Pure dactyls, unbroken, in fives. Then a few anapaests, inverting the accent, but always keeping it serrated and sharp. Then—
gingerly | stamping the | snow at each | step until
Back into dactyls again. Whilst "warily coasting the swell of the tooth she paused where it pushed her out furthest" repeats the first bar exactly—length, footing, and all—down to the trim middle trochee, round which the rope of the sentence seems to take a loop and a hitch before lilting on to the riveting "furthest." And the very dialogue goes skipping in dactyls as well: "'What's it like?' Aubrey called. Could she he giving?" Oh, it's implacable!
Do you wonder now that these drops, alert nodules of noise, sometimes seem to blur the scene like dancing hail?—that when you watch June and Aubrey out there on the Dent Rouge, working their way up its pinnacles, you want to brush the sound away impatiently, at any rate till the worst pitch is over, like a third climber teased by a drizzle? Rhythmic prose of any sort is infrequent enough: to find a whole novel written to music is rarer; but it isn't so much the mere presence of rhythm that rattles one, as the special, percussive, peremptory kind of it. Reconsider that paragraph, and see how it is all crisped with consonants: every line end-stopped, every seam caulked ; not an open vowel anywhere, no interior glides; all polysyllables even, with their leave to the mind to ease off a bit, while the tongue threads its way round all the windings and curves that wrap up the single small meaning—even these ordinary indulgences barred. It is the unremitting rap of it that rings weaker brains silly, till they begin to count the crepitation mechanically : the spray of a sea can check and distract a man's swimming even though it forms a pure part of the element he revels in. And it doesn't bring much relief
