he statement that a mountain is 15,000 feet
high is, by itself, little more impressive, than that it is 3,000; we
want something more before we can mentally compare Mont Blanc and
Snowdon. Indeed, the same people who guess of a mountain's height at a
number of feet much exceeding the reality, show, when they are
cross-examined, that they fail to appreciate in any tolerable degree the
real meaning of the figures. An old lady one day, about 11 A.M.,
proposed to walk from the Aeggischhorn to the Jungfrau-Joch, and to
return for luncheon--the distance being a good twelve hours' journey for
trained mountaineers. Every detail of which the huge mass is composed is
certain to be underestimated. A gentleman the other day pointed out to
me a grand ice-cliff at the end of a hanging glacier, which must have
been at least 100 feet high, and asked me whether that snow was three
feet deep. Nothing is more common than for tourists to mistake some huge
pinnacle of rock, as big as a church tower, for a traveller. The rocks
of the Grands Mulets, in one corner of which the chalet is hidden, are
often identified with a party ascending Mont Blanc; and I have seen
boulders as big as a house pointed out confidently as chamois. People
who make these blunders must evidently see the mountains as mere toys,
however many feet they may give them at a random guess. Huge overhanging
cliffs are to them steps within the reach of human legs; yawning
crevasses are ditches to be jumped; and foaming waterfalls are like
streams from penny squirts. Everyone knows the avalanches on the
Jungfrau, and the curiously disproportionate appearance of the little
puffs of white smoke, which are said to be the cause of the thunder; but
the disproportion ceases to an eye that has learnt really to measure
distance, and to know that these smoke-puffs, represent a cataract of
crashing blocks of ice.

Now the first merit of mountaineering is that it enables one to have
what theologians would call an experimental faith in the size of
mountains--to substitute a real living belief for a dead intellectual
assent. It enables one, first, to assign something like its true
magnitude to a rock or snow-slope; and, secondly, to measure that
magnitude in terms of muscular exertion instead of bare mathematical
units. Suppose that we are standing upon the Wengern Alp; between the
Moench and the Eiger there stretches a round white bank, with a curved
outline, which we may roughly compare t