d looking round we
find that we have in an instant pierced the clouds, and emerged, as it
were, on the surface of the ocean of vapour. Beneath us stretches for
hundreds of miles the level fleecy floor, and above us shines out clear
in the eternal sunshine every mountain, from Mont Blanc to Monte Rosa
and the Jungfrau. What, again, in the lower regions, can equal the
mysterious charm of gazing from the edge of a torn rocky parapet into an
apparently fathomless abyss, where nothing but what an Alpine traveller
calls a "strange formless wreathing of vapour" indicates the storm-wind
that is raging below us? I might go on indefinitely recalling the
strangely impressive scenes that frequently startle the traveller in the
waste upper world; but language is feeble indeed to convey even a
glimmering of what is to be seen to those who have not seen it for
themselves, whilst to them it can be little more than a peg upon which
to hang their own recollections. These glories, in which the mountain
Spirit reveals himself to his true worshippers, are only to be gained by
the appropriate service of climbing--at some risk, though a very
trifling risk, if he is approached with due form and ceremony--into the
furthest recesses of his shrines. And without seeing them, I maintain
that no man has really seen the Alps.

The difference between the exoteric and the esoteric school of
mountaineers may be indicated by their different view of glaciers. At
Grindelwald, for example, it is the fashion to go and "see the
glaciers"--heaven save the mark! Ladies in costumes, heavy German
professors, Americans doing the Alps at a gallop, Cook's tourists, and
other varieties of a well-known genus, go off in shoals and see--what?
A gigantic mass of ice, strangely torn with a few of the exquisite blue
crevasses, but denied and prostrate in dirt and ruins. A stream foul
with mud oozes out from the base; the whole mass seems to be melting
fast away; the summer sun has evidently got the best of it in these
lower regions, and nothing can resist him but the great mounds of
decaying rock that strew the surface in confused lumps. It is as much
like the glacier of the upper regions as the melting fragments of snow
in a London street are like the surface of the fresh snow that has just
fallen in a country field. And by way of improving its attractions a
perpetual picnic is going on, and the ingenious natives have hewed a
tunnel into the ice, for admission to which th