laciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents
into the little green valley. Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more
difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more
difficult than either or both. A plumbline dropped from the summit of
Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt. You
first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred
double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles. In the
afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the
Riffelhouse. It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs
of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your
house--only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the
house. This takes three hours--an hour to each hundred stories; after
the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have
reached the first floor. The next day you go up and down the Goerner
Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a
view unequaled in Europe. Ordering the guide to be ready and the
porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the
glorious revelations of the morrow.

The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the
question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad." There is
plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live
thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly
near. We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent. The
lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and
the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct. Was the
storm over? The guides would give no opinion. It was their interest
to go, it was ours to go only in good weather. By three o'clock I
noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that
has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an
inch upward. I gave the order to start. The other parties said, "Good
for your pluck! _Bon voyage, gute reise_," and went to bed. In an
hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier.
The sky was brilliant. Hopes were high. The glacier with its vast
medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long,
was crossed in the dawn. The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks
with glory, and we shouted victory. But in a moment the sun was
clouded, and so were we