. Soon it came out again, and continued clear.
But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear
weather." Men get pious amid perils. I thought of the aneroid, and
felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his
servants.

Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain. Six hours and a
half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight. I have no
fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do
the ascents. They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and
enjoy, but to boast. We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty
feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow
of ice below. We scramble up the rocks of the mountain. Hour after
hour we toil upward. At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all
four roped together. There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred
feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them. If a man drops in
the rest must pull him out. Being heavier than any other man of the
party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my
ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay
of dangling by a rope in a chasm. The beauty of these cold blue ice
vaults cannot be described. They are often fringed with icicles. In
one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the
bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an
apparently reversed condition. We passed one place where vast masses
of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start
a new avalanche. We were up in one of nature's grandest workshops.

How the view widened! How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened
the effect in the valley below! The glorious air made us know what the
man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive. Some have
little occasion to be thankful in that respect.

Here we learned the use of a guide. Having carefully chosen him, by
testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only
generally, but step by step. Put each foot in his track. He had
trodden the snow to firmness. But being heavier than he it often gave
way under my pressure. One such slump and recovery takes more strength
than ten regular steps. Not so in following the Guide to the fairer
and greater heights of the next world. He who carried this world and
its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time int