ssor Forbes's drawing of
the peak, outlined at page 180, has evidently been made under the
influence of considerable excitement. For fear of being deceived by
enthusiasm also, I daguerreotyped the Cervin from the edge of the little
lake under the crag of the Riffelhorn, with the somewhat amazing result
shown in Fig. 80. So cautious is Nature, even in her boldest work, so
broadly does she extend the foundations, and strengthen the buttresses,
of masses which produce so striking an _impression_ as to be described,
even by the most careful writers, as perpendicular.

Sec. 12. The only portion of the Matterhorn which approaches such a
condition is the shoulder, before alluded to, forming a step of about
one twelfth the height of the whole peak, shown by light on its snowy
side, or upper surface, in the right-hand figure of Plate +38+. Allowing
4000 feet for the height of the peak, this step or shoulder will be
between 300 and 400 feet in absolute height; and as it is not only
perpendicular, but assuredly overhangs, both at this snow-lighted angle
and at the other corner of the mountain (seen against the sky in the
same figure), I have not the slightest doubt that a plumb-line would
swing from the brow of either of these bastions, between 600 and 800
feet, without touching rock. The intermediate portion of the cliff which
joins them is, however, not more than vertical. I was therefore anxious
chiefly to observe the structure of the two angles, and, to that end, to
see the mountain close on that side, from the Zmutt glacier.

Sec. 13. I am afraid my dislike to the nomenclatures invented by the German
philosophers has been unreasonably, though involuntarily, complicated
with that which, crossing out of Italy, one necessarily feels for those
invented by the German peasantry. As travellers now every day more
frequently visit the neighborhood of the Monte Rosa, it would surely be
a permissible, because convenient, poetical license, to invent some
other name for this noble glacier, whose present title, certainly not
euphonious, has the additional disadvantage of being easily confounded
with that of the _Zermatt_ glacier, properly so called. I mean myself,
henceforward, to call it the Red glacier, because, for two or three
miles above its lower extremity, the whole surface of it is covered with
blocks of reddish gneiss, or other slaty crystalline rocks,--some fallen
from the Cervin, some from the Weisshorn, some brought from the St