ockhi
and Dent d'Erin, but little rolled or ground down in the transit, and
covering the ice, often four or five feet deep, with a species of
macadamization on a large scale (each stone being usually some foot or
foot and a half in diameter), anything but convenient to a traveller in
haste. Higher up, the ice opens into broad white fields and furrows,
hard and dry, scarcely fissured at all, except just under the Cervin,
and forming a silent and solemn causeway, paved, as it seems, with white
marble from side to side; broad enough for the march of an army in line
of battle, but quiet as a street of tombs in a buried city, and bordered
on each hand by ghostly cliffs of that faint granite purple which seems,
in its far-away height, as unsubstantial as the dark blue that bounds
it;--the whole scene so changeless and soundless; so removed, not merely
from the presence of men, but even from their thoughts; so destitute of
all life of tree or herb, and so immeasurable in its lonely brightness
of majestic death, that it looks like a world from which not only the
human, but the spiritual, presences had perished, and the last of its
archangels, building the great mountains for their monuments, had laid
themselves down in the sunlight to an eternal rest, each in his white
shroud.

Sec. 14. The first point from which the Matterhorn precipices, which I came
to examine, show their structure distinctly, is about half-way up the
valley, before reaching the glacier. The most convenient path, and
access to the ice, are on the south; but it is best, in order to watch
the changes of the Matterhorn, to keep on the north side of the valley;
and, at the point just named, the shoulder marked _e_ in Fig. 33, p.
181, is seen, in the morning sunlight, to be composed of zigzag beds,
apparently of eddied sand. (Fig. 81.)

[Illustration: FIG. 81.]

I have no doubt they once _were_ eddied sand; that is to say, sea or
torrent drift, hardened by fire into crystalline rock; but whether they
ever were or not, the certain fact is, that here we have a precipice,
trenchant, overhanging, and 500 feet in height, cut across the thin beds
which compose it as smoothly as a piece of fine-grained wood is cut with
a chisel.

Sec. 15. From this point, also, the nature of the corresponding bastion, _c
d_, Fig 33, is also discernible. It is the edge of a great concave
precipice, cut out of the mountain, as the smooth hollows are out of the
rocks at the foot of a