e eternal snows, or look down into the valleys, and see
the people in the meadows and fields making hay or cutting grain!
Haymakers may drink the water that was an hour before part of the mass of
ice and snow which they see hanging near the top of the mountains several
thousand feet above their heads! Avalanches slide down into the valleys
every month of the year, and I passed through tunnels and bridges that are
purposely constructed that the snow may thus slide over the roads without
doing harm to any one. Where the mountains rise too precipitously, it is
in some places impossible to construct a road along the edge; in these
cases they pierce through the mountains for considerable distances. The
Axenstrasse, along Lake Luzerne, has many such tunnels, one of which is
about one eighth of a mile in length. In the Grimsel, the road avoids a
water-fall by passing through a tunnel under it.

The Rhone Glacier, the only ice-field that I crossed, is upwards of nine
miles in length and rises from 5,751 feet to 10,450 feet in height. About
the time of sunset on the 4th of September, I entered the cavern of ice
from which issues the stream that constitutes the source of the Rhone
River. "This is the Rhodanus of the ancients, which was said to issue
'from the gates of eternal night at the foot of the pillar of the sun.'"

I descended through the Grimsel pass (7,103 feet) and Haslithal along the
upper waters of the Aare down to Meiringen, in one day. Though there is
only a bridle-path through the almost unparalled wildnesses of this
valley, still there is a telegraphic wire running up to the hotel at the
upper end, near the Rhone Glacier! No language can describe the
picturesqueness of the bare rocky sides of this valley. I heard persons
who thought they were alone, utter a dozen exclamations of surprise while
making a single turn where a new view opened! The solitary tourist will
ejaculate his exclamations without number; and it is under such
circumstances that the unpoetical soul seeks some personification to whom
it may do homage. It would not require a worshipper of images to kneel
down, in the Grimsel or Ober Haslithal, before any emblem that embodied
any adequate representation of the crushingly sublime scenery that one
beholds there!

I met a lake whose depths seemed as boundless as the blue heavens above
me. The water of many of the Swiss lakes is as clear as crystal, so that
white objects at their bottoms may be discerne