s, a covering of
exquisitely delicate flowers. You cannot realize, until you have seen
them, the variety, beauty, and profusion of the Alpine flowers. Looking
back in memory upon the bare rocks, doomed to stand here through all
time in solitude and in the midst of desolation, as though in expiation
of some sin, it is pleasant to remember that at their feet and in their
clefts these little flowers nestle and bloom.

We gathered nosegays and made snowballs, and at noon gained the summit
of the Furka, and rested an hour or two at the inn--the only sign of
house or hut we had seen since morning. The rough _salons_, the passage,
the doorway, even the space outside, were alive with tourists. It is a
continual jar upon one's sense of the fitness of things, something to
which you never become thoroughly accustomed, until all freshness of
sight-seeing is passed--this coming suddenly upon the world in the midst
of the unutterable solitude of nature; this plunging into a crowd
dressed in the latest style, and discussing universal frivolities where
the very rocks and hills seem to stand in silent adoration. But after
the first moment you, too, form one of the frivolous throng, the sight
and sound of which shock the sensibilities of the next comer.

From the inn a tongue of land, green and dotted with flowers, falls into
the valley below. On either side rises a mountain, scarred by the
torrents dried away now, and stained this day with the last year's snow,
while beyond--ever beyond, like some heavenly heights we vainly strove
to gain--rose the Bernese Alps.

From the summit of the Furka we descended to the Rhone glacier by one of
the zigzag mountain roads. Looking down over the edge, we could see
below, the ways we were yet to follow on the mountain face before
accomplishing the descent. The horses dashed down at a flying pace. The
inclination of the road was not sufficient to alarm; but the turns are
always so frightfully abrupt as to make it seem as though the leader
must dash off. But no; he invariably swung around just upon the outer
edge, held, it seemed sometimes, by the traces, and with a crack of the
driver's whip was off again before our fears, if we had any, could find
words.

One of these abrupt turns fairly hangs over the glacier, where the icy
river has fallen into broken masses from a higher point, before
spreading out in the narrow valley just here where it ends. Only a short
distance from the foot of the glacier