sleep very deep and yet in pain, as men sleep who are stunned.
But twice that night I woke suddenly, staring at darkness. I had
outworn the physical network upon which the soul depends, and I was
full of terrors.

Next morning I had fine coffee and bread and butter and the rest, like
a rich man; in a gilded dining-room all set out for the rich, and
served by a fellow that bowed and scraped. Also they made me pay a
great deal, and kept their eyes off my boots, and were still courteous
to me, and I to them. Then I bought wine of them--the first wine not
of the country that I had drunk on this march, a Burgundy--and putting
it in my haversack with a nice white roll, left them to wait for the
next man whom the hills might send them.

The clouds, the mist, were denser than ever in that early morning; one
could only see the immediate road. The cold was very great; my clothes
were not quite dried, but my heart was high, and I pushed along well
enough, though stiffly, till I came to what they call the Hospice,
which was once a monk-house, I suppose, but is now an inn. I had
brandy there, and on going out I found that it stood at the foot of a
sharp ridge which was the true Grimsel Pass, the neck which joins the
Bernese Oberland to the eastern group of high mountains. This ridge or
neck was steep like a pitched roof--very high I found it, and all of
black glassy rock, with here and there snow in sharp, even, sloping
sheets just holding to it. I could see but little of it at a time on
account of the mist.

Hitherto for all these miles the Aar had been my companion, and the
road, though rising always, had risen evenly and not steeply. Now the
Aar was left behind in the icy glen where it rises, and the road went
in an artificial and carefully built set of zig-zags up the face of
the cliff. There is a short cut, but I could not find it in the mist.
It is the old mule-path. Here and there, however, it was possible to
cut off long corners by scrambling over the steep black rock and
smooth ice, and all the while the cold, soft mist wisped in and out
around me. After a thousand feet of this I came to the top of the
Grimsel, but not before I had passed a place where an avalanche had
destroyed the road and where planks were laid. Also before one got to
the very summit, no short cuts or climbing were possible. The road
ran deep in a cutting like a Devonshire lane. Only here the high banks
were solid snow.

Some little way past the