Ægischhorn; and though it was difficult to find a place free from snow to sit, we stayed an hour and a half on the top, none of us feeling the least cold. Whilst we ate our lunch, Almer pointed out the most prominent of the great forest of peaks. Part of the time was devoted to breaking off a bit of the great cornice which overhung from the top. Well held by the two men who got secure footing a little below, we hacked and hewed at it with great labour, till at length it suddenly gave way and went down to the depths below. Four thousand feet it went, breaking into pieces as it struck projecting ribs of rock or ice; and as these in their turn started others, there was in the end quite a respectable little avalanche. So steep are the cliffs which fall away from the top of the Finsteraarhorn, that a stone dropped from the one hand falls with very little touch of anything but air to that great depth, while a larger one, started by the other, finds its way in enormous bounds on to the Viescher glacier on the south-east side.

The next morning, after another night at the Concordia, we crossed to the Grimsel by the Oberaarjoch, climbing the Oberaarhorn on the way. Before starting, we contemplated with much dismay the provisions which were to keep up the strength of three men during much hard work. One leg of a chicken, a small piece of cheese, some bread and chocolate, and a tiny bit of bacon, was all that could be found. Almer, however, said he did not care for anything but bread and cheese, and Roth of course agreed with his chief, so we devoured greedily the greater part of the more dainty food. Chocolate was always useful, and a great mainstay; and though we always had plenty of brandy and whisky with us, we found that tea, iced in the

snow, and mixed with red wine and a little lemon, was the most refreshing, and the best drink to walk on. The Oberaarhorn gave a little more trouble than it need have done, its upper part being one immense slope of hard ice-a state of things which Almer had never seen there before-and this necessitated steps being cut all the way. The rocks, too-which had to be taken sooner than usual

were, though easy, loose and rotten; and before the descent was finished, the glacier below was thickly sprinkled with their fragments, and the air filled with the peculiar smell which bruised stone gives out. We crossed at the top of this pass the largest bergschrund we had yet met with. Almer thought it was a hundred feet wide, and we thought that a grouse killed across it would have been well shot.

It was pleasant in the Grimsel valley on that bright autumn afternoon. After the long hours spent on snow and ice, with nothing to relieve their cold beauties but rock bare of the smallest atom of vegetation, the eye wandered with pleasure over the richer colouring of the more home-like little strath. Heather grew luxuriantly below the junction of the two great glaciers and along the valley's sides, and the rich green of the short mountaingrass brought out the warm greys and browns of the long ago icerounded walls which shut it in. It reminded one of places such as many were then passing through in pleasant labour far away in Scotland, though the contour of the rocks a little destroyed the resemblance. No one however ignorant of geology could look at these rocks without seeing that their shapes had been formed by ice. How long ago it was-how many thousands and tens of thousands of years it is, since the glaciers shrank

and left them bare, perhaps scientific men could tell, though we could not. But the marks were plain enough. Sometimes in England tiny furrows or even scratches on stone are shown as proofs of a colder climate-as the workings of ice—and great isolated boulders are pointed out as signs of its power. Here for some mile or two in length, for some thousands of feet in height, nearly every single rock had been rounded, there seemed hardly a sharp angle of stone on the hillside. They rose tier upon tier, played upon now as for many centuries by rain and snow, and warmed by sun, the short turf running round them and creeping into every hollow, which for some immense unknown period had been hid in ice. Perhaps as it has gone here so it will go in other parts, and the depths which it now covers be one day given to the light. Perhaps in a thousand years shepherds may look after their goats far up on the Mönch, and women sit and watch their children playing under sycamore and vines on the lower slopes of the Finsteraarhorn. That would be a bad age for Alpine climbersa bad age, too, for the great plains of Europe.

The Grimsel must be a wild place in winter, and the two men who stay there to help travellers can have but a lonely time of it. We went up the pass to look at the view of the Rhone glacier in the Furka, but were more interested in the little "Todten See," the "tarn of the dead;" and we tried to imagine the day, sixty or seventy years ago, when Frenchmen and Austrians met there and fought, and its waters gave sepulchre to those who were killed.

Soon after two the next morning we started for Grindelwald by the Lauteraarjoch. The morning was not promising, and Almer at one time thought it would be better to

go by the easier Strahleck; but when we stopped for a second breakfast on the huge moraine where the Lauteraar and Finsteraar glaciers join, it showed signs of better things, and the longer and more difficult pass was taken. There are many moulins on these glaciers-holes formed by the surface-water pouring into a crevasse, which soon becomes enlarged, and which is often of very great depth. The larger ones are not unlike the shaft of a coal-pit—a shaft lined with sapphire and emerald instead of grimy stone.

We

On this ground Almer made a change in his way of proceeding, and we well knew the reason. had sometimes wondered at the supreme indifference with which he passed the wildest-looking crevasses and bergschrunds without deigning to look into them-places which had a strange fascination for us. But here it was different: here we often went a little out of our way that he might examine them. With the rope taut behind him, and with snow-spectacles off, he peered long and earnestly into their black depths, if by chance he might see any traces of the three lost men. For he believed (of course it was only a supposition, but coming from him it is worthy of mention) that Dr. Haller and his guides had never reached the top of the pass, but were lying in one of the holes on the Grimsel side. But no one will ever know. Those who had worked with Rubi, both Englishmen and guides, think it most unlikely that the accident happened through any fault or rashness of his, for he was a steady, first-rate man. The crevasses ran here in every direction, and were many of them very wide indeed in some parts it seemed as if we were crossing one enormous pit, and that the snow and ice by which we did so was merely a thin and frail covering over it.

There is something appalling in the i luck which all connected with that party had. Rubi was on the Matterhorn last year when the gentleman whom he was with, by his own neglect of the rope, fell from a great height and was killed. This year he and Inabnit and Dr. Haller were on the Jungfrau when the accident we have mentioned before took place. These two misfortunes made, as they well might, a great impression on Rubi, for he said at Grindelwald, a short time afterwards, that if he could afford to do so-if he could in any other way provide for his wife and children that he would give the mountains up altogether. Poor fellow! he had been a witness only of calamity before, he was

now to

become a principal in it; and in a few days he started on that expedition from which neither he nor his comrades were ever to return.

Owing to the lateness of the season and the shrinking of the ice, the pass, never an easy one, was made more difficult, and its difficulties brought out the wonderful qualities of our guide. Almer loitering about the hotels at Grindelwald, or showing the glaciers and ice-caves to some high-hatted, black-coated tourist, and Almer cutting his way up the steep bergschrunded Col at the top of the Lauteraarjoch, or finding his way with barely the smallest delay or hesitation through the bewildering intricacy of the seracs on the other side, seemed hardly to be the same man. We looked at him with somewhat of the same feeling -only here much intensified with which a novice regards a firstclass deer-stalker who has been successfully showing off his craft,-intensified here: for in the one case bad management means vexation and disappointment only; in the other, something of much greater importance-perhaps life.

-

The payment which such men

get may appear high. Seventy or eighty francs for leading the way up the Jungfrau or the Schreckhorn seems a great deal of money, but the disproportion of the payment to the service vanishes when the nature of the service is considered. Indeed, then one is inclined to wonder that so much is done for comparatively so little. To show the way up a difficult mountain to an experienced man is of course a very different thing to taking up a novice, and the bulk of those who spend their time in climbing are perfectly able to look after themselves and cause little trouble to their guides. Though we suppose that, to first-class guides, the company of any outsider, however good he may be, must be to a certain extent a hindrance. But then there are people who go up a mountain in order to say they have been up it. The work of dragging such individuals up Monte Rosa or Mont Blanc is sometimes dreadful. Their guides will get them up somehow,

by hook or crook, if the thing is feasible it will be done. The climber may be exhausted almost to the last stage of exhaustion; he may be giddy, and feel sick from the rarefied air; but if he can only keep the little spark of pluck which must have been in him when he started from quite going out, his guides will give him a noble share of their limbs and lungs and strength, and get him to the top, though probably in a condition little suited for enjoying what he will see there. When an unknown man comes to a guide and engages him for some, perhaps, difficult expedition, the latter has no means of finding out his capabilities. He may be a second Tyndall or Leslie Stephen; but then, on the other hand, he may be an individual who has very much overrated his strength, one whose nerve and head may give way utterly at the most

critical moment. The guide must to a certain extent risk his life with such a man; and who can say that for such a service the payment asked is dear? A climber keeping his man for any length of time will of course arrange to do his work at a much lower rate-at so much for every peak and pass.

So far there had been no hitch or delay in our pleasant journey,-the pale maiden had been gracious and smiled upon us, and the dark peak had shown us his bright side. The Schreckhorn was tried next, and that great mountain was at first moody and would have nothing to do with us. We had a steep climb to the Schwarzegg hut by the rocks on the left side of the upper glacier (for the ice was in such bad order that we could not use it), past the place where, twenty years ago, a chamois-hunter was killed in an avalanche, and where a bit of his waistcoat still remains between two great stones-one of which was lying on him six months after when he was found; past little nooks white with edelweiss, for as Almer said, "Here come not many people." Then for hours there was a steady patter of rain on the roof, which later in the night turned to snow, and in the morning it lay thick before the door, and there was nothing for us but to go back. It made the return journey by the rocks troublesome: it was only here and there that the blue of late gentians could be seen; but the edelweiss with its larger stem showed grey on the white covering. And then for nearly a fortnight we could do nothing the snow came lower and lower, whitening the Scheidecks, and at last weighing down the branches of the firs quite low on the Eiger. So we had to stop, restless, at the pleasant "Bear," tormenting the lives of the numerous Mr. Bosses by questions about

VOL. CXXX.-NO. DCCXCI.

the weather, and finding consolation only in the conduct and sweet behaviour of their admirable monkey. It seemed as if the winter was really coming on, and that the Schreckhorn would be unapproachable for another year; for furious winds, as well as snow, were at work on the heights, and sometimes the Wetterhorn was wrapped in one great sheet of white with no rock visible.

We stayed on, however, hoping, till we, who had arrived when nearly a hundred people sat down to dinner, were left almost alone at the "Bear"-almost alone, in fact, in Grindelwald, and things began to look very black indeed. Then they brightened. After a succession of fine days, sandwiched in between two wet ones, the weather got better, and-just before October-we started again.

The snow couloirs which lead up to the final arête of the Schreckhorn are exceeding steep. We had ex

For some

amined them with much interest from the Finsteraarhorn with a good glass, and from that point of view they appear perpendicular, though they are not quite so bad as that. The mountain is-especially after fresh snow-subject to avalanches, and is also in the habit of sending down showers of stones. immense period-in fact, ever since its formation,-a mass of hard red rock has existed near the summit. The suns of thousands of summers, the frost and snow and rain of thousands of winters, have acted upon it and its surroundings seemingly to little purpose. But they have done their work, and it has one day to leave its resting-place, and make its first and last journey-a wild one it will be-down to the glacier below. In a very few seconds it acquires a terrible impetus. strikes a rock, and long before the sound of the smash reaches the ear, the eye sees the solid block part

2 B

It

into thousands of pieces, whilst they as they hurry on pick up and carry with them all loose fragments which they may happen to touch; so that the disturbance which began in the fall of one great mass at the top, spreads out into a great fan of flying devastation, and ends three or four thousand feet below on the glacier. The small bits sink into the snow at once; the largerunless they be very large-disappear later; and soon there is no sign left, unless it be the bruised mountain-side, of the exercise of a power capable of sweeping away a regiment. Such a fall is best seen at a distance. Another kind of stone avalanche is caused by the slipping of a mass of loose débris. The noise made by this has a particularly harsh grating sound about it, very disagreeable to listen to at night. The Schreckhorn delights in all this kind of thing. He is constantly preparing some such little greeting for those who are toiling up him. Perhaps this is how he got his name; but more probably it was from his hopeless-looking cliffs, and from his position, completely circled with ice. There is a real awfulness about the "peak of terror" when he shows himself against a black lowering sky, his middle hid in mist, or only seen here and there.

He looks almost cruelutterly inaccessible as if he was thirty thousand feet high. He has been sometimes very cruel.

There were a little moon and bright stars, and we determined not to wait for daylight, but to make a very early start, for the weather was so fickle and changeable that there was no certainty of its remaining favourable for even a few hours. At exactly two the hut was left; in fifteen minutes the foot of the first great couloir was reached. From that point to the top we had eight hours of hard, almost incessant work. To the ordinary diffi

culties of a climb-never an easy one-we had those caused by fresh snow, deep and often soft on the couloirs, thick and treacherously lying on the rocks. The first couloir is in shape not unlike an hour-glass. It narrows after a rise of a thousand feet or so (but it is difficult to measure accurately with the eye distances on snow, and it may be much more or less) from a tolerable breadth to a very narrow neck, and then opens out again, and through this neck any ice or snow or stones coming from above must fall. It was a place dangerous to pass when the sun had been up any time, but safe enough then when the frost was still in power. Then the rocks on the right were taken to again for a little, and then again the snow. For hours we toiled on, the work of the last men, hard though it was, being as nothing compared with what Almer had to do. How many steps he made it is impossible to say-some thousands; we counted 470 on the last slope.

Of course many of these

by far the greatest number-were made in the hardened snow, and one or two blows of the extraordinary weapon he carried were, as a rule, sufficient to make them. For in looking into the Zassenberg chalet the day before, Almer had seen a great heart-shaped sort of hoe, with a blade two or three times as broad as an ordinary ice-axe. This had been used for making a track on the moraine for some beasts which came across the glacier for two or three weeks' feeding, and he thought it would be useful in stepcutting, or in clearing away the cornice on the arête. It proved most useful without it our time, long as it was, would have been much longer. Its temper was good, and it would cut a step in very hard névé. Where ice had to be crossed Almer took

one of our axes.

In due time the sun rose; we