rities; they are all tried men, and generally very civil and trustworthy. Most of the stated excursions are performed wholly or in part with mules, and it is customary for each party of travellers to engage one guide with the requisite number of animals; six francs a day are paid to him for his services, and the same sum for the use of each mule. For the laborious excursions more guides are taken. These men are celebrated for their intelligence, hardihood, and activity; they have a fund of information for the entertainment of the traveller, and are always ready, as Simond says, to "climb, and talk, and fight their battles over again" for his instruction and amusement. They pay a careful attention to his safety and convenience, and on his part he cannot do better than always follow implicitly their advice. Almost all the accidents which have occurred in the mountain-excursions, have been occasioned, as Mr. Bakewell says, by inattention to their advice; and whenever the enterprises in which they have been engaged have had a calamitous result, it has generally happened that they were urged to engage in them in opposition to their judgment and wishes. Most of them are sufficiently bold and adventurous; and some of them wonderfully so-though perhaps, not more so than their physical skill and activity would warrant. Simond mentions a remarkable instance, "a proof of undiminished strength, spirit, and perhaps rashness, at the age of sixty," on the part of a veteran named Jacques Balma, (with the addition des Dames on account of his particular attention to ladies climbing under his guidance,) on the return from a laborious expedition. A party of young men, on a botanizing excursion, spied a very fine plant, blooming in apparent safety out of reach, on the top of an inaccessible rock. Jacques Balma considered a few minutes, then took off his shoes, and securing a foot here, a hand there, holding once by his teeth to a twig, springing from one shelving place to another like a chamois, or writhing like a snake among stones and bushes out of sight, without once hesitating or looking back, worked himself up to the pyramidal bunch of flowers, and threw it down to the wondering spectators. That was not enough; another bunch of flowers bloomed over his head in a still more difficult and hazardous situation: he sprang for it; all present united in entreating him to desist, the other guides having warned him of his danger, and then turned away, that they might not appear to encourage the mad attempt. A general exclamation induced them soon after to look again, when they beheld him poised on his breast, plucking the flower with the toes of an outstretched leg. "How he came down," says Simond, "I do not know; it was, perhaps, still more hazardous than going up, but in a few minutes we saw him again by our side, his load on his back, and not even out of breath. When the intrepid old fellow waited on us at supper in the evening, I felt ashamed to see him behind my chair. Jacques Balma was born a goat-herd, and is, perhaps, less well-informed than many of the other guides, but he has in him that genuine spirit which makes heroes, either for good, for indifferent, or for bad purposes."

There is always ample employment for the guides during the season in which travellers visit the valley. During the Winter they have no occupation, and the picture which Mr. Bakewell draws of the manner in which they then pass their time, is not a pleasing one. "As the Winters commence early," he says, "and last till late in the Spring, there is little employment for the men during the season; and the guides being accustomed to a wandering life in the Summer, and to a certain degree of intellectual excitement, by associating with well-informed foreigners from every part of Europe, they would sink into a state of torpor were it not for the dangerous resource of gambling, with which they are said chiefly to occupy themselves in the winter months. It would be extremely difficult to remedy the evil here in England the substitute for gambling would be smoking and drinking, or politics; but under the paternal government of his Sardinian majesty, great care is taken by the prohibition of books, that the peasants shall neither read nor think, if it be possible to prevent them. The Chamouniards, however, from their Summer intercourse with the world, are less superstitious than the peasants in other parts of Savoy."

THE MONTANVERT,

"WHAT the people of Chamouni call properly Montanvert," to use the expression of Saussure, is a pasturage, elevated more than 2600 feet above the Valley of Chamouni, and consequently 6000 feet above the level of the

sea.

It is at the foot of the Aiguille de Charmoz, and immediately above that "valley of ice," of which the lower part bears the name of the Glacier des Bois. Strangers are generally taken to it, because it is a spot which affords a magnificent view of this immense glacier, and of the mountains bordering it, and because they can descend from it upon the ice, and thus observe some of the singularities which it presents.

The road, or rather the pathway, which leads from the valley up to the Montanvert, is steep in some parts, but nowhere dangerous. The journey is sometimes performed wholly on foot, and may be in this manner conveniently accomplished in three hours. Till the year 1802, only half of the route from the Priory, or village of Chamouni, was practicable for mules; the whole of it was then rendered so, and accordingly visiters commonly make use of those animals. After leaving the Priory, the road lies along the bottom of the valley, through meadows and well-cultivated fields. Saussure points out as particularly worthy of notice the perfect level which the surface of the ground presents: wherever the ground is a little open, horizontal beds of mud, sand, and gravel, are seen; whence it may be concluded that the Arve formerly covered the whole bottom of the valley, and that this bottom has been raised by the accumulations of the deposits of that river. On quitting the valley, the ascent lies through a forest of birch, fir, and larch, intermixed; it does not proceed directly up the mountain, but winds round it so as to overcome the steep acclivity. On the summit of the Montanvert are two small chalets, or resting-places; one of them was erected by a Monsieur Desportes, formerly "Resident" of France at Geneva, and repaired by a countryman of his. It is dedi cated "à la Nature," an inscription "a little too finical and affected," as Simond justly observes, and one which might excuse a doubt whether the real love of nature had much to do with the erection of this French temple.

The view from this point is very striking. "In mounting to the Montanvert," says Saussure, "you have always below your feet a view of the Valley of Chamouni, of the Arve which waters it throughout its whole length, of a crowd of villages and hamlets, surrounded by trees, and well-cultivated fields. The moment you arrive at the Montanvert, the scene changes; and instead of this smiling and fertile valley, you find yourself almost at the very border of a precipice, the bottom of which is another valley much wider and more extensive, filled with snow and ice, and bounded by colossal mountains, which astonish by their height and shape, and which terrify by their sterility and steepness."

THE MER DE GLACE, OR SEA OF ICE. THE "valley of snow and ice" upon which the traveller looks down from the Montanvert, is the upper part of that enormous glacier, of which the lower part, sloping down into the Valley of Chamouni, is called the Glacier des Bois. This upper part is commonly called the Mer de Glace, or Sea of Ice; the limit, however, is not defined, and sometimes the whole glacier is called the Glacier des Bois. "The surface of the glacier seen from Montanvert," says Saussure, "resembles that of a sea which had been suddenly frozen, not in the moment of a tempest, but at the instant when the wind has calmed, and the waves, although very high, have become blunted and rounded. great waves are nearly parallel to the length of the glacier, and they are cut by transverse crevices, which appear blue in the interior, while the ice seems white on its external surface.

These

But a distant view of the Mer de Glace is not by any means calculated to convey a correct notion of its peculiar features; and if the surface be not too rugged and too much split by crevices, the visiter should advance three or four hundred feet upon it. "If you content yourself with looking at it from a distant point-from the Montanvert, for example, you do not distinguish any of the details; the inequalities of the surface seem like the rounded undulations of the sea after a storm; but when you are in the middle of the glacier these waves appear mountains, and their intervals are like valleys between those mountains. Besides, it is necessary to traverse the glacier a little, to become acquainted with its curious features,-its wide and deep crevices, its great caverns, its lakes filled with the finest water enclosed within transparent walls of a sea-green colour,-its brooks of fresh clear water flowing in canals of ice, and precipitating themselves in cascades down the icy abysses."

This indefatigable naturalist, who certainly cannot be accused of timidity in exploring the wonders of the mountains, recommends that no one should undertake to cross the Mer de Glace from the Montanvert, unless the guides have previously ascertained that it is passable without much difficulty. He says, that in his first expedition in 1760, he hazarded it, and had much trouble in extricating himself. Sometimes he had to slide down to the bottom of little ice-valleys,-the intervals of those mountain-waves which look like small undulations from the Montanvert, and then to climb up out of them on the opposite side with vast labour and fatigue. At other times, when he came to crevices which were very wide and deep, he had to pass them "like a rope-dancer," on very narrow ridges of ice, extending across from the one side to the other. "The good Pierre Simon, my first guide in the high Alps," he says, "repented strongly of having let me engage in the enter prise. He went about here and there, seeking the least dangerous passages, cutting steps in the ice, offering me a hand whenever he could, and giving me at the same time the first lessons in the art-for it is one-of putting down the feet and resting the body properly, and of making use of one's baton in difficult passages. I escaped, however, without other injury than a few contusions which I got in sliding down some very steep slopes of ice which we had to descend. Pierre Simon slid down, standing upright on his feet, his body thrown back and leaning on his iron-shod baton." This mode of descending a declivity of ice or snow is much more difficult than it would seem to be at first sight; the guides, however, practise it with wonderful dexterity, sliding down slopes of " frightful steepness," and accelerating, or retarding, and even altogether stopping their course at pleasure, merely by pressing the sharp point of their batons into the ice to the requisite depth.

After crossing the Mer de Glace-if he be enabled to accomplish that dangerous expedition, the visiter may repose himself amid the scanty pastures which the rocks opposite to the Montanvert afford, and wonder how the cattle which he sees around him, contrived to get there. He will learn from his guide that, at the commencement

of the Summer season, a regular expedition is made across the Mer de Glace, by those who have to conduct their cattle to this remote spot, whither a number of heifers, with one or two milch-cows for the support of the herdsman, are driven. They remain there until the beginning of Autumn, when another expedition is made to bring them back, it being necessary on each occasion to open a new route for the passage of the animals. The herdsman himself never descends to the valley above once or twice in the season, and then to obtain a supply of bread; during the rest of the period he remains alone with his herd "in this frightful solitude." When Saussure was there in 1760, the herdsman was an old man with a long beard, clothed in a calf's skin with the hair still on its outside. "He had an air as wild as the place in which he dwelt; he was much astonished to see a stranger, and I believe that I was really the first from whom he had received a visit. I should have wished to leave him an agreeable recollection of the visit; but he only wanted some tobacco,-I had none-and the money which I gave him did not seem to afford him any pleasure."

The upper part of this glacier being highly elevated above the valley, avalanches are frequently rolled down from it during a warm Summer's day. "In the course of one hour," says Mr. Bakewell, "we saw four considerable avalanches, and heard several from the other side of the glacier. The masses of ice may be observed in motion for a little time before they detach themselves, and when they fall upon the rocks below, the noise resembles the distant discharge of heavy artillery, followed by a succession of echoes. When the ice was once in motion, it would fall in a continued stream for a considerable time, which, seen at a distance, resembled a cataract: with the ice were intermixed large blocks of stone which had long lain upon the glacier. I counted several seconds between the first motion of the ice and the time when it struck against the rocks, and some seconds more before the sound reached the ear. I could have waited for hours to observe these avalanches, but as the sun declined they were less frequent, and ceased before evening."