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part of, the terminal moraine* of the glacier. It was disagreeable
walking in the dark, and we were frequently stumbling and
falling. Long before we reached the glacier, day had begun to
dawn, and a cold clear grey was stealing over the sky :-
"Lo! on the eastern summit, clad in grey,

Morn, like a horseman girt for travel, comes
And from his tower of mist

Night's watchman hurries down."

We were nearly an hour upon the ice, on leaving which we approached an abrupt wall of rock, which afforded the only means of access to the upper plateau.† It turned out to be not absolutely precipitous, but full of small ledges and steep slopes covered with loose stones and schisty ‡ débris, which gave way at every step. It was extremely steep; very often the ledges which gave us foothold were but an inch or two wide, and throughout it was a marvel to me that rocks which, from a short distance off, looked such absolute precipices, could be climbed at all.. . . At length we came to a very singular formation. Standing out from a nearly perpendicular wall of rock were a series of thin parallel wedges of rock, planted, with the thin edge upwards, at right angles to the body of the mountain, and separated from each other by deep intervening clefts and hollows. Each of these wedges was two or three hundred feet in height, seventy or eighty in width at the base, but narrowing off to the thickness of a few inches, and presenting at the top a rough and jagged ridge, forty or fifty feet long, by which we must pass to reach the plateau which lay just beyond. We first climbed to the top of one of these wedges, and then had to make our way along its crest.

It was nervous work; a good head, a stout heart, a steady hand and foot, were needed. Lauener went first, carrying a rope, which we stretched by the side of the ridge, so as to form a protection to the next passer. Bohren went next; then came my own turn. It was certainly the worst piece of scrambling I ever did. The rock was much shattered by exposure to the frost and snow, and there was hardly a single immoveable piece along the whole length. Every bit had to be tried before it was trusted to, and many were the fragments, some as large as a shoulder of mutton, and something of that shape, which came out when put to the test, and went crashing down till out of sight,

* Moraine, accumulations of stones and other débris brought down with a glacier, and deposited where it melts away.

+ Plateau, plur. plateaux (pron. plat-o), extended plain.

Schisty, easily split into lamina or plates, as slatē, mica, &c.

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making an avalanche of other stones as they fell. . . I passed my right arm over the top of the ridge, and thus secured myself, having the rock between that arm and my body on one side, and the rope stretched below me on the other. Every one had to pass much in the same way, and it was a long quarter of an hour before we were all safely landed on the snow beyond. We now fastened ourselves all together with ropes, and commenced the last ascent. It lay near the edge of a long and steep curve, which connects the Mittelhorn with the Wetterhorn; at the place where we gained the plateau the ridge was nearly level, but almost immediately began to rise sharply towards the peak. We were now at the back of the mountain, as seen from the valley of Grindelwald, which was of course completely hidden from the view. When we had stopped to take something to eat, we were at an extremity of the ridge which runs up to the actual summit, and, as it were, peeped round a corner. We were not to see the valley again till we stood upon the summit.

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The ascent was rapid, and commenced in deep snow; but it was not long before the covering of snow became thinner, and the slope more rapid, and every minute a step or two had to be cut. In this way we zigzagged onwards for nearly an hour, in the course of which we made, perhaps, a thousand feet of ascent, having the satisfaction, every time we looked round, to see a wider expanse of prospect risen into view. About ten o'clock

we reached the last rocks, which were a set of black, sloping, calcareous crags, whose inclination was hardly less than that of the glacier, left bare by the melting of the snow; they were much disintegrated by the weather, and the rough and shady débris on their surface was, for the most part, soaked with the water that trickled from the snows above. Here we came to a halt, and unharnessed ourselves. A gentle breeze tempered the heat of the sun, which shone gloriously upon a sparkling sea of ice-clad peaks, contrasting finely with the deep blue of the cloudless heaven.

Once established on the rocks, and released from the ropes, we began to consider our next operations. A glance upwards showed that no easy task awaited us. In front rose a steep curtain of glacier, surmounted, about 500 or 600 feet above us, by an over

*Calcareous, of the nature of lime.

+ Disintegrated, worn, i. e., separated into integrant parts-parts of the same substance as the whole, as distinguished from "decomposed," separated into constituent parts or elements.

hanging cornice* of ice and frozen snow, edged with a fantastic fringe of pendants and enormous icicles. This formidable obstacle bounded our view, and stretched along from end to end of the ridge. What lay beyond it we could only conjecture; but we all thought that it must be crowned by a swelling dome which would constitute the actual summit. We foresaw great difficulty in forcing this imposing barrier; but, after a short consultation, the plan of attack was agreed upon, and immediately carried into execution. . Lauener and Sampson were sent forward to conduct our approaches, which consisted of a series of short zigzags, ascending directly from where we were resting to the foot of the cornice. The steep surface of the glacier was covered with snow; but it soon became evident that it was not deep enough to afford any material assistance. It was loose and uncompacted, and lay to the thickness of two or three inches only; so that every step had to be hewn out of the solid ice. Lauener went first,

and cut a hole just sufficient to afford him a foothold while he cut another. Sampson followed, and doubled the size of the step, so as to make a safe and firm resting-place. The line they took ascended, as I have said, directly above the rocks on which we were reclining, to the base of the overhanging fringe. Hence the blocks of ice, as they were hewn out, shot past us into the fathomless abyss beneath. We had to be on the alert to avoid these rapid missiles, which came accompanied by a very avalanche of dry and powdery snow. I could not help being struck with the marvellous beauty of the barrier which lay, still to be overcome, between us and the attainment of our hopes. The cornice curled over towards us, like the crest of a wave, breaking at irregular intervals along the line into pendants and inverted pinnacles of ice, many of which hung down to the full length of a tall man's height. They cast a ragged shadow on the wall of ice behind, which was hard and glassy, not flecked with a spot of snow, and blue as the "brave o'erhanging" of the cloudless firmament. They seemed battlements of an enchanted fortress, framed to defy the curiositv of man, and to laugh to scorn his audacious efforts.

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Lauener chose his course well, and had worked up to the most accessible point along the whole line, where a break in the series of icicles allowed him to approach close to the icy parapet, and where the projecting crest was narrowest and weakest. It was resolved to cut boldly into the ice, and endeavour to hew deep

* Cornice, the crowning portion of a structure, ornamented.

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enough to get a sloping passage on to the dome beyond. He stood close, not facing the parapet, but turned half round, and struck out as far away from himself as he could. A few strokes of his powerful arm brought down the projecting crest, which, after rolling a few feet, fell headlong over the brink of the arrete, and was out of sight in an instant. We all looked on in breathless anxiety; for it depended upon the success of this assault whether that impregnable fortress was to be ours, or whether we were to return, slowly and sadly, foiled by its calm and massive strength. Suddenly, a startling cry of surprise and triumph rang through the air. A great block of ice bounded from the top of the parapet, and before it had well lighted on the glacier, Lauener exclaimed, "I see blue sky." A thrill of astonishment and delight ran through our frames. Our enterprise had succeeded! We were almost upon the actual summit. That wave above us, frozen, as it seemed, in the act of falling over, into a strange and motionless magnificence, was the very peak itself. My left shoulder grazed against the angle of the icy embrasure, while, on the right, the glacier fell abruptly away beneath me, towards an unknown and awful abyss; a hand from an invisible person grasped mine; I stepped across, and had passed the ridge of the Wetterhorn!

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The instant before I had been face to face with a blank wall of ice. One step, and the eye took in a boundless expanse of crag and glacier, peak and precipice, mountain and valley, lake and plain. The whole world seemed to lie at my feet. The next moment I was almost appalled by the awfulness of our position. The side we had come up was steep, but it was a gentle slope compared with that which now fell away from where I stood. A few yards of glittering ice at our feet, and then nothing between us and the green slopes of Grindelwald, 9,000 feet beneath. I am not ashamed to own that I experienced, as this sublime and wonderful prospect burst upon my view, a profound and almost irrepressible emotion-an emotion which, if I may judge by the low ejaculations of surprise, followed by a long pause of breathless silence, as each in turn stepped into the opening, was felt by others as well as myself. Balmat told me repeatedly, afterwards, that it was the most awful and startling moment he had known in the course of his long mountain experience. We felt as in the more immediate presence of Him who had reared this tremendous pinnacle, and beneath the "majestic roof" of whose deep blue heaven we stood, poised, as it seemed, half way between the earth and sky.-Wills" High Alps."

WINTER IN ST. PETERSBURG.

IN the year 1836, and in the month of December, a man threw a piece of apple peel out of his little air window in Moscow. The peel of the apple did not reach the street, but happening to strike against the ledge of the window, froze fast to it, and remained icebound on its way from the window to the street, till it was set free by a thaw somewhere in the month of February, and was enabled to complete the journey on which it had set out six weeks and three days previously. This may afford a tolerable notion of the severity and perseverance of a Moscovite winter.

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Such a thing could not have occurred in St. Petersburg, for in the marshy delta of the Neva the temperature is more variable than in Central Russia. The icy winds that blow from Siberia are in some measure tempered by the influence of the Baltic. Rainy west winds, freezing north-easters, thick fogs, and cheerful frosty days, are succeeding each other constantly, and keep up a struggle for mastery throughout the whole of the six months' winter. man is as little secure against rain and mud in January as against frost and snow in April. In Moscow, on the contrary, the sky was never known to drop a single tear of rain in December; and neither among the records of the city nor the traditions of its inhabitants will you trace one instance of a pair of boots having been spotted with mud in January.

The climate of St. Petersburg oscillates continually between two extremes. It is not merely in the course of the year, however, but in the course of the same twenty-four hours, that the temperature is liable to great variations. In summer, after a hot sultry morning, a rough wind will set in towards evening, and drive the thermometer down immediately. In winter also there is often a difference of 12° or 18° between the temperature of the morning and that of the night. It would be impossible to preserve existence in such a climate if man did not endeavour to counteract its fickleness by his own unchangeableness. In Germany, where the transitions are less sudden, we endeavour to follow the vagaries of the weather by putting on a cloak one day and leaving it off the next, by putting an additional log or two into the stove, or by economizing our fuel. In St. Petersburg, people are less variable in their arrangements. The winter is considered to begin in October and end in May, and in the beginning of October every man puts on his furs, which are calculated for the severest weather that can come, and these furs are not laid aside again till

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