Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/58

 pushing towards the pole, and feeling that the ship which he has left behind is the sole basis of his operations. Above the Grimsel rises the Gallenstock, which, though not one of the mightiest giants, is a grand enough peak, and stands almost at the central nucleus of the Alps. The head waters of the Rhone and the Rhine flow from its base, and it looks defiantly across a waste of glaciers to its great brethren of the Oberland. It recalls Milton's magnificent phrase, "The great vision of the guarded mount," but looks over a nobler prospect than St, Michael's. Five hours' walk will reach it in summer, and it seemed that its winter panorama must be one of the most characteristic in the region. The accident which frustrated our attempt gave a taste of that savage nature which seems ready to leap to life in the winter mountains. The ferocious element of the scenery culminated for a few minutes, which might easily have been terrible.

We had climbed high towards the giant backbone of the mountain, and a few minutes would have placed us on the top. We were in that dim upper stratum, pierced by the nobler peaks alone, and our next neighbor in one direction was the group of Monte Rosa, some sixty miles away, but softly and clearly defined in every detail as an Alpine distance alone can be. Suddenly, without a warning or an apparent cause, the weather changed. The thin white flakes which had been wandering high above our heads changed suddenly into a broad black veil of vapor, dimming square leagues of snow with its shadows. A few salmon-colored wreaths that had been lingering near the furthest ranges had vanished between two glances at the distance, and in their place long trailers of cloud spread themselves like a network of black cobwebs from the bayonet point of the Weisshorn to the great bastion of the Monte Rosa, and seemed to be shooting out mysterious fibres, as the spider projects its nets of gossamer. Though no formed mass of cloud had showed itself, the atmosphere bathing the Oberland peaks rapidly lost its transparency, and changed into a huge blur of indefinite gloom. A wind, cold and icy enough, had all day been sucked down the broad funnel of the Rhone glacier, from the limiting ridges; and the light powdery snow along the final parapet of the Gallensback had been blowing off in regular puffs, suggestive of the steady roll of rifle smoke from the file-firing of a battalion in line. Now the wind grew louder and shriller; miniature whirlwinds began to rollick down the steep gullies, and when one turned towards the wind, it seemed as if an ice-cold hand was administering a sharp blow to the cheek. In our solitude, beyond all possible communication with permanent habitation, distant by some hours of walk even from our base at the Grimsel, there was something almost terrible in this sudden and omnious awakening of the storm spirit. We had ventured into the monster's fastness and he was rousing himself. We depended upon the coming moon for our homeward route, and the moon would not have much power in the thick snowstorm that was apparently about to envelope us.

Retreat was evidently prudent, and when the dim light began to fade we were still climing that broad-backed miscellaneous ridge or congeries of ridges which divides the Grimsel from the Rhone glacier. In summer it is a wilderness of rocky hummocks and bowlders, affording shelter to the most ambitious stragglers of the Alpine rose, and visited by an occasional chamois — a kind of neutral ground between the kingdom of perpetual snow and the highest pastures — one of those chaotic misshapen regions which suggest the world has not been quite finished. In winter, a few black rocks alone peep through the snowy blanket; the hollows become covered pitfalls; and some care is required in steering through its intricacies, and crossing gullies steep enough to suggest a possibility of avalanches. Night and storm might make the work severe, though there was no danger for men of average capacity, and with first-rate guides. But, suddenly and perversely, the heaviest and strongest man of the party declared himself to be ill. His legs began to totter, and he expressed a decided approbation of sitting in the abstract. Then, I must confess, an uncomfortable vision flitted for a moment through my brain. I did not think of the spirited description of the shepherd, in Thomson, lost in the snowdrifts,

But I did recall a dozen uncomfortable legends — only too authentic — of travellers lost, far nearer to hospitable refuges, in Alpine storms; of that disgusting museum of corpses, which the monks are not ashamed to keep for the edification of travellers across the St. Bernard; of the English tourists frozen almost within reach of safety on the Col du Bonhomme; of 