The trip to the Schwarzsee is the first stage on the Matterhorn route.  It leads through the village, past the Gorner Gorges (which one may visit by a slight detour) and then enters some very pretty woods, from which one issues on to the bare green meadows which clothe the upper part of the steep slope of the mountain.  As one mounts this zigzag path, it sometimes seems as if it would never end, and for all the magnificent views which it affords, one is always glad that it is over, as it exactly fulfils the conditions of a “grind.”

From the Schwarzsee (8,495 feet, where there is an excellent hotel), there is a fine survey of the Matterhorn, and also a splendid panorama, on three sides, one view up the glaciers toward the Monte Rosa, another over the valley to the Dent Blanche and other great peaks, and still another to the far distant Bernese Oberland.  Near the hotel is a little lake and a tiny chapel, where mass is sometimes said.  The reflection in the still waters of the lake is very lovely.

From the Schwarzsee, trips are made to the Hoernli (another stage on the way to the Matterhorn), to the Gandegg Hut, across moraine and glacier and to the Staffel Alp, over the green meadows.  The Hoernli (9,490 feet high) is the ridge running out from the Matterhorn.  It is reached by a stiff climb over rocks and a huge heap of fallen stones and debris.  From it the view is similar to that from the Schwarzsee, but much finer, the Theodule Glacier being seen to great advantage.  Above the Hoernli towers the Matterhorn, huge, fierce, frowning, threatening.  Every few moments comes a heavy, muffled sound, as new showers of falling stones come down.  This is one of the main dangers in climbing the peak itself, for from base to summit, the Matterhorn is really a decaying mountain, the stones rolling away through the action of the storms, the frosts, and the sun.

PONTRESINA AND ST. MORITZ[40]

BY VICTOR TISSOT

The night was falling fine as dust, as a black sifted snow-shower, a snow made of shadow; and the melancholy of the landscape, the grand nocturnal solitude of these lofty, unknown regions, had a charm profound and disquieting.  I do not know why I fancied myself no longer in Switzerland, but in some country near the pole, in Sweden or Norway.  At the foot of these bare mountains I looked for wild fjords, lit up by the moon.

Nothing can express the profound somberness of these landscapes at nightfall; the long desert road, gray from the reflections of the starry sky, unrolls in an interminable ribbon along the depth of the valley; the treeless mountains, hollowed out like ancient craters, lift their overhanging precipices; lakes sleeping in the midst of the pastures, behind curtains of pines and larches, glitter like drops of quicksilver; and on the horizon the immense glaciers crowd together and overflow like sheets of foam on a frozen sea.