BY EDWARD WHYMPER

On the 23d of July, 1860, I started for my first tour of the Alps.  At Zermatt I wandered in many directions, but the weather was bad and my work was much retarded.  One day, after spending a long time in attempts to sketch near the Hoernli, and in futile endeavors to seize the forms of the peaks as they for a few seconds peered out from above the dense banks of woolly clouds, I determined not to return to Zermatt by the usual path, but to cross the Goerner glacier to the Riffel hotel.  After a rapid scramble over the polished rocks and snow-beds which skirt the base of the Theodule glacier, and wading through some of the streams which flow from it, at that time much swollen by the late rains, the first difficulty was arrived at, in the shape of a precipice about three hundred feet high.  It seemed that there would be no difficulty in crossing the glacier if the cliff could be descended, but higher up and lower down the ice appeared, to my inexperienced eyes, to be impassable for a single person.

The general contour of the cliff was nearly perpendicular, but it was a good deal broken up, and there was little difficulty in descending by zigzagging from one mass to another.  At length there was a long slab, nearly smooth, fixt at an angle of about forty degrees between two wall-sided pieces of rock; nothing, except the glacier, could be seen below.  It was a very awkward place, but being doubtful if return were possible, as I had been dropping from one ledge to another, I passed at length by lying across the slab, putting the shoulder stiffly against one side and the feet against the other, and gradually wriggling down, by first moving the legs and then the back.  When the bottom of the slab was gained a friendly crack was seen, into which the point of the baton could be stuck, and I dropt down to the next piece.

It took a long time coming down that little bit of cliff, and for a few seconds it was satisfactory to see the ice close at hand.  In another moment a second difficulty presented itself.  The glacier swept round an angle of the cliff, and as the ice was not of the nature of treacle or thin putty, it kept away from the little bay on the edge of which I stood.  We were not widely separated, but the edge of the ice was higher than the opposite edge of rock; and worse, the rock was covered with loose earth and stones which had fallen from above.  All along the side of the cliff, as far as could be seen in both directions, the ice did not touch it, but there was this marginal crevasse seven feet wide and of unknown depth.  All this was seen at a glance, and almost at once I concluded that I could not jump the crevass and began to try along the cliff lower down, but without success, for the ice rose higher and higher until at last farther progress was stopt by the cliffs becoming perfectly smooth.  With an ax it would have been possible to cut up the side of the ice—­without one, I saw there was no alternative but to return and face the jump.