A pale light now overspread the eastern sky, which increased, as we ascended, to a daffodil tinge; this afterward heightened to orange, deepening at one extremity into red, and fading at the other into a pure, ethereal hue to which it would be difficult to assign a special name.  Higher up the sky was violet, and this changed by insensible degrees into the darkling blue of the zenith, which had to thank the light of moon and stars alone for its existence.  We wound steadily for a time through valleys of ice, climbed white and slippery slopes, crossed a number of crevasses, and after some time found ourselves beside a chasm of great depth and width, which extended right and left as far as we could see.  We turned to the left, and marched along its edge in search of a “pont”; but matters became gradually worse; other crevasses joined on to the first one, and the further we proceeded the more riven and dislocated the ice became.

At length we reached a place where further advance was impossible.  Simond, in his difficulty complained of the want of light, and wished us to wait for the advancing day; I, on the contrary, thought that we had light enough and ought to make use of it.  Here the thought occurred to me that Simond, having been only once before to the top of the mountain, might not be quite clear about the route; the glacier, however, changes within certain limits from year to year, so that a general knowledge was all that could be expected, and we trusted to our own muscles to make good any mistake in the way of guidance.

We now turned and retraced our steps along the edges of chasms where the ice was disintegrated and insecure, and succeeded at length in finding a bridge which bore us across the crevasse.  This error caused us the loss of an hour, and after walking for this time we could cast a stone from the point we had attained to the place whence we had been compelled to return.

Our way now lay along the face of a steep incline of snow, which was cut by the fissure we had just passed, in a direction parallel to our route.  On the heights to our right, loose ice-crags seemed to totter, and we passed two tracks over which the frozen blocks had rushed some short time previously.  We were glad to get out of the range of these terrible projectiles, and still more so to escape the vicinity of that ugly crevasse.  To be killed in the open air would be a luxury, compared with having the life squeezed out of one in the horrible gloom of these chasms.  The blush of the coming day became more and more intense; still the sun himself did not appear, being hidden from us by the peaks of the Aiguille du Midi, which were drawn clear and sharp against the brightening sky.  Right under this Aiguille were heaps of snow smoothly rounded and constituting a portion of the sources whence the Glacier du Geant is fed; these, as the day advanced, bloomed with a rosy light.  We reached the Petit Plateau, which we found covered with the remains of ice avalanches;