above us upon the crest of the mountain rose three mighty bastions, divided from each other by deep, vertical rents, with clean smooth walls, across which the lines of annual bedding were drawn like courses of masonry.  From these, which incessantly renew themselves, and from the loose and broken ice-crags near them, the boulders amid which we now threaded our way had been discharged.  When they fall their descent must be sublime.

The snow had been gradually getting deeper, and the ascent more wearisome, but superadded to this at the Petit Plateau was the uncertainty of the footing between the blocks of ice.  In many places the space was merely covered by a thin crust, which, when trod upon, instantly yielded and we sank with a shock sometimes to the hips.  Our way next lay up a steep incline to the Grand Plateau, the depth and tenderness of the snow augmenting as we ascended.  We had not yet seen the sun, but as we attained the brow which forms the entrance to the Grand Plateau, he hung his disk upon a spike of rock to our left, and, surrounded by a glory of interference spectra of the most gorgeous colors, blazed down upon us.  On the Grand Plateau we halted and had our frugal refreshment.

At some distance to our left was the crevasse into which Dr. Hamel’s three guides were precipitated by an avalanche in 1820; they are still entombed in the ice, and some future explorer may, perhaps, see them disgorged lower down, fresh and undecayed.  They can hardly reach the surface until they pass the snow-line of the glacier, for above this line the quantity of snow that annually falls being in excess of the quantity melted, the tendency would be to make the ice-covering above them thicker.  But it is also possible that the waste of the ice underneath may have brought the bodies to the bed of the glacier, where their very bones may have been ground to mud by an agency which the hardest rocks can not withstand.

As the sun poured his light upon the Plateau the little snow-facets sparkled brilliantly, sometimes with a pure white light, and at others with prismatic colors.  Contrasted with the white spaces above and around us were the dark mountains on the opposite side of the valley of Chamouni, around which fantastic masses of cloud were beginning to build themselves.  Mont Buet, with its cone of snow, looked small, and the Brevent altogether mean; the limestone bastions of the Fys, however, still presented a front of gloom and grandeur.  We traversed the Grand Plateau, and at length reached the base of an extremely steep incline which stretched upward toward the Corridor.  Here, as if produced by a fault, consequent upon the sinking of the ice in front, rose a vertical precipice, from the coping of which vast stalactites of ice depended.