When the man behind was also engaged in hauling himself up by the rope attached to your waist, when the two portions of the rope formed an acute angle, when your footing was confined to the insecure grip of one toe on a slippery bit of ice, and when a great hummock of hard serac was pressing against the pit of your stomach and reducing you to a position of neutral equilibrium, the result was a feeling of qualified acquiescence in Michel or Almer’s lively suggestion of “Vorwaerts! vorwaerts!”

Somehow or other we did ascend.  The excitement made the time seem short; and after what seemed to me to be half an hour, which was in fact nearly two hours, we had crept, crawled, climbed and wormed our way through various obstacles, till we found ourselves brought up by a huge overhanging wall of blue ice.  This wall was no doubt the upper side of a crevasse, the lower part of which had been filled by snow-drift.  Its face was honeycombed by the usual hemispherical chippings, which somehow always reminds me of the fretted walls of the Alhambra; and it was actually hollowed out so that its upper edge overhung our heads at a height of some twenty or thirty feet; the long fringe of icicles which adorned it had made a slippery pathway of ice at two or three feet distance from the foot of the wall by the freezing water which dripped from them; and along this we crept, in hopes that none of the icicles would come down bodily.

The wall seemed to thin out and become much lower toward our left, and we moved cautiously toward its lowest point.  The edge upon which we walked was itself very narrow, and ran down at a steep angle to the top of a lower icefall which repeated the form of the upper.  It almost thinned out at the point where the upper wall was lowest.  Upon this inclined ledge, however, we fixt the foot of our ladder.  The difficulty of doing so conveniently was increased by a transverse crevasse which here intersected the other system.  The foot, however, was fixt and rendered tolerably safe by driving in firmly several of our alpenstocks and axes under the lowest step.  Almer, then, amidst great excitement, went forward to mount it.  Should we still find an impassable system of crevasses above us, or were we close to the top?  A gentle breeze which had been playing along the last ledge gave me hope that we were really not far off.  As Almer reached the top about twelve o’clock, a loud yodel gave notice to all the party that our prospects were good.  I soon followed, and saw, to my great delight, a stretch of smooth, white snow, without a single crevasse, rising in a gentle curve from our feet to the top of the col.

The people who had been watching us from the Wengern Alp had been firing salutes all day, whenever the idea struck them, and whenever we surmounted a difficulty, such as the first great crevasse.  We heard the faint sound of two or three guns as we reached the final plateau.  We should, properly speaking, have been uproariously triumphant over our victory.  To say the truth, our party of that summer was only too apt to break out into undignified explosions of animal spirits, bordering at times upon horseplay....