We were approaching Zermatt; consequently, we were approaching the renowned Matterhorn.  A month before, this mountain had been only a name to us, but latterly we had been moving through a steadily thickening double row of pictures of it, done in oil, water, chromo, wood, steel, copper, crayon, and photography, and so it had at length become a shape to us—­and a very distinct, decided, and familiar one, too.  We were expecting to recognize that mountain whenever or wherever we should run across it.  We were not deceived.  The monarch was far away when we first saw him, but there was no such thing as mistaking him.  He has the rare peculiarity of standing by himself; he is peculiarly steep, too, and is also most oddly shaped.  He towers into the sky like a colossal wedge, with the upper third of its blade bent a little to the left.  The broad base of this monster wedge is planted upon a grand glacier-paved Alpine platform whose elevation is ten thousand feet above sea-level; as the wedge itself is some five thousand feet high, it follows that its apex is about fifteen thousand feet above sea-level.  So the whole bulk of this stately piece of rock, this sky-cleaving monolith, is above the line of eternal snow.  Yet while all its giant neighbors have the look of being built of solid snow, from their waists up, the Matterhorn stands black and naked and forbidding, the year round, or merely powdered or streaked with white in places, for its sides are so steep that the snow cannot stay there.  Its strange form, its august isolation, and its majestic unkinship with its own kind, make it—­so to speak—­the Napoleon of the mountain world.  “Grand, gloomy, and peculiar,” is a phrase which fits it as aptly as it fitted the great captain.

Think of a monument a mile high, standing on a pedestal two miles high!  This is what the Matterhorn is—­a monument.  Its office, henceforth, for all time, will be to keep watch and ward over the secret resting-place of the young Lord Douglas, who, in 1865, was precipitated from the summit over a precipice four thousand feet high, and never seen again.  No man ever had such a monument as this before; the most imposing of the world’s other monuments are but atoms compared to it; and they will perish, and their places will pass from memory, but this will remain. [1]

1.  The accident which cost Lord Douglas his life (see
    Chapter xii) also cost the lives of three other men. 
    These three fell four-fifths of a mile, and their bodies
    were afterward found, lying side by side, upon a glacier,
    whence they were borne to Zermatt and buried in the
churchyard. 
    The remains of Lord Douglas have never been found. 
    The secret of his sepulture, like that of Moses, must remain
    a mystery always.