I ordered the men to break camp and prepare for the land journey to Zermatt.  At this moment a most interesting find was made; a dark object, bedded in the glacial ice, was cut out with the ice-axes, and it proved to be a piece of the undressed skin of some animal—­a hair trunk, perhaps; but a close inspection disabled the hair-trunk theory, and further discussion and examination exploded it entirely—­that is, in the opinion of all the scientists except the one who had advanced it.  This one clung to his theory with affectionate fidelity characteristic of originators of scientific theories, and afterward won many of the first scientists of the age to his view, by a very able pamphlet which he wrote, entitled, “Evidences going to show that the hair trunk, in a wild state, belonged to the early glacial period, and roamed the wastes of chaos in the company with the cave-bear, primeval man, and the other Ooelitics of the Old Silurian family.”

Each of our scientists had a theory of his own, and put forward an animal of his own as a candidate for the skin.  I sided with the geologist of the Expedition in the belief that this patch of skin had once helped to cover a Siberian elephant, in some old forgotten age—­but we divided there, the geologist believing that this discovery proved that Siberia had formerly been located where Switzerland is now, whereas I held the opinion that it merely proved that the primeval Swiss was not the dull savage he is represented to have been, but was a being of high intellectual development, who liked to go to the menagerie.

We arrived that evening, after many hardships and adventures, in some fields close to the great ice-arch where the mad Visp boils and surges out from under the foot of the great Gorner Glacier, and here we camped, our perils over and our magnificent undertaking successfully completed.  We marched into Zermatt the next day, and were received with the most lavish honors and applause.  A document, signed and sealed by the authorities, was given to me which established and endorsed the fact that I had made the ascent of the Riffelberg.  This I wear around my neck, and it will be buried with me when I am no more.

CHAPTER XL [Piteous Relics at Chamonix]

I am not so ignorant about glacial movement, now, as I was when I took passage on the Gorner Glacier.  I have “read up” since.  I am aware that these vast bodies of ice do not travel at the same rate of speed; while the Gorner Glacier makes less than an inch a day, the Unter-Aar Glacier makes as much as eight; and still other glaciers are said to go twelve, sixteen, and even twenty inches a day.  One writer says that the slowest glacier travels twenty-give feet a year, and the fastest four hundred.

What is a glacier?  It is easy to say it looks like a frozen river which occupies the bed of a winding gorge or gully between mountains.  But that gives no notion of its vastness.  For it is sometimes six hundred feet thick, and we are not accustomed to rivers six hundred feet deep; no, our rivers are six feet, twenty feet, and sometimes fifty feet deep; we are not quite able to grasp so large a fact as an ice-river six hundred feet deep.