“I am quite unable to speak with justice—­or think with clearness—­of this marvellous view.  One is so unused to see a mass like that of Mont Blanc without any snow that all my ideas and modes of estimating size were at fault.  I only felt overpowered by it, and that—­as with the porch of Rouen Cathedral—­look as I would, I could not see it.  I had not mind enough to grasp it or meet it.  I tried in vain to fix some of its main features on my memory; then set the mules to graze again, and took my sketch-book, and marked the outlines—­but where is the use of marking contours of a mass of endless—­countless—­fantastic rock—­12,000 feet sheer above the valley?  Besides, one cannot have sharp sore-throat for twelve hours without its bringing on some slight feverishness; and the scorching Alpine sun to which we had been exposed without an instant’s cessation from the height of the col till now—­i.e., from half-past ten to three—­had not mended the matter; my pulse was now beginning slightly to quicken and my head slightly to ache—­and my impression of the scene is feverish and somewhat painful; I should think like yours of the valley of Sixt.”

So he finished his drawing, tramped down the valley after his mule, in dutiful fear of increasing his cold, and found Cormayeur crowded, only an attic au quatrieme to be had.  After trying to doctor himself with gray pill, kali, and senna, Coutet cured his throat with an alum gargle, and they went over the Col Ferret.

The courier Pfister had been sent to meet him at Martigny, and bring latest news and personal report, on the strength of which several days passed without letters, but not without a remonstrance from headquarters.  On August 8 he writes from Zermatt: 

“I have your three letters, with pleasant accounts of critiques, etc., and painful accounts of your anxieties.  I certainly never thought of putting in a letter at Sion, as I arrived there about three hours after Fister left me, it being only two stages from Martigny; and besides, I had enough to do that morning in thinking what I should want at Zermatt, and was engaged at Sion, while we changed horses, in buying wax candles and rice.  It was unlucky that I lost post at Visp,” etc.

A few days later he says: 

“On Friday I had such a day as I have only once or twice had the like of among the Alps.  I got up to a promontory projecting from the foot of the Matterhorn, and lay on the rocks and drew it at my ease.  I was about three hours at work as quietly as if in my study at Denmark Hill, though on a peak of barren crag above a glacier, and at least 9,000 feet above sea.  But the Matterhorn, after all, is not so fine a thing as the aiguille Dru, nor as any one of the aiguilles of Chamouni:  for one thing, it is all of secondary rock in horizontal beds, quite rotten and shaly; but there are other causes