“I wish you good luck; good weather you are sure of.”

[Illustration:  COL DE BLANC, MONT BLANC.

From a photograph loaned by Mr. Frank Hegger, New York.]

It was high authority, for Monsieur Janssen has studied the weather all his life, and knows the atmosphere of mountain peaks and of the airy levels where balloons float; yet if he could have foreseen what was to occur on Mont Blanc within twenty hours, he would have wished me the good fortune of being somewhere else.

It was past the middle of the forenoon of the 10th of August when, with Couttet and the porter, I left Chamonix.  Dismissing my tired mule at the Pierre Pointue, which hangs with its flag nearly seven thousand feet above sea level, and high over the seracs of the Glacier des Bossons, we began the ascent by way of the Pierre a l’Echelle and over the missile-scarred foot of the Aiguille du Midi.  The upper part of this mountain as seen from Chamonix looks quite sharp-pointed enough to deserve its name of the “Needle of the South.”  The side toward the Glacier des Bossons is exceedingly steep, and when the snows are melting the peak becomes a perfect catapult, volleys of ice and stones being discharged from its lofty precipices.  The falling rocks, dropping, as some of them do, from ledge to ledge half a mile, acquire the velocity of cannon shots.  Nobody ever lingers on this part of the route, and we had no desire to pause, although the Aiguille sends comparatively few stones down so late in the summer.

The sun beat furiously while we were scrambling on the rocks, and the latter were warm to the touch, although, thousands of feet below, the immense cleft in the mountain side was choked with masses of never-melted ice.

“Never mind,” said Couttet, as I stopped to wipe the perspiration from my face, “it will be cool enough when we get onto the glacier.”

And it was—­so cool in fact that I hastily pulled on my coat.  Having passed out of range of the Aiguille du Midi, we found comfortable going on the ice.

[Illustration:  THE MAUVAIS PAS, MONT BLANC.]

DIFFICULTIES AND DANGERS OF THE ROUTE.

The northern slope of Mont Blanc is hollowed into a vast cavernous channel, half filled with glaciers, and edged on the east by the Mont Maudit, the Aiguille de Saussure, and the Aiguille du Midi, and on the west by the Dome and Aiguille du Gouter and the Gros Bechat.  Down this tremendous gutter crowd the eternal snows of Mont Blanc, compressed toward the bottom into the Glacier des Bossons and the Glacier de Taconnaz.  These immense ice streams are separated by the projecting nose of the Montagne de la Cote, which rises from the valley of Chamonix and lies in a long, dark ridge on the foot of Mont Blanc.  Above the Montagne de la Cote several gigantic rock masses, shooting into pinnacles, push up through the ice from the bottom and near the centre of the channel.  These are called the Grands Mulets, from the resemblance which they present, when seen from Chamonix, to a row of huge black mules tramping up the white mountain side.