Jakob now produced a telescope, through which he hoped we might detect moving figures amongst the snow of the Wild Gall.  In vain we strained our eyes through the greasy old telescope, for neither moving figures nor stationary black dots were visible.  Even Jakob with his eagle eye confessed to seeing no trace of man either amongst the irregular ash-colored rocks or upon the snowy curves of the Wild Gall, which, like a huge white-crested breaker at sea, upheaved itself in the air as in the very act of turning.  Quite as solitary and untrodden did it look as its still more stately sister, the Hoch Gall, a mountain deservedly the especial pride of the district, its lofty pinnacle piercing the sky, whilst a vast sheet of thick, pure snow hung straight and smooth down its concave sides, a huge mountain-buttress linking the lower portion of this snow pyramid to the white, glittering expanse of the Gross Lengstein Glacier—­a buttress of many thousand feet, standing prominently forth like an antediluvian monster, on whose gigantic pachydermatous flanks the shattered, blasted stems of dead uniform fir trees shone out a silvery gray, mingling in color with the loose, glittering debris which had slidden into the upland valley just below.  Two silver threads descending from the glaciers of the Hoch Gall wound through these fallen stones into the green turf of the Bachernthal, but whether formed of snow or water it would have been difficult to decide, had not ever and anon a sound as of a distant train been borne upon the breeze, proving them to be brooks, which helped to swell the roaring, tumbling Giessbach, whose boisterous acquaintance we had already made.

The Hoch Gall, which has been twice ascended, was first attempted in 1869 by a very adventurous, clever young Alpine climber, Karl Hofmann, the only son of a well-known physician of Munich—­a youth of whom it is said that no study was too difficult, no danger too great, no peak too high for him.  Innumerable were the mountains which he scaled between 1866 and 1870, and of which he wrote excellent, accurate descriptions:  then laying down his young life—­he was but twenty-three—­on September 2, 1870, in the fierce battle of Sedan, his spirit passed away to mightier slopes, to more delectable mountains.

Again, in the August of 1871, after our first visit to the Olm, the ascent was repeated by two other members of the Tyrolese Alpine Club, Herr Richter and Herr Struedl.  They brought with them two experienced men—­one the chief guide of the Gross Glockner, the other of the Venediger Spitze—­and, except for Hofmann’s written description, had to plan and calculate for themselves, there being no local knowledge of the mountain attainable, as the two guides who accompanied the young explorer were also dead.