You want to ascend these mountains?  Come to Zermatt.  With a wand ten miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks.  Europe has but one higher.  Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents into the little green valley.  Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more difficult than either or both.  A plumbline dropped from the summit of Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt.  You first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles.  In the afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the Riffelhouse.  It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your house—­only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the house.  This takes three hours—­an hour to each hundred stories; after the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have reached the first floor.  The next day you go up and down the Goerner Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a view unequaled in Europe.  Ordering the guide to be ready and the porter to call you at one o’clock, you lie down to dream of the glorious revelations of the morrow.

The porter’s rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the question, “What is the weather?” he said, “Not utterly bad.”  There is plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly near.  We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent.  The lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct.  Was the storm over?  The guides would give no opinion.  It was their interest to go, it was ours to go only in good weather.  By three o’clock I noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an inch upward.  I gave the order to start.  The other parties said, “Good for your pluck! Bon voyage, gute reise,” and went to bed.  In an hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier.  The sky was brilliant.  Hopes were high.  The glacier with its vast medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long, was crossed in the dawn.  The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks with glory, and we shouted victory.  But in a moment the sun was clouded, and so were we.  Soon it came out again, and continued clear.  But the guide said, “Only the good God knows if we shall have clear weather.”  Men get pious amid perils.  I thought of the aneroid, and felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his servants.