Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain.  Six hours and a half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight.  I have no fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do the ascents.  They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and enjoy, but to boast.  We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow of ice below.  We scramble up the rocks of the mountain.  Hour after hour we toil upward.  At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all four roped together.  There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them.  If a man drops in the rest must pull him out.  Being heavier than any other man of the party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay of dangling by a rope in a chasm.  The beauty of these cold blue ice vaults cannot be described.  They are often fringed with icicles.  In one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an apparently reversed condition.  We passed one place where vast masses of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start a new avalanche.  We were up in one of nature’s grandest workshops.

How the view widened!  How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened the effect in the valley below!  The glorious air made us know what the man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive.  Some have little occasion to be thankful in that respect.

Here we learned the use of a guide.  Having carefully chosen him, by testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only generally, but step by step.  Put each foot in his track.  He had trodden the snow to firmness.  But being heavier than he it often gave way under my pressure.  One such slump and recovery takes more strength than ten regular steps.  Not so in following the Guide to the fairer and greater heights of the next world.  He who carried this world and its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time into such firmness that no man walking in his steps, however great his sins, ever breaks down the track.  And just so in that upward way, one fall and recovery takes more strength than ten rising steps.

Meanwhile, what of the weather?  Uncertainty.  Avalanches thundered from the Breithorn and Lyskamm, telling of a penetrative moisture in the air.  The Matterhorn refused to take in its signal flags of storm.  Still the sun shone clear.  We had put in six of the eight hours’ work of ascent when snow began to fall.  Soon it was too thick to see far.  We came to a chasm that looked vast in the deception of the storm.  It was only twenty feet wide.  Getting round this the storm deepened till we could scarcely see one another.  There was no mountain, no sky.  We halted of necessity.  The guide said, “Go back.”  I said, “Wait.”  We waited in wind, hail, and snow till all vestige of the track by which we had come—­our only guide back if the storm continued—­was lost except the holes made by the Alpenstocks.  The snow drifted over, and did not fill these so quickly.