“The difficult air of the iced mountain top,
    Where the birds dare not build, nor insect’s wing
    Flit o’er the herbless granite."[34]

The transport of the artillery and ammunition was the most difficult point; and to this, accordingly, the Chief Consul gave his personal superintendence.  The guns were dismounted, grooved into the trunks of trees hollowed out so as to suit each calibre, and then dragged on by sheer strength of muscle—­not less than an hundred soldiers being sometimes harnessed to a single cannon.  The carriages and wheels, being taken to pieces, were slung on poles, and borne on men’s shoulders.  The powder and shot, packed into boxes of fir-wood, formed the lading of all the mules that could be collected over a wide range of the Alpine country.  These preparations had been made during the week that elapsed between Buonaparte’s arrival at Geneva and the commencement of Lannes’s march.  He himself travelled sometimes on a mule, but mostly on foot, cheering on the soldiers who had the burden of the great guns.  The fatigue undergone is not to be described.  The men in front durst not halt to breathe, because the least stoppage there might have thrown the column behind into confusion, on the brink of deadly precipices; and those in the rear had to flounder knee deep, through snow and ice trampled into sludge by the feet and hoofs of the preceding divisions.  Happily the march of Napoleon was not harassed, like that of Hannibal, by the assaults of living enemies.  The mountaineers, on the contrary, flocked in to reap the liberal rewards which he offered to all who were willing to lighten the drudgery of his troops.

On the 16th of May Napoleon slept at the convent of St. Maurice; and, in the course of the four following days, the whole army passed the Great St. Bernard.  It was on the 20th that Buonaparte himself halted an hour at the convent of the Hospitallers, which stands on the summit of this mighty mountain.  The good fathers of the monastery had been warned beforehand of the march, and they had furnished every soldier as he passed with a luncheon of bread and cheese and a glass of wine; for which seasonable kindness, they now received the warm acknowledgments of the chief.[35] It was here that he took his leave of a peasant youth, who had walked by him, as his guide, all the way from the convent of St. Maurice.  Napoleon conversed freely with the young man, and was much interested with his simplicity.  At parting, he asked the guide some particulars about his personal situation; and, having heard his reply, gave him money and a billet to the head of the monastery of St. Maurice.  The peasant delivered it accordingly, and was surprised to find that, in consequence of a scrap of writing which he could not read, his worldly comforts were to be permanently increased.  The object of his generosity remembered, nevertheless, but little of his conversation with the Consul.  He described Napoleon as being “a very dark man” (this