From here forward we moved through a storm-swept and smileless desolation.  All about us rose gigantic masses, crags, and ramparts of bare and dreary rock, with not a vestige or semblance of plant or tree or flower anywhere, or glimpse of any creature that had life.  The frost and the tempests of unnumbered ages had battered and hacked at these cliffs, with a deathless energy, destroying them piecemeal; so all the region about their bases was a tumbled chaos of great fragments which had been split off and hurled to the ground.  Soiled and aged banks of snow lay close about our path.  The ghastly desolation of the place was as tremendously complete as if Dor’e had furnished the working-plans for it.  But every now and then, through the stern gateways around us we caught a view of some neighboring majestic dome, sheathed with glittering ice, and displaying its white purity at an elevation compared to which ours was groveling and plebeian, and this spectacle always chained one’s interest and admiration at once, and made him forget there was anything ugly in the world.

I have just said that there was nothing but death and desolation in these hideous places, but I forgot.  In the most forlorn and arid and dismal one of all, where the racked and splintered debris was thickest, where the ancient patches of snow lay against the very path, where the winds blew bitterest and the general aspect was mournfulest and dreariest, and furthest from any suggestion of cheer or hope, I found a solitary wee forget-me-not flourishing away, not a droop about it anywhere, but holding its bright blue star up with the prettiest and gallantest air in the world, the only happy spirit, the only smiling thing, in all that grisly desert.  She seemed to say, “Cheer up!—­as long as we are here, let us make the best of it.”  I judged she had earned a right to a more hospitable place; so I plucked her up and sent her to America to a friend who would respect her for the fight she had made, all by her small self, to make a whole vast despondent Alpine desolation stop breaking its heart over the unalterable, and hold up its head and look at the bright side of things for once.

We stopped for a nooning at a strongly built little inn called the Schwarenbach.  It sits in a lonely spot among the peaks, where it is swept by the trailing fringes of the cloud-rack, and is rained on, and snowed on, and pelted and persecuted by the storms, nearly every day of its life.  It was the only habitation in the whole Gemmi Pass.

Close at hand, now, was a chance for a blood-curdling Alpine adventure.  Close at hand was the snowy mass of the Great Altels cooling its topknot in the sky and daring us to an ascent.  I was fired with the idea, and immediately made up my mind to procure the necessary guides, ropes, etc., and undertake it.  I instructed Harris to go to the landlord of the inn and set him about our preparations.  Meantime, I went diligently to work to read up and find out what this much-talked-of mountain-climbing was like, and how one should go about it—­for in these matters I was ignorant.  I opened Mr. Hinchliff’s summer months among the Alps (published 1857), and selected his account of his ascent of Monte Rosa.