It began: 

    “It is very difficult to free the mind from excitement
    on the evening before a grand expedition—­”

I saw that I was too calm; so I walked the room a while and worked myself into a high excitement; but the book’s next remark —­that the adventurer must get up at two in the morning—­came as near as anything to flatting it all out again.  However, I reinforced it, and read on, about how Mr. Hinchliff dressed by candle-light and was “soon down among the guides, who were bustling about in the passage, packing provisions, and making every preparation for the start”; and how he glanced out into the cold clear night and saw that—­

“The whole sky was blazing with stars, larger and brighter than they appear through the dense atmosphere breathed by inhabitants of the lower parts of the earth.  They seemed actually suspended from the dark vault of heaven, and their gentle light shed a fairylike gleam over the snow-fields around the foot of the Matterhorn, which raised its stupendous pinnacle on high, penetrating to the heart of the Great Bear, and crowning itself with a diadem of his magnificent stars.  Not a sound disturbed the deep tranquillity of the night, except the distant roar of streams which rush from the high plateau of the St. Theodule glacier, and fall headlong over precipitous rocks till they lose themselves in the mazes of the Gorner glacier.”

He took his hot toast and coffee, and then about half past three his caravan of ten men filed away from the Riffel Hotel, and began the steep climb.  At half past five he happened to turn around, and “beheld the glorious spectacle of the Matterhorn, just touched by the rosy-fingered morning, and looking like a huge pyramid of fire rising out of the barren ocean of ice and rock around it.”  Then the Breithorn and the Dent Blanche caught the radiant glow; but “the intervening mass of Monte Rosa made it necessary for us to climb many long hours before we could hope to see the sun himself, yet the whole air soon grew warmer after the splendid birth of the day.”

He gazed at the lofty crown of Monte Rosa and the wastes of snow that guarded its steep approaches, and the chief guide delivered the opinion that no man could conquer their awful heights and put his foot upon that summit.  But the adventurers moved steadily on, nevertheless.

They toiled up, and up, and still up; they passed the Grand Plateau; then toiled up a steep shoulder of the mountain, clinging like flies to its rugged face; and now they were confronted by a tremendous wall from which great blocks of ice and snow were evidently in the habit of falling.  They turned aside to skirt this wall, and gradually ascended until their way was barred by a “maze of gigantic snow crevices,”—­so they turned aside again, and “began a long climb of sufficient steepness to make a zigzag course necessary.”

Fatigue compelled them to halt frequently, for a moment or two.  At one of these halts somebody called out, “Look at Mont Blanc!” and “we were at once made aware of the very great height we had attained by actually seeing the monarch of the Alps and his attendant satellites right over the top of the Breithorn, itself at least 14,000 feet high!”