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Page 18
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.
Not knowing but that the storm might last two days, as is frequently
the case, I reluctantly gave the order to go down. In an hour we got
below the storm. The valley into which we looked was full of brightest
sunshine; the mountain above us looked like a cowled monk. In another
hour the whole sky was perfectly clear. O that I had kept my faith in
my aneroid! Had I held to the faith that started me in the
morning--endured the storm, not wavered at suggestions of peril, defied
apparent knowledge of local guides--and then been able to surmount the
difficulty of the new-fallen snow, I should have been favored with such
a view as is not enjoyed once in ten years; for men cannot go up all
the way in storm, nor soon enough after to get all the benefit of the
cleared air. Better things were prepared for me than I knew;
indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and
held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of
darkness and storm.
I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and
softened snow, and said to the guide, "To-morrow I start for the
Matterhorn." To do this we go down the three hundred stories to
Zermatt.
Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree
profitable. Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination,
has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed.
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