BEACHY HEAD
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
On the 23d of July, 1860, I started for my first tour in the Alps. As we steamed out into the Channel, Beachy Head came into view, and recalled a scramble of many years ago. With the impudence of ignorance, my brother and I, schoolboys both, had tried to scale that great chalk cliff. Not the head itself—where sea-birds circle, and where the flints are ranged so orderly in parallel lines—but at a place more to the east, where the pinnacle called the Devil’s Chimney had fallen down. Since that time we have been often in dangers of different kinds, but never have we more nearly broken our necks than upon that occasion.
In Paris I made two ascents. The first to the seventh floor of a house in the Quartier Latin—to an artist friend, who was engaged, at the moment of my entry, in combat with a little Jew. He hurled him with great good-will and with considerable force into some of his crockery, and then recommended me to go up the towers of Notre Dame. Half an hour later I stood on the parapet of the great west front, by the side of the leering fiend which for centuries has looked down upon the great city. It looked over the Hôtel Dieu to a small and commonplace building, around which there was always a moving crowd. To that building I descended. It was filled with chattering women and eager children, who were struggling to get a good sight of three corpses which were exposed to view. It was the Morgue. I quitted the place disgusted, and overheard two women discussing the spectacle. One of them concluded with, “But that it is droll;” the other answered approvingly, “But that it is droll;” and the Devil of Notre Dame, looking down upon them, seemed to say, “Yes, your climax, the cancan—your end, not uncommonly, that building: it is droll, but that it is droll.”
I passed on to Switzerland; saw the sunlight lingering on the giants of the Oberland; heard the echoes from the cow horns in the Lauterbrunnen valley and the avalanches rattling off the Jungfrau; and then crossed the Gemmi into the Valais, resting for a time by the beautiful Oeschinen See, and getting a forcible illustration of glacier-motion in a neighboring valley—the Gasteren Thal. The upper end of this valley is crowned by the Tschingel glacier, which, as it descends, passes over an abrupt cliff that is in the centre of its course. On each side the continuity of the glacier is maintained, but in the centre it is cleft in twain by the cliff. Lower down it is consolidated again. I scrambled on to this lower portion, advanced toward the cliff, and then stopped to admire the contrast of the brilliant pinnacles of ice with the blue sky. Without a warning, a huge slice of the glacier broke away and fell over the cliff on to the lower portion with a thundering crash. Fragments rolled beyond me, although, fortunately, not in my direction. I fled, and did not stop until off the glacier, but before it was quitted learned another lesson in glacial matters: the terminal moraine, which seemed to be a solid mound, broke away underneath me, and showed that it was only a superficial covering resting on a slope of glassy ice.
