One of the most attractive of all the pleasure resorts in Switzerland is the lovely Vale of Chamonix. The first view one obtains of it, in coming over the mountains from Martigny, is superb. Three monstrous glaciers, creeping out from their icy lairs, lie beneath ice-fringed buttresses of snow, like glittering serpents watching for a favorable chance to seize and swallow their prey. Looking across the valley at them, it is true, they seem quite harmless; but in reality, such glaciers are the mighty wedges which have for ages carved these mountains into shape, and are still keeping them apart in solitary grandeur. What from a distance seems a little bank of snow is probably a wall of ice, one hundred feet in height. What look like wrinkles are crevasses of an unknown depth; and the seeming puff of smoke which one at times discerns upon them, is really a tremendous avalanche of snow and ice. Of the three glaciers which descend into the Vale of Chamonix, the one most frequently visited by tourists is the Mer de Glace. It is well called the "Sea of Ice," for its irregular surface looks precisely like a mass of tossing waves which have been crystallized when in their wildest agitation. To right and left, the ice is partially concealed by rocks and earth, which have been ground off from the adjacent mountain-sides, or which have fallen there, as the result of avalanches. Sometimes huge boulders are discernible, tossed here and there like nut-shells, the rocky débris of ages.
APPALLING PRECIPICES.
ZÜRICH, WITH DISTANT ALPS.
What is there more suggestive of mysterious power than a frozen cataract like this? Apparently as cold and motionless as death, it nevertheless is moving downward with a slow, resistless march, whose progress can be accurately traced from day to day; so accurately, indeed, that objects lost to-day in one of these crevasses may be confidently looked for at the glacier's terminus after a certain number of years. Forever nourished on the heights, forever wasting in the valleys, these glaciers are the moving mysteries of the upper world; vast, irresistible, congealed processions,—the frozen reservoirs of rivers that glide at last from their reluctant arms in a mad haste to reach the sea.
