Greatest wonders of the world, as seen and described by famous writers

by Unknown

On looking towards the upper portion of the glacier, at the spot where it precipitates itself into the rock passage which conducts it to the valley like a furiously boiling cascade with wild spurts which some magic power has turned into ice at its strongest leap, you discover, arranged like an amphitheatre, the Montagne des Périades, the Petites Jorasses, the Grandes Jorasses, and the Aiguille du Géant, covered with eternal snow, the white diadem of the Alps which the suns of summer are powerless to melt and which scintillate with a pure and cold brilliancy in the clear blue of the sky.

At the foot of the Périades, the glacier, as may be seen from Montanvert, divides into two branches, one of which ascends towards the east and takes the name of the Glacier de Léchaud, while the other takes its course behind the Aiguilles de Chamouni towards Mont Blanc du Tacul, and is called the Glacier du Géant. A third branch, named the Glacier du Talifre, spreads out over the slopes of the Aiguille Verte.

It is in the middle of the Talifre where lies that oasis of the glaciers that is called the Jardin, a kind of basket of Alpine flowers, which find there a pinch of vegetable earth, a few rays of sunshine, and a girdle of stones that isolate them from the neighbouring ice; but to climb to the Jardin is a long, fatiguing and even dangerous excursion, necessitating a night’s sleep at the châlet of Montanvert.

We resumed our journey not without having gathered several bunches of rhododendrons of the freshest green and brightest rose, that opened in the liberty and solitude of the mountains by means of the pure Alpine breeze. You descend by the same route more rapidly than you ascended.

AIGUILLE DU DRU, ALPS.

The mules stepped gaily by the side of their leaders, who carried the sticks, canes and umbrellas, which had now become useless. We traversed the forest of pines pierced here and there by the torrents of stones of the avalanches; we gained the plain and were soon at Chamouni to go to the source of the Arveiron, which is found at the base of the Glacier des Bois, the name that is assumed by the Mer de Glace on arriving in the valley.

This is an excursion that you can make in a carriage. You follow the bottom of the valley, cross the Arve at the hamlet of Praz, and after having passed the Hameau des Bois, where you must alight, you arrive, winding among masses of rocks in disorder and pools of water across which logs are placed, at the wall of the glacier, which reveals itself by its slit and tortured edges, full of cavities and gashes where the blue-green hatchings colour the transparent whiteness of the mass.

The white teeth of the glacier stand out clearly against the sombre green of the forests of Bochard and Montanvert and are majestically dominated by the Aiguille du Dru, which shoots its granite obelisk three thousand nine hundred and six metres into the depths of the sky, and the foreground is formed by the most prodigious confusion of stones, rocks and blocks that a painter could wish for giving value to those vapourous depths. The Arveiron foams and roars across this chaos and, after half an hour of frantic disordered course, loses itself in the Arve.

Les Vacances de Lundi (Paris, 1881).