involved an
over-expenditure of energy whose effects I could not escape, and nature
was already demanding usury for the loan.

As we approached the ridge of the saddle, day rose blushing in the east,
and Couttet put out the lantern. Turning to the right, we hurried in
zigzags up the slippery Mur de la Cote, stopping to cut steps only when
strictly necessary. While we were ascending this wall the sun appeared,
and hung for a moment, a great, dazzling, fire-colored circle, on a
distant mountain rim. Below us for a long time the great valleys
remained filled with gloom, while out of and around there rose hundreds
of peaks, tipped with pink and gold. But very few of the towering giants
now reached to our level, and in a little while we should be above them
all.

Once on top of the Mur we had level going again for a space, and
hurrying to the base of the crowning dome, which swells upward another
thousand feet, we began its ascent without stopping. About half way up
the dome the highest visible rocks of Mont Blanc on this side break
through the Mur. They are called the Petits Mulets. We had nearly
reached them when, looking back, I saw the heads of the other party
appearing on the brink of the Mur. They looked up at us hanging right
above them on the white slope, while Couttet carried my handkerchief,
streaming triumphantly in the morning wind, from the end of his baton.
Waving their hands, they sat down and gave up the race. While they
lunched we pushed upward more slowly, and at six o'clock entered the
door of Monsieur Janssen's observatory, fifteen thousand seven hundred
and seventy-seven feet above the sea.

My first look was directed to the Matterhorn, which, thirty-five miles
away, pierced the morning sky with its black spike. Glittering near it
were the snow turrets of Monte Rosa, the Dent Blanche, and all the
marvellous circle of peaks that stand around Zermatt. There was not a
cloud to break the view. On one side lay Italy; on the other France. It
would be impossible to imagine the wild scene immediately below us. The
tremendous slopes of snow falling away on all sides, now in steep
inclines and now in broken precipices, ever down and down, were not
after all so imposing as the jagged pinnacles of bare rock that sprang
out of them.

There was something peculiarly savage, almost menacing, in the aspect of
these lower mountains, pressing in serried ranks around their
white-capped chief. They seemed to shut us fa