yot volunteered.

Two ropes were made fast to his leather belt and he bore the end of a
third one in his hand to tie to the victim in case he found him. He was
lowered into the crevice, he descended deeper and deeper between the
clear blue walls of solid ice, he approached a bend in the crack and
disappeared under it. Down, and still down, he went, into this profound
grave; when he had reached a depth of eighty feet he passed under
another bend in the crack, and thence descended eighty feet lower, as
between perpendicular precipices. Arrived at this stage of one hundred
and sixty feet below the surface of the glacier, he peered through the
twilight dimness and perceived that the chasm took another turn and
stretched away at a steep slant to unknown deeps, for its course was
lost in darkness. What a place that was to be in--especially if that
leather belt should break! The compression of the belt threatened to
suffocate the intrepid fellow; he called to his friends to draw him up,
but could not make them hear. They still lowered him, deeper and deeper.
Then he jerked his third cord as vigorously as he could; his friends
understood, and dragged him out of those icy jaws of death.

Then they attached a bottle to a cord and sent it down two hundred feet,
but it found no bottom. It came up covered with congelations--evidence
enough that even if the poor porter reached the bottom with unbroken
bones, a swift death from cold was sure, anyway.

A glacier is a stupendous, ever-progressing, resistless plow. It pushes
ahead of it masses of boulders which are packed together, and they
stretch across the gorge, right in front of it, like a long grave or a
long, sharp roof. This is called a moraine. It also shoves out a moraine
along each side of its course.

Imposing as the modern glaciers are, they are not so huge as were some
that once existed. For instance, Mr. Whymper says:

"At some very remote period the Valley of Aosta was occupied by a vast
glacier, which flowed down its entire length from Mont Blanc to the
plain of Piedmont, remained stationary, or nearly so, at its mouth
for many centuries, and deposited there enormous masses of debris. The
length of this glacier exceeded EIGHTY MILES, and it drained a basin
twenty-five to thirty-five miles across, bounded by the highest
mountains in the Alps.

"The great peaks rose several thousand feet above the glaciers, and
then, as now, shattered by sun and frost, poured