ta of 10,000 ft. to 20,000 ft. in thickness, which, if
straightened out, would give a flat area of that thickness, and of 200
miles in length, have been buckled and folded so as to occupy only a
length of 130 miles! The former tight-fitting skin of horizontal rock
layers has "had to" buckle to that extent here (and in the same way in
other mountain ranges in other parts of the world), because the whole
terrestrial sphere has shrunk, owing to the gradual cooling of the
mass, whilst the crust has not shrunk, not having lost heat.

Filled with interest and delight in these things, I reached the
railway station at Lauterbruennen, from whence the little train is
driven far up the mountain, even into the very heart of the Jungfrau,
by an electric current generated by a turbine, itself driven by the
torrent at our feet, the waters of which have descended from the
glaciers far above, to which it will carry us. In a few minutes I was
gently gliding in the train up the to the "Wengern Alp" and the
"Little Scheidegg"--a slope up which I have so often in former years
painfully struggled on foot for four hours or more. One could to-day
watch the whole scene, in ease and comfort, during the two hours'
ascent of the train. And a marvellous scene it is as one rises to the
height of 8,000 ft., skirting the glaciers which ooze down the rocky
sides of the Jungfrau, and mounting far above some of them. At the
Scheidegg I changed into a smaller train, and with some thirty
fellow-passengers was carried higher and higher by the faithful,
untiring electric current. After a quarter of an hour's progress we
paused high above the "snout" of the great Eiger glacier, and
descended by a short path on to it, examined the ice, its crevasses
and layers, and its "glacier-grains," and watched and heard an
avalanche. The last time I was here it took a couple of hours to reach
this spot from the Scheidegg, and probably neither I nor any of my
fellow-passengers could to-day endure the necessary fatigue of
reaching this spot on foot. Then we remounted the train, and on we
went into the solid rock of the huge Eiger. The train stops in the
rock tunnel and we got out to look, through an opening cut in its
side, down the sheer wall of the mountain on to the grassy meadows
thousands of feet below.

Then we start again, and on we are driven by the current generated
away down there in Lauterbruennen, through the spiral tunnel, mounting
a thousand feet more till w