e was still
suffering from a fall which he had but recently met with while hunting.
Hans Jaun was the oldest of all and the least robust. His hair was
growing grey, his eyelids were rimmed with a blood-coloured border.
However, he presided over the gathering. I had closed the door, so that
no one should disturb our solemn conference. The guides appeared
meditative, and sought to read in my eyes if my firmness were real or
assumed.

"It was decided that we should take with us four porters loaded with
provisions, ladders, ropes, and pick-axes; that towards evening I should
start for Interlachen with Pierre and Jaun, and that the other guides
should await me at Grindelwald. Then we separated with the friendly
greeting, 'Au revoir.'

"Scarcely had the sun dropped below the horizon, streaked with long bars
of fire, when I took my solitary seat in an open carriage. Peter
occupied the box. We traversed the walnut-tree avenues of Interlachen
and its smiling gardens. We followed the banks of the pale Luetschina,
which bounds through the midst of abrupt rocks. Clouds accumulated on
the sky. Soon we heard the distant roar of thunder. We passed into the
presence of colossal mountains, whose rugged peaks rose like
inaccessible fortresses. On turning round, I could see nothing in the
direction of Interlachen but gloomy vaporous depths, impenetrable to the
eye. Nearer and nearer drew the thunder, filling space with its sonorous
voice. The wind whistled, the Luetschina rolled its groaning waters. The
spectacle was sublime. Night gathered in all around, and the vicinity
of Grindelwald I could make out only by the lights in the chalets
scattered upon the hill.

"I had scarcely entered beneath the hospitable roof of the hotel of the
Eagle, before the rain fell in torrents, like a waterspout. I elevated
my soul to God. At this moment the thunder burst, the avalanches
resounded among the mountains, and the echoes a thousand times repeated
the noise of their fall.

"The stars were paling in the firmament when I opened my window. Mists
clothed the horizon. The rushing wind soon tore them aside, and drove
them into the gorges, whence descend, in the shape of a fan, the
unformed masses of the lower glacier, soiled with a blackish dust.

"The storm of the preceding evening, those dense clouds which gave to
the Alps a more formidable aspect than ever, the well-meant
remonstrances of the herdsmen of the valley, all awakened in the heart
of