522 Notes on Sport and Travel x 



But wonderfully beautiful as these plains were, 

 and strange and wild as they appeared to an English 

 eye, with a brilliant August sun pouring his whole 

 flood of light and warmth upon them, they were not 

 the great points of interest to us. Those mighty 

 ranges of cliff, rising tier above tier to our right, 

 fretted with a pure white lace-work of fresh-fallen 

 snow, with here and there vast beds of screes shot 

 from above, giving promise of gemsenkraiit, were the 

 bits we scanned with the greatest eagerness. We 

 had come for chamois, and, I am afraid, looked upon 

 the rest as of very secondary importance. 



We were advancing along the base of the lowest tier 

 of cliff, which had a sort of step of snow running along 

 it about half-way up for some half- a -mile, bounded 

 at one end by an immense mass of screes and 

 precipice, and at the other by a sudden turn of the 

 rock, when Joseph, suddenly dashing off his hat and 

 throwing himself prostrate behind a stone, dragged 

 me down beside him with a vice-like grasp that left 

 its mark on my arm for many a day after. Utterly 

 taken aback at the suddenness of my prostration, I 

 lay beside him, wondering at the change that had 

 come over his face ; he was as white as marble, his 

 moustache worked with intense excitement, and his 

 eyeballs seemed starting from their sockets as he 

 glared at the cliff. Following his line of sight I 

 glanced upwards, and my eye was instantly arrested 

 by something. It moved — again— and again! 

 With shaking hand I directed the telescope to the 



