LIFE IN THE ALPS. 325 



as natural bridges, render the crossing of the torrent 

 easy from side to side. Sooner or later these torrents 

 plunge with a thunderous sound into clefts or shafts, 

 the latter bearing the name of moulins or mills, and 

 thus reach the bottom of the glacier. Here the river 

 produced by the melting of the surface-ice rushes on 

 unseen, coming to the light of day as the Rhone, or 

 the Massa, or the Visp, or the Rhine, at the end of the 

 glacier. 



A small dark-coloured stone sinks into the ice, while 

 a large stone protects the ice beneath it. Through the 

 small stone the heat readily passes by conduction to 

 its lower surface and melts the ice underneath; while 

 the barrier offered by the large stone to the passage of 

 the heat cannot be overcome. Round the large stone, 

 therefore, the exposed ice melts away, leaving the 

 rock supported upon a stalk or pillar of protected ice. 

 Slabs of granite, having a surface of one hundred 

 or two hundred square feet, are to be found at this 

 moment poised upon pillars of ice on the Ober Aletsch 

 glacier. Some of them are nearly horizontal. They 

 are called " tables," and right royal tables they are for 

 those privileged to feast upon them. Sand strewn upon 

 the glacier by the streams also protects the ice. The 

 protected parts, being left behind, like the "tables," 

 form what are called the " sand cones " of the glacier. 

 On the adjacent glacier there are cones from ten to 

 twenty feet in height, and they sometimes reach an 

 even greater elevation. On first seeing them, you 

 would imagine them to be heaps of pure sand. But a 

 stroke of the ice-axe shows the sand to be merely the 

 superficial covering of a cone of specially hard ice. 

 The medial moraine, which stretches like a great flexile 

 serpent along the centre of the glacier now below me, 



