164 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



Central Alps. There were no accurate maps to serve as bases, 

 and the task therefore was one of great difficulty and labour. 

 M. Pfyffer is said, while engaged on it, to have camped out and 

 lived on the milk of goats he took with him . He often, de Saussure 

 tells us, risked being attacked by peasants, suspicious, like all 

 primitive people, that any survey meant interference with their 

 property or their rights. His relief, if technically inexact, 

 must have had considerable merits, since de Saussure goes so far 

 as to say that its inspection gave him pleasure comparable to 

 that he had enjoyed from the panoramas of the Crammont and 

 Mont Blanc. 



At a later date (1791) de Saussure travelled to Aarau to 

 inspect another work of the same kind due to the enterprise of 

 M. Meyer, a ribbon manufacturer of that town. It occurred 

 to this enterprising tradesman to produce ribbons on which 

 should be woven the forms of the mountains of his native land. 

 For this purpose he had models made of some parts of the snowy 

 range. Their success encouraged him to attempt to represent 

 ' all the mountains of Switzerland.' He found in M. Weiss 

 a geographer capable of undertaking the task, and de Saussure 

 in his last volume (published 1796) expresses a hope that a model, 

 some 15 feet by 8 feet, of the Alps from the Lake of Constance 

 to Mont Blanc would be completed shortly. It was from M. 

 Pfyffer and M. Weiss that de Saussure first heard the report 

 that the Schreckhorn was possibly higher than Mont Blanc. 



In 1784 de Saussure returned to the scene of his early scrambles, 

 the base of the Chamonix Aiguilles, spending three nights in a 

 chalet at the Plan de 1' Aiguille in order to explore more fully 

 their cliffs and glaciers. In so doing he met with what seems to 

 have been his nearest approach to a mountaineering accident. 

 His description of it is a good example of direct and simple 

 narrative, stripped of emotion, but not of humour. 



De Saussure, accompanied by his favourite, Pierre Balmat, and 

 another guide, had been geologising at the base of the Aiguille 

 du Midi. It was nearly 2 P.M. when they turned, apparently un- 

 roped, to descend the glacier, the surface of which was covered 

 with snow, now softened by the midday sunshine. 



' Suddenly the snow gave way under both my feet at once ; the right, 

 which was behind, rested on nothing, but the left had still some support, 



