TEN YEARS' ALPINE TRAVEL (1774-84) 169 



quartz, etc., none of which approached what I collected on the Glacier 

 de Mi age. 



' What gave me most pleasure was that, as we advanced on the ice, 

 I began to see behind the Mettenberg a very lofty peak, and it entered 

 my mind that it might be the so -much -sought Schreckhorn. I asked 

 my guide its name, but he could not understand. He thought I was 

 talking all the time of the Mettenberg. He told long stories of sheep 

 lost on the mountains, of shepherds overwhelmed by avalanches ; he 

 exhausted my patience, until at last, as the peak gradually revealed 

 itself, he saw what I wanted him to see, and said as if I ought to have 

 known, " That is the Schreckhorn." 



' I walked on gaily and as quickly as I could in order to have 

 plenty of time to examine it before the clouds, which I saw gathering 

 behind us on the side of the plains, came up and covered it. Despite 

 my efforts, it took us an hour to cross the glacier, and a quarter of an 

 hour more to the wretched hut of the shepherd, which was opposite 

 the peak and almost as near as it was possible to get. 



' Picture to yourself one of the faces of an immense pyramid, of 

 which the top, though more than a league distant, rises 33 degrees 

 above the horizon, and of which the edges fall one to the north-west, 

 reposing on the top of the Mettenberg, itself from the valley of 

 Grindelwald of a prodigious height, another still sharper, on the, 

 south-west, falling towards the Bierselberg and Fiescherberg ridges. 

 These ridges are broken. . . . The summit is not sharp, but blunt, 

 and the face opposite us a precipice of a thousand to fifteen hundred 

 feet. Through glasses the stratification appeared to me to be vertical. 



' After having noted what seemed to me most interesting in this 

 noble mountain, I turned to study the other heights by which I was 

 surrounded. The rock called the Zasenberg, on which I stood, was 

 like an island between two great glaciers. Its base is clothed with 

 pasture which feeds sheep and goats. Behind it and above it rises the 

 Fiescherberg. Its summit is nearly horizontal, a little concave on one 

 side, and covered with snow which juts out like the eaves of a roof.' 



De Saussure's return to the valley was hastened by a sign of 

 bad weather he was quick to interpret a light cloud that, as it 

 passed across the sun, assumed rainbow hues. He got back just 

 in time to escape a violent storm. 1 



1 This incident is recorded in his volume, Essais sur V Hygrom&lre, 1783, p. 359. 

 De Saussure further notes in the same connection the beautiful effects caused at 

 sunset (or sunrise) by a wind from behind a mountain, itself in shadow, blowing 

 off it a cloud of frozen snow which crowns the summit ridges with a bright red 

 halo. This is most often seen in winter. 



