OLD ALPINE JOTTINGS. 450 



making, it is true, pleasant excursions with pleasant 

 friends, but these merely spanned the brief intervals 

 which separated one rain-gush or thunder^orm from 

 another. Bound by an engagement to my friend Pro- 

 fessor De la Eive, of Gnmeva, where the Swiss savants 

 had their annual assembly in 1865, I was forced to 

 leave Zermatt. My notion had been to climb to the 

 point where the men slipped, and to fix there suitable 

 irons in the recks. By means of ropes attached to these 

 I proposed to scour the mountain along the line of the 

 glissade. There were peculiarities of detail which need 

 not now be dwelt upon, inasmuch as the weather ren- 

 dered them all futile. 



In the summer of 1866 I first went to Engsteln, 

 one of the most charming spots in the Alps. It had 

 at that time a double charm, for the handsome young 

 widow who kept the inn supplemented by her kind- 

 ness and attention within doors the pleasures of the 

 outer world. A man named Maurer, of Meyringen, 

 was my guide for a time. We climbed the Titli?, 

 going straight up it from the Joch pass, in the track 

 of a scampering chamois which showed us the way. 

 The Titlis is a very noble mass — one of the few which, 

 while moderate in height, bear a lordly weight of snow. 

 The view from the summit is exceedingly fine, and on 

 it I repeated with a hand spectroscope the observations 

 of M. Janssen on the absorption-bands of aqueous 

 vapour. On the day after this ascent I quitted Eng- 

 steln, being drawn towards the Wellborn and Wetter- 

 horn, both of which as seen from Engsteln came out 

 nobly. The upper dome of heaven was of the deepest 

 blue, while only the faintest lightening of the colour 

 towards the horizon indicated the augmented turbidity 

 of the atmosphere in that direction. The sun was 



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