416 THE HUNTING GROUNDS 



continual cracking, creaking, and heaving, made us 

 feel nervous lest it might open directly under our 

 feet and engulf us, which seemed very possible, 

 as we twice saw the ice sink, give way, and tear 

 asunder, forming fearful yawning chasms of un- 

 known depths. 



After several hours' continued exertion we got to 

 an altitude high above the head of the glacier, and 

 the aspect of the scenery became entirely changed ; 

 deep snow lay in all the gorges and ravines, and no 

 vegetation was seen except here and there a patch 

 of gentian or a few flowers of such intensely-bril- 

 liant blue that they seemed to reflect the colour of 

 the sky overhead. The slope of the ridge up which 

 we made our way was furrowed with deep fissures 

 and gullies, presenting a stern and monotonous ap- 

 pearance, and here and there covered with huge, 

 shapeless boulders of detached granite, piled one 

 upon another in wild confusion. A strange depres- 

 sing sense of desolation and dismal solitude reigned 

 in this wilderness of rocks and beetling crags : even 

 our voices seemed to re-echo with a strange un- 

 earthly sound. After a fatiguing climb up a nar- 

 row fissure in the mountain, filled with loose stones 

 and fragments of rock, that rolled from under the 

 feet at every step, we gained a grass-covered slope, 

 which, although steep, afforded great relief after our 

 fag up the bed of the watercourse. As we plodded 

 along we saw a troop of ibex scampering along a 

 craggy ridge many hundred feet below us, yet the 



