28 GLETSGH 



beauty by the plunge downwards of the rocky gorge made 

 by the Rhone as it leaves the flat-bottomed amphitheatre of 

 its birth. The top of the Grimsel Pass, which is a little 

 over 7000 ft. above sea-level, is the most desolate and 

 bare of all such mountain passes. The rock is dark grey, 

 almost black, and of an unusually hard character. It is 

 unstratified, and so resistant that it is everywhere worn 

 into smooth, rounded surfaces, instead of being splintered 

 and shattered. >- A small, black-looking lake at the top of 

 the pass contains to this day the bones of 500 Austrians 

 and French who fought here in 1799. It is called the 

 Totensee, or Dead Men's Lake. At this point one stands 

 on a great watershed, dividing the rivers of the north 

 from the rivers of the south. You may put one foot in a 

 rivulet which is carrying water down the Aar Valley, and 

 through the Lakes of Brienz and of Thun to the Rhine 

 and North Sea, whilst you keep the other in another 

 little stream, whose particles will pass by the Rhone gorge 

 and valley through the Lake of Geneva to the great Rhone 

 and the Mediterranean. Three incomparably fine days 

 — September 17th, i8th, and 19th — atoned for three 

 weeks of sunless cloud. One of them we spent in the 

 high valley of Rosenlaui, where are hairy-lipped gentians 

 and the blue-iced glacier, but of these I have not space 

 to tell. Then the clouds and the rain resumed their 

 odious domination, and we left Lucerne and its lakes 

 invisible, overwhelmed in grey fog, and made for Paris. 

 Ocioter, 191a 



