CLOUDS AND RIVERS, ICE AND GLACIERS. 7 



Follow this upwards ; you find it joined by smaller 

 rivers from, the mountains right and left. Pass these, 

 and push your journey higher still. You come at length 

 to a huge mass of ice — the end of a glacier — which fills 

 the Ehone valley, and from the bottom of the glacier 

 the river rushes. In the glacier of the Ehone you thus 

 find the source of the river Rhone. 



18. But again we have not reached the real begin- 

 ning of the river. You soon convince yourself that this 

 earliest water of the Ehone is produced by the melting 

 of the ice. You get upon the glacier and walk upwards 

 along it. After a time the ice disappears and you comp 

 upon snow. If you are a competent mountaineer you 

 may go to the very top of this great snow-field, and if 

 you cross the top and descend at the other side you 

 finally quit the snow, and get upon another glacier 

 called the Trift, from the end of which rushes a rive*" 

 smaller than the Ehone. 



19. You soon learn that the mountain snow feeds 

 the glacier. By some means or other the snow is con- 

 verted into ice. Bat whence comes the snow ? Like 

 the rain, it comes from the clouds, which, as before, 

 can be traced to vapour raised by the sun. Without 

 solar fire we could have no atmospheric vapour, without 

 vapour no clouds, without clouds no snow, a.nd without 

 snow no glaciers. Curious then as the conclusion may 

 be, the cold ice of the Alps has its origin in the heat oi 

 the sun. 



