EETIEWS. 



77 



tliat no influence of weather on these towers of rock can ever have so 

 modelled and gnawed them down. . . . 



" Most of what is called granite in the central Alps is granitic gneiss, 

 called in the people's language ' Gaisberger,' because the highest moun- 

 tains climbed by the goats {G-aisen) are formed of it. It is the substance 

 from which the atmospheric influences carve those strange towers of rock 

 and picturesque ornaments, which in Chamouny are significantly called 

 Aiguilles, from their sharp points. From this so-called ' primeval mate- 

 terial ' are formed the wondrous spikes of stone which ornament the sum- 

 mits of different mountains, or strike up here and there like outposts 

 through the far-stretching wastes of neve. We should see many more of 

 these slender rock ' needles ' if many of them were not engulfed in the 

 perpetual snow. Here the Achilles-heel of the apparently indestructible 

 ' urgestein ' betrays itself. Gneiss is, as already stated, of stratified 

 tabular structure. In the elevation of the A.lps, the strata of gneiss were 

 raised, and often placed vertically on the edges of the fracture, as the im- 

 mediate envelope of the granite. The mass must have been of various 

 hardness at different places. At any rate, whilst particular parts have 

 withstood the action of the weather without injury, others have been over- 

 tlirown, gnawed into, and destroyed by the atmosphere to such an extent 

 as quite to have disappeared, and left only isolated points behind. Ex- 

 amples on a large scale are the. Aiguille Verte, the Aiguille du Moine, the 

 strangely shattered Aiguilles de Charmoz, the Aiguilles Houges, all the 

 mountains on both sides of the Valley of Chamouny, the Schreckliorner, 

 and Grindelwald Yiesclierhorner in the Bernese Alps, the whole southern 

 wall of the Bergell in the Grisons, etc., etc. 



" But a different kind of atmospheric action attracts our attention in the 

 Alps, and that in the most singular manner, and in places where the ex- 

 planation is not at once obvious. This appears in the so-called ' Devil's 

 Mills ' or ' Seas of Hock ' on the highest points of many isolated moun- 

 tains. The Sidelhorn, close to the Grimsel, is one of the most visited 

 points of view in the Bernese Alps. It is easily reached from the Hospice 

 in two or two and a half hours. The nearer one approaches to the sum- 

 mit, the more do the vast rock ruins accumulate, piled wondrously over 

 each other, till at length the highest point is covered with a perfect chaos 

 of such loosely massed granitic blocks of gneiss. At times a certain dis- 

 turbed stratification may be observed, something like plates laid upon 

 each other : then again, in other places, a tolerably regular step-like forma- 

 tion, but in general they lie without recognizable order. This phenomenon, 

 which frequently occurs on summits, is the result of a weathering of the 

 granite, but of that kind in which more or less the scaly structure was 

 once predominant. The brothers Schlagintweit represent in their atlas* 

 such disorganized scales of gneiss. As the fanciful Jean Paul employs 

 the beautiful picture ' graves are the mountain-tops of a far new world,' 

 here in reality the mountain tops are graves of a past world. The grandest 

 and most imposing masses of granitic rock are only to be found in the 

 central Alps. There they often tower in such fearful sublimity, like ver- 

 tical walls of rock palaces above the deep valley-hollows, that one is 

 startled at their greatness. He who has never seen the dusky pyramid 

 of the rinster Aarhorn from the ' Abschwung ' on the Aar Glacier, as it 

 rises in naked sublimity from the snow-beds to the clouds ; he who has 

 not journeyed round the south-east of Mont Blanc, and seen its central mass 

 from the Cramont or the giant rocky brows of the Grand Cornier, Dent 

 Blanche, and Weisshorn, from the depths of the Einfischthal, will hardly 



* To the ' Neue Untersuchungen iiber die Physicahsche Geograpliie und Geologieder 

 Alpen.' 



