18 SCRAMBLES AMONGST THE ALPS.

seemed to me then to be hopelessly inaccessible from thisdirection.

I descended the valley to the village of Stalden, and thenwent up the Visp Thai to Zermatt , and stopped there severaldays. Numerous traces of the formidable earthquake-shocksof five years before still remained ; particularly at St. Nicholas,where the inhabitants had been terrified beyond measure atthe destruction of their churches and houses. At this place,as well as at Visp, a large part of the population was obligedto live under canvas for several months. It is remarkablethat there was hardly a life lost on this occasion, althoughthere were about fifty shocks, some of which were verysevere.

At Zermatt I wandered in many directions, but theweather was bad, and my work was much retarded. Oneday, after spending a long time in attempts to sketch nearthe Hornli, and in futile endeavours to seize the forms ofthe peaks as they peered out for a few seconds above thedense banks of woolly clouds, I determined not to returnto Zermatt by the usual path, and to cross the Gorner Glacier to the Riflfel hotel. After a rapid scramble overthe polished rocks and snow-beds which skirt the base ofthe Th^odule Glacier, and wading through some of thestreams which flow from it (at that time much swollen bythe late rains), the first difficulty was arrived at, in the shapeof a precipice about three hundred feet high. It seemedthat it would be easy enough to cross the glacier if the cliffcould be descended; though higher up, and lower down,the ice appeared, to my inexperienced eyes, to be impassablefor a single person. The general contour of the cliff wasnearly perpendicular, but it was a good deal broken up,and there was little difficulty in descending by zigzaggingfrom one mass to another. At length there was a long slab,nearly smooth, fixed at an angle of about forty degreesbetween two wall-sided pieces of rock. Nothing except