was hard and glossy, not flecked with a spot of snow, and blue as the 'brave o'erhanging' of the cloudless firmament. They seemed the battlements of an enchanted fortress, framed to defy the curiosity of man, and to laugh to scorn his audacious efforts. A brief parley ensued. Lauener had chosen his course well, and had worked up to the most accessible point along the whole line, where a break in the series of icicles allowed him to approach close to the icy parapet, and where the projecting crust was narrowest and weakest. It was resolved to cut boldly into the ice, and endeavour to hew deep enough to get a sloping passage on to the dome beyond. He stood close, not facing the parapet, but turned half round, and struck out as far away from himself as he could. A few strokes of his powerful arm brought down the projecting crest, which, after rolling a few feet, fell headlong over the brink of the arête, and was out of sight in an instant. We all looked on in breathless anxiety; for it depended upon the success of this assault whether that impregnable fortress was to be ours, or whether we were to return, slowly and sadly, foiled by its calm and massive strength. THE FIRST ASCENT OF THE WETTERHORN. PART III.-VICTORY. SUDDENLY a startling cry of surprise and triumph rang through the air. A great block of ice bounded from the top of the parapet, and before it had well lighted on the glacier, Lauener exclaimed, 'I see blue sky!' A thrill of astonishment and delight ran through our frames. Our enterprise had succeeded! We were almost upon the actual summit. That wave above us, frozen, as it seemed, in the act of falling over, with a strange and motionless magnificence, was the very peak itself! Lauener's blows flew with redoubled energy. In a few minutes a practicable breach was made, through which he disappeared; and in a moment more, the sound of his axe was heard behind the battlement under whose cover we stood. In his excitement, he had forgotten us, and very soon the whole mass would have come crashing upon our heads. A loud shout of warning from Sampson, who now occupied the gap, was echoed by five other eager voices, and he turned his energies in a safer direction. It was not long before Lauener and Sampson together had widened the opening; and then, at length, we crept slowly on. As I took the last step, Balmat disappeared from my sight; my left shoulder grazed the angle of the icy embrasure, while, on the right, the glacier fell abruptly away beneath me, towards an unknown and awful abyss; a hand from an invisible person grasped mine; I stepped across, and had passed the ridge of the Wetterhorn! The instant before I had been face to face with a blank wall of ice. One step and the eye took in a boundless expanse of crag and glacier, peak and precipice, mountain and valley, lake and plain. The whole world seemed to be at my feet. The next moment I was almost appalled by the awfulness of our position. The side we had come up was steep; but it was a gentle slope, compared with that which now fell away from where I stood. A few yards of glittering ice at our feet, and then, nothing between us and the green slopes of Grindelwald, nine thousand feet beneath. I am not ashamed to own that I experienced, as this sublime and wonderful prospect burst upon my view, a profound and almost irrepressible emotion-an emotion which, if I may judge by the low ejaculations of surprise, followed by a long pause of breathless silence, as each in turn stepped into the opening, was felt by others as well as by myself. Balmat told me repeatedly afterwards, that it was the most awful and startling moment he had known in the course of his long mountain experience. We felt as in the more immediate presence of Him who had reared this tremendous pinnacle, and beneath the 'majestical roof' of whose deep blue heaven we stood, poised, as it seemed, half way between the earth and sky. In a few minutes, Lauener and Sampson had cut away a length of about ten feet of the overhanging cornice, and we hastened, for the sake of security, to place ourselves astride on the ridge that was exposed. It was a saddle, or more properly, a kind of knife-edge of ice; for I never sat on so narrow-backed a horse. We worked ourselves along this ridge, seated ourselves in a long row upon it, and untied the ropes. After a few minutes, when we had become accustomed to the situation, I ventured to stand upright on that narrow edge-not five inches wide-and then, at length, I became fully aware of the extent and magnificence of the panorama. To the east and south lay a boundless sea of mighty peaks, stretching from the great Ortler Spitz, and his giant companions of the Tyrol, in the solemn distance, past the five groups of the Monte Leone, the many summits of Monte Rosa, and the sharp peak of the Weisshorn, towards the western extremity of the Pennine chain. Mont Blanc was hidden behind the mountains of the Oberland, whose stupendous masses looked but a stone's-throw from us. Between us and the far-off snows of the Ortler Spitz, lay group behind of the mountains of the Grisons and of Uri, green at group the base, dark and craggy above, and capped by broken patches of glacier and snow, intersected by numerous deep and narrow valleys, at the foot of which tortuous mountain torrents and glacier streams glittered like silver threads. The long range stretching back from the Wetterhorn towards the Grimsel seemed, from this point of view, to join on with the clustered peaks beyond the valley of the Rhone. In this direction we gazed upon an icy sea, in which scarcely one islet of rock was perceptible. The summit nearest to us was the Mittelhorn, seen edgeways, rising majestically, in a kind of half-dome, from the plateau, and connected with us by the arête, along whose precipitous brink we had won our hard-fought way. Immediately beneath this arête lay a fearful abyss, terminating in the upper basin of the glacier of Rosenlaui, which was broken and rifted into a chaos of dazzling white crevasses. The immediate group of the Oberland presented a scene of indescribable sublimity. The Shreckhorn was the nearest of these mountains, a massive pyramid of gneiss, checkered with patches of snow and glacier, which clung to the ledges and lay amongst the recesses of its precipitous sides. Between the Shreckhorn and the Eiger was seen a magnificent amphitheatre of glacier and precipice—one of the finest in the Alps; then came the wedge-like form of the Eiger, rising in a thin slice a thousand feet above the height on which we stood. This mountain, too steep to allow more than a thin and broken coating of snow to rest upon its northern side, presents, from this point of view, a peculiarly majestic and imposing appearance. It appears to raise itself directly from the valley south of the Wengern Alp, and to shoot upward, almost in one unbroken and uniform plane, from the base to the summit. Turning towards the north, we were greeted by a scene of pleasing contrast to this majestic, but desolate, spectacle. Far as the eye could reach or the mind could grasp, lay a vast expanse of verdure-covered mountains and fertile plains. A soft, rich green was the pervading colour of the landscape, and peace and plenty the pervading ideas which it suggested. The heights above the valley of Lauterbrunnen, escarped here and there with snow, lay next to the mighty barrier of ice and crag, which seemed to say 'Here shalt thou cease' to the wave of life and fertility that was borne upwards towards it on gradually increasing heights from the great plain of Switzerland. Conspicuous in the north-west were the wellknown and characteristic forms of the Niesen and Stockhorn ; then came the plain of Switzerland, bounded by the distant Jura, the lake of Thun, peacefully nestled beneath a chain of mountain ramparts, the fir-clad group above the Brünig, the lakes of Lungern, Sarnen, Lucerne, Zug, and Zürich forming a chain of dark blue islands in that mighty ocean of green. The Righi was with some difficulty distinguished, amidst a multitude of summits of nearly equal altitude; to the east of which, the mountains rise again, and snow-capped peaks in distant Schwyz and Glarus mark the approach, in this direction, to the vast domains where frost and ice hold sway. I was very much struck with the nearer prospect eastward, where it was curious to look down into valley after valley, and follow them as on a map. We were so high that we could trace in this manner the course of pass after pass in several directions from the foot of the ascent to the crest or col of the passage; many of them wound through valleys, both sides of which we could see from top to bottom. I never from any other point got so good an idea of the grouping of mountains, and of the manner in which the passes lie amongst them. After all, however, the most interesting and striking part of the view lay nearer to us. It was impossible long to turn the eye from the fearful slope at the top of which we stood. For twenty or thirty yards below us, the glacier curved away steeper and steeper, until its rounded form limited our view, and prevented us seeing what shape it took beneath. Nothing else broke the terrific void, and the next objects on which the eye rested were the green pastures of the Scheideck, nearly two miles of absolute depth below us. This was the prospect that had startled us so much when we mounted the breach in the cornice, and made our hearts beat quicker with a solemn and strange emotion. The imagination shrank from contemplating the abyss, and picturing to itself the fearful precipices which must be beneath, to raise us to that dizzy height. ALFRED WILLS. THE CASTLED CRAG OF DRACHENFELS. THE castled crag of Drachenfels Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine, Whose breast of waters broadly swells E |