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THE COL DU GÉANT.

THE necessity which De Saussure was under, of returning from Mont Blanc before night set in, rendered the downward passage difficult and hazardous, and prevented his making all the scientific observations which he meditated. Four hours and a half were barely sufficient for repose and refreshment. In the ensuing spring, however, he was enabled to repair his enforced omissions at a less elevated but much more convenient site, the Col du Géant, which, being 12,000 feet and upwards above the sea-level, is sufficiently aerial for a physical laboratory.

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The grand scene which is beheld from the Col du Géant seems to have impressed the early scientific adventurer, as it has done many others since. "No words," says De Saussure, " can describe, nor pencil sketch, the immense panorama which is disclosed from this point of the Alps. Ten thousand feet below my stand-point were the Val Ferret, Courmayeur, and l'Allée Blanche, with their glaciers, their lakes and torrents. Beyond, the eye, as far as it could reach, was dazzled by an admirable labyrinth of cliffs and valleys. Right before me rose the Cramont and the Arquille de Chavannes, the inaccessible pyramid of Mont Cervin, called by the Germans and English the Matterhorn, the Hérins, and the colossal mass of Monte Rosa, whose lofty crest is only 700 feet below that of Mont Blanc. Then, rising with the regularity of the steps of a ladder, one behind the other, were

its sudden lulls, succeeded by the most perfect calm. In these intervals of its fury we could plainly hear it roaring below us in the depths of the Allée Blanche, while in our immediate vicinity every thing was perfectly quiet. But the calm was always followed by squalls of indescribable violence, more resembling successive discharges of artillery than any thing else. At night we felt the mountain quivering under our very beds; the wind pierced the crevices of the stone cabin, and, twice blowing all the covering off my bed, froze me from head to foot. It calmed a little towards break of day on the 5th, only to rise again accompanied by a heavy fall of snow, which penetrated every part of our miserable abode. We took refuge in one of our little tents, and here we found the guides manfully holding the tent-poles in their positions lest the force of the wind should dislodge them, and sweep us away with the tent.

"Towards seven in the morning the grandeur (and inconvenience) of the storm was augmented by a terrible hail shower and uninterrupted thunder-claps. A thunderbolt fell so close to us that we could distinctly hear one of its fragments strike the roof of the tent, and even see the sparks which it emitted as it passed immediately behind the place occupied by my son.

"I verified in these heights another phenomenon, the frequency and dreadful noise of which can never be forgotten by those who have once witnessed it.

"The molten snows which are filtered continually through the interstices of the inclined strata of the cliffs,