After A Thousand Feet Of This I Came To The Top Of The Grimsel, But Not Before I Had Passed A Place Where An Avalanche Had Destroyed The Road And Where Planks Were Laid.

Also before one got to the very summit, no short cuts or climbing were possible.

The road ran deep in a cutting like a Devonshire lane. Only here the high banks were solid snow.

Some little way past the summit, on the first zig-zag down, I passed the Lake of the Dead in its mournful hollow. The mist still enveloped all the ridge-side, and moved like a press of spirits over the frozen water, then - as suddenly as on the much lower Brienzer Grat, and (as on the Brienzer Grat) to the southward and the sun, the clouds lifted and wreathed up backward and were gone, and where there had just been fulness was only an immensity of empty air and a sudden sight of clear hills beyond and of little strange distant things thousands and thousands of feet below.

LECTOR. Pray are we to have any more of that fine writing?

AUCTOR. I saw there as in a cup things that I had thought (when I first studied the map at home) far too spacious and spread apart to go into the view. Yet here they were all quite contained and close together, on so vast a scale was the whole place conceived. It was the comb of mountains of which I have written; the meeting of all the valleys.

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