Pretty Soon We Came To A Tremendous Ravine, As If An
Earthquake Had Rent A Mountain Asunder.
A hundred feet down in this
black gorge, a stream was roaring in a succession of mad leaps, and a
bridge crossed it, where we stood to gaze down into its dark, awful
depths.
Then on we went till we came to the glacier. What a mass of
clear, blue ice! so very blue, so clear! This awful chasm runs
directly under it, and the mountain torrent, formed by the melting of
the glacier, falls in a roaring cascade into it. You can go down into
a cavern in this rift. Above your head a roof of clear, blue ice;
below your feet this black chasm, with the white, flashing foam of the
cascade, as it leaps away into the darkness. On one side of the
glacier was a little sort of cell, or arched nook, up which an old man
had cut steps, and he helped me up into it. I stood in a little Gothic
shrine of blue, glittering ice, and looked out of an arched window at
the cascade and mountains. I thought of Coleridge's line -
"A pleasure bower with domes of ice."
[Illustration: _of a glacier's terminus, with animals and small
buildings in the foreground._]
On the whole, the glacier of Rosenlaui paid for looking - even at
dinner time - which is saying a good deal.
JOURNAL - (CONTINUED.)
FRIDAY, July 22, Grindelwald to Meyringen. On we came, to the top of
the Great Schiedich, where H. and W. botanized, while I slept.
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