Better things were prepared for me than I knew;
indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and
held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of
darkness and storm.
I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and
softened snow, and said to the guide, "To-morrow I start for the
Matterhorn." To do this we go down the three hundred stories to
Zermatt.
Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree
profitable. Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination,
has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed.
THE MATTERHORN
The Matterhorn is peculiar. I do not know of another mountain like it
on the earth. There are such splintered and precipitous spires on the
moon. How it came to be such I treated of fully in _Sights and
Insights_. It is approximately a three-sided mountain, fourteen
thousand seven hundred and eighteen feet high, whose sides are so steep
as to be unassailable. Approach can be made only along the angle at
the junction of the planes.
[Illustration: The Matterhorn.]
It was long supposed to be inaccessible. Assault after assault was
made on it by the best and most ambitious Alp climbers, but it kept its
virgin height untrodden. However, in 1864, seven men, almost
unexpectedly, achieved the victory; but in descending four of them were
precipitated, down an almost perpendicular declivity, four thousand
feet.
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