VII. MACUGNAGA 365

moorlands. There was a little inn, of which the upper floor was just enough for the landlord, Couttet, George and me;¹-once, during a month’s stay, I remember seeing two British persons with knapsacks at the bottom of the stairs, who must also have slept in the house, I suppose. My own room was about seven feet wide by ten long; one window, two-feet-six square, at the side, looked straight into the green bank at the bottom of the Monte Moro, and another, at the end, looked into vacant sky down the valley. A clear dashing stream, not ice fed, but mere fountain and rainfall from the Moro, ran past the house just under the side window, and was the chief cause of my stay, and consolation of it. The group of chalets round had no inhabitants, that ever I saw:-the little chapel had a belfry, but I never remember hearing its bell, or seeing anybody go in or come out of it. I don’t think even the goats had bells, so quiet the place was. The Monte Rosa glacier, a mile higher up, merely choked the valley; it seemed to come from nowhere and to be going nowhere; it had no pinnacles, no waves, no crevasses with action or method of fracture in them; no icefalls at the top, nor arched source of stream at the bottom; the sweep of rock above showed neither bedding nor buttressing of the least interest, and gave no impression of having any particular top, while yet the whole circuit of it was, to such poor climbing powers as mine, totally inaccessible, and even unapproachable, but with more trouble than it was worth.

133. Thus much I made out the first day after arriving, but thought there must be something to see somewhere, if I looked properly about; also, I had made solemn vows and complex postal arrangements for a month under Monte Rosa, and I stayed my month accordingly, with variously humiliating and disagreeably surprising results.

The first, namely, that mountain air at this height,

¹ [For a letter written by Ruskin in 1845 from this “deal cabin,” see Vol. I. p. 498. J. D. Forbes stayed there, and describes the inn in his Travels, 1843, p. 343; and its history is told in Coolidge’s Swiss Travel and Swiss Guide-books, p. 233.]

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