452 PRĆTERITA-II

beginning to recognize what James Forbes had proved of glacier flow:-

“The most magnificent piece of ruin I have yet seen in the Alps is that opposite the embouchure of the lower glacier of the Val de Ferret, near Courmayeur; the pines are small indeed, but they are hurled hither and thither, twisted and mingled in all conditions of form, and all phases of expiring life, with the chaos of massy rocks, which the glacier has gnashed down, or the opposite mountain hurled. And yet, farther on, at the head of the valley, there is another, in its way as wonderful; less picturesque, but wilder still,-the remains of the éboulement of the Glacier de Triolet caused by the fall of an aiguille near the Petits Jorasses-the most phrenzied accumulation of moraines I have ever seen; not dropped one by one into a heap, and pushed forward by the ice ploughshare, but evidently borne down by some mingled torrent of ice and rock and flood, with the swiftness of water and the weight of stone, and thrown along the mountain-side like pebbles from a stormy sea;-but the ruins of an Alp instead of the powder of a flint bed. The glacier torrent of Triolet is almost lost among them, but that below, coming just from the base of the Jorasses, is exquisite beyond description in the play of its currents, narrow eddies of white névé round islands of rock-falling in upon each other in deep and eddying pools; flowing forth again in massy sheets of ice, feeding, not one glacier stream, but cascade above cascade, far into the mountain gulph.”

And so on, of divers matters, through four hundred and fifty pages; not all as good as that, but the core of what I had to learn and teach about gneiss and ice and clouds;-George indefatigably carrying his little daguerreo-type box up everywhere, and taking the first image of the Matterhorn, as also of the aiguilles of Chamouni, ever

[Version 0.04: March 2008]