A steep and difficult path leads down the mountain side to the source of the Aveiron. We could plainly distinguish the black arch of the ice cavern, which terminates the Mer de Glace, and through whose mouth it forces its way, and bounds forward to fling itself into the Arve. Passing the fountain and its gay troops of peasant girls assembled there with fruit, milk, and lemonade, very agreeable refreshment at that height, we crossed the track of an avalanche, a broad line of destruction; the firs snapped at the root and carried away, or laid prostrate beneath the weight of stones and portions of rock cast down from above, looking as if some giant scythe had mown an avenue through the pine forest from the mountain top high over our heads down to the valley far beneath.
From this place the way grows more rugged, and encumbered with larger blocks of stone, but the mules climbed gallantly; and at last, arrived at the summit, we stopped at the pavilion opposite the older refuge built by an Englishman, and called from him the Hôpital de Blair. The view would have repaid us for more fatigue. The Mer de Glace was directly beneath, and opposite, the pinnacled mountains which guard its shore. There seemed to me no resting-place for the foot of an eagle, yet Mounier said he had often slept out on them when hunting the chamois. The highest of the numberless pointed rocks which shoot upwards like white spires against the blue sky, is the Aiguille Verte, for it is about seven thousand feet above the summit of the Montanvert. The Mer de Glace itself is ill represented in all the engravings I have seen, for its waves do not resemble those of the sea suddenly frozen, while driven in the same direction by a tempest--they rather look as if they had been tossed by whirlwinds, and are of irregular forms and unequal height, their flat surfaces and pointed crests of the dull white of soiled snow; for it rejects to its surface all impurities, and only on looking down into its crevices are you aware of their pale, beautiful green--the purest and clearest in the world. You can form no idea of the size of these waves except by descending among them, the magnitude of all which surrounds them deceiving as to theirs, yet many exceed forty feet in height; and of the Mer de Glace, which is about eight leagues in length, two are from this spot visible.