We lingered long in this wonderful spot. A batch of morning tourists came and gazed around for ten minutes, and was succeeded by another and another, but as the day wore on they grew few and far between, and we were at length left entirely alone, wrapped in that intense and awful stillness which at times pervades these mighty solitudes, broken only at long intervals by the sudden rush of an avalanche on the steep slopes of Monte Rosa or the low hum of a wild bee, attracted to this far height by the fervid noonday beams. We wandered along the ridge stretching towards the Stockhorn, where the gentian and other exquisite wild flowers which flourish at this elevation grow in the greatest profusion, peering up through patches of snow in shady nooks. Then we returned, and found new beauties in the panorama, which in the fierce sunlight became almost too dazzling for the eye to rest on. At last we turned away reluctantly, with another recollection for a lifetime,--another "joy forever" stored within the cells of memory....
A few days later we resolved on a closer acquaintance with the mountain which had attracted our admiration from so many points of view in the neighborhood. The Matterhorn seems to dominate the whole district of Zermatt like a pervading spirit. It is difficult to lose sight of it. Through rifts in the pine-wood, over grassy bluffs, from the depths of dark ravines, from one's chamber window, the giant peak is seen piercing the blue air above. The play of light and shadow upon it as the hours roll by is in itself a study. Facing the earliest beams, as the sun rises out of a tossing ocean of Alpine peaks, it stands proudly up, a pinnacle of burnished gold with scarce a speck of shade to dim its lustre. As noon approaches, the gloom gathers on the precipitous northern face until the mid-day shadow falls with a cool blue-black on the white upper snows of the Matterhorn glacier. By and by, when the sun has passed to the west, the great shadowy mass rises in gloomy grandeur against the evening sky, and still later the northwest ridges are fringed with the lustre of sunset, ere they wrap themselves in the dusky robe of night.
[The Matterhorn, one of the most difficult of the Alps to ascend, defied the efforts of mountaineers until 1865, when Whymper, with three companions and three guides, reached its summit. The victory, however, was a tragic one, as the three companions and one of the guides fell down a precipice and met their death. Whymper had made various earlier efforts to ascend. We give his story of one such effort, made at an earlier date.]