It was even now utterly dark. The huge bulwark of the Breithorn rose opposite to us like a great shadow. Monte Rosa was very faintly lighted by the approach of dawn. The mighty pyramid of the solitary Matterhorn had yet no touch of red fire upon it. And presently one of the guides said "Look!" and looking at the Matterhorn we presently perceived that two parties were climbing it from the Zermatt side; we saw their lanterns moving with almost intolerable slowness. And far across the great ice river of the Gorner Glacier we saw other and nearer and brighter lanterns going from the Bétemps Hut on the Untere Plattje. One party was going for Monte Rosa, another for the Lyskamm Joch. We knew that they could see us too. But these little lantern lights upon the vast expanse of snow looked very strange and lonely and very human. We seemed small ourselves, we were like glow-worms, like wounded fire-flies crawling on a plain. And still we saw these little climbing lights upon the Matterhorn. One party was close to the lower hut, another was beginning to near the old hut, twelve thousand feet high. Then and all of a sudden the lights went out. There was a strange red glow upon the Matterhorn, a glow which most people, as victims of tradition, call beautiful. As a matter of fact the colour of dawn upon the rock of the Cervin is not truly a beautiful colour. It is a hard and brick-dusty red, very different from the snow fire seen on true snow peaks. Yet the scene was fine and majestic, and cold and dreadful, solitary and non-human. This fine inhumanity of the mountains is their chief quality to me. The sea is always more human; it moves, it breathes, it seems alive. I have been alone at sea in the Channel and yet never felt quite alone. The human water lapped at the planks of my boat. I knew the sea was the pathway of the world. But on the mountains nothing moves at night. There even stones do not fall; there are no thunders of avalanches; no sudden and awful crash of an ice-fall. Even when the sun is hot and the mountains waken a little these motions seem accidents. And the perpetual motion of a glacier has something about it which is cruelly inevitable, bestial, diabolic. No, upon the mountains one is swung clear of one's fellow-creatures; one is adrift; it is another world; it gives fresh views of the warm world of man.