§ 10. To return to the Cervin. The view of it given on the left hand in Plate +38+ shows the ridge in about its narrowest profile; and shows also that this ridge is composed of beds of rock shelving across it, apparently horizontal, or nearly so, at the top, and sloping considerably southwards (to the spectator's left), at the bottom. How far this slope is a consequence of the advance of the nearest angle giving a steep perspective to the beds, I cannot say; my own belief would have been that a great deal of it is thus deceptive, the beds lying as the tiles do in the somewhat anomalous, but perfectly conceivable house-roof, Fig. 79. Saussure, however, attributes to the beds themselves a very considerable slope. But be this as it may, the main facts of the thinness of the beds, their comparative horizontality, and the daring swordsweep by which the whole mountain has been hewn out of them, are from this spot comprehensible at a glance. Visible, I _should_ have said; but eternally, and to the uttermost, _in_comprehensible. Every geologist who speaks of this mountain seems to be struck by the wonderfulness of its calm sculpture--the absence of all aspect of convulsion, and yet the stern chiselling of so vast a mass into its precipitous isolation leaving no ruin nor débris near it. "Quelle force n'a-t-il pas fallu," exclaims M. Saussure, "pour rompre, et pour _balayer_ tout ce qui manque à cette pyramide!" "What an overturn of all ancient ideas in Geology," says Professor Forbes, "to find a pinnacle of 15,000 feet high [above the sea] sharp as a pyramid, and with perpendicular precipices of thousands of feet on every hand, to be a representative of the older chalk formation; and what a difficulty to conceive the nature of a convulsion (even with unlimited power), which could produce a configuration like the Mont Cervin rising from the glacier of Zmutt!"
§ 11. The term "perpendicular" is of course applied by the Professor in the "poetical" temper of Reynolds,--that is to say, in one "inattentive to minute exactness in details;" but the effect of this strange Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great, that even the gravest philosophers cannot resist it; and Professor Forbes's drawing of the peak, outlined at page 180, has evidently been made under the influence of considerable excitement. For fear of being deceived by enthusiasm also, I daguerreotyped the Cervin from the edge of the little lake under the crag of the Riffelhorn, with the somewhat amazing result shown in Fig. 80. So cautious is Nature, even in her boldest work, so broadly does she extend the foundations, and strengthen the buttresses, of masses which produce so striking an _impression_ as to be described, even by the most careful writers, as perpendicular.