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At
Grindelwald, for example, it is the fashion to go and "see the
glaciers"--heaven save the mark! Ladies in costumes, heavy German
professors, Americans doing the Alps at a gallop, Cook's tourists, and
other varieties of a well-known genus, go off in shoals and see--what?
A gigantic mass of ice, strangely torn with a few of the exquisite blue
crevasses, but denied and prostrate in dirt and ruins. A stream foul
with mud oozes out from the base; the whole mass seems to be melting
fast away; the summer sun has evidently got the best of it in these
lower regions, and nothing can resist him but the great mounds of
decaying rock that strew the surface in confused lumps. It is as much
like the glacier of the upper regions as the melting fragments of snow
in a London street are like the surface of the fresh snow that has just
fallen in a country field. And by way of improving its attractions a
perpetual picnic is going on, and the ingenious natives have hewed a
tunnel into the ice, for admission to which they charge certain
centimes.


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