This text is part of:
[324]
to a depth of eighty feet, and even beyond, though with less distinctness.
The summer closed with their famous ascent of the Jungfrau.
The party consisted of twelve persons: Agassiz, Desor, Forbes, Heath, and two travelers who had begged to join them,—M. de Chatelier, of Nantes, and M. de Pury, of Neuchatel, a former pupil of Agassiz.
The other six were guides; four beside their old and tried friends, Jacob Leuthold and Johann Wahren.
They left the hospice of the Grimsel on the 27th of August, at four o'clock in the morning.
Crossing the Col of the Oberaar they descended to the snowy plateau which feeds the Viescher glacier.
In this grand amphitheatre, walled in by the peaks of the Viescherhorner, they rested for their midday meal.
In crossing these fields of snow, while walking with perfect security upon what seemed a solid mass, they observed certain window-like openings in the snow.
Stooping to examine one of them, they looked into an immense open space, filled with soft blue light.
They were, in fact, walking on a hollow crust, and the small window was, as they afterward found, opposite a large crevasse on the other side of this ice-cavern, through which the light entered, flooding
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.