Ac veluti montis Saxum de vertice præceps Cum ruit avulsum vento, seu turbidus imber Proluit, aut annis solvit sublapsa vetustas: Fertur in abruptum magno mons improbus actu, Exultatque solo, silvas, armenta, virosque Involvens secum. VIRG. LETTER XXVI. Geneva. There are five or six different Glaciers, which all terminate upon one side of the Valley of Chamouni, within the space of about five leagues. These are prodigious collections of snow and ice, formed in the intervals or hollows, between the mountains that bound the side of the valley near which Mount Blanc stands. The snow in those hollows being screened from the influence of the sun, the heat of summer can dissolve only a certain portion of it. These magazines of ice and snow are not formed by what falls directly from the heavens into the intervals. They are supplied by the snow which falls during winter on the loftiest parts of Mont Blanc; large beds or strata of which slide down imperceptibly by their own gravity, and finding no resistance at these intervals, they form long irregular roots around all the adjacent mountains. Five of these enter, by five different embouchures, into the valley of Chamouni, and are called Glaciers, on one of which we had been. At present their surface is from a thousand, or two thousand feet high, above the valley. Their breadth depends on the wideness of the interval between the mountains in which they are formed. Viewed from the valley, they have, in my opinion, a much finer effect than from their summit. The rays of the sun striking with various force on the different parts, according as they are more or less exposed, occasion an unequal dissolution of the ice; and, with the help of a little imagination, give the appearances of columns, arches, and turrets, which are in some places transparent. A fabric of ice in this taste, two thousand feet high, and three times as broad, with the sun shining full upon it, you must acknowledge to be a very singular piece of architecture. Our company ascended only the Glacier of Montanvert, which is not the highest, and were contented with a view of the others from the valley; but more curious travellers will surely think it worth their labour, to examine each of them more particularly. Some people are so fond of Glaciers, that not satisfied with their present size, they insist positively, that they must necessarily grow larger every year, and they argue the matter thus: