Returning to Geneva, the party travelled by Lausanne and Neuchâtel to Bâle, and then followed the picturesque route along the river, by the tumultuous rapids of Laufenburg and the grand falls of the Rhine, to Schaffhausen, whence they turned off to Zurich. Here he writes of the principal inn that it "partook more than any of a fault too common in Switzerland. They have their stables and cow-houses under the same roof, and the unavoidable consequences may be conceived, till they can fall in with a man as able--as 'Hercules to cleanse a stable.'" From Zurich they crossed the Albis to Zug. The other members of the party went direct to Lucerne, but Lyell turned aside to visit the spot where twelve years previously an enormous mass of pudding-stone had come crashing down from the Rossberg, had destroyed the village of Goldau, and had converted a great tract of fertile land into a wilderness of broken rock. He diagnosed correctly the cause of the catastrophe, and then ascended the Rigi. Here he spent a flea-bitten night at the Kulm Hotel, but was rewarded by a fine sunset and a yet finer sunrise. At Lucerne he rejoined his relatives, and they drove together over the Brünig Pass to Meyringen. From this place they made an excursion to the Giessbach Falls, and saw the Alpbach in flood after a downpour of rain. This, like some other Alpine streams, becomes at such times a raging mass of liquid mud and shattered slate, and Lyell carefully notes the action of the torrent under these novel circumstances, and its increased power of transport. Parting from his relatives at the Handeck Falls, he walked up the valley of the Aar to the Grimsel Hospice, where he passed the night, and the next morning crossed over into the valley of the Rhone to the foot of its glacier, and then walked back again to Meyringen. He remarks that on the way to the Hospice "we passed some extraordinary large bare planks of granite rock above our track, the appearance of which I could not account for." This is not surprising, for he had not yet learnt to read the "handwriting on the wall" of a vanished glacier. Its interpretation was not to come for another twenty years, when these would be recognised as perhaps the finest examples of ice-worn rocks in Switzerland. Lyell was evidently a good pedestrian; for the very next day he walked from Meyringen over the two Scheideggs to Lauterbrunnen, ultimately joining his relatives at Thun, from which town they went on to Berne, where they were so fortunate as to see, from the well-known terrace, the snowy peaks of the Oberland in all the beauty of the sunset glow.