After six o'clock, accompanied by a guide (who was by trade a shoemaker, and possessed a small stock of mountain cattle), we set forward on our walk of eight leagues, the turreted barrier facing us. Passed along a lane fenced by curiously crossed rails,--thence (still gently ascending) through rough ground scattered over with small pine-trees, and stones fallen from the mountains. No wilder object can be imagined than a shattered guidepost at the junction of one road with another, which had been placed there because travellers, intending to cross the Gemmi, had often been misled, and some had perished, taking the right-hand road toward the snow mountain, instead of that to the left. Even till we reached the base of that rocky rampart which we were to climb, the track of ascent, in front of us, had been wholly invisible. Sometimes it led us slanting along the bare side of the crags:--sometimes it was scooped out of them, and over-roofed, like an outside staircase of a castle or fortification: sometimes we came to a level gallery--then to a twisting ascent--or the path would take a double course--backwards and forwards,--the dizzy height of the precipices above our heads more awful even than the gulfs beneath us! Sometimes we might have imagined ourselves looking from a parapet into the inner space of a gigantic castle--a castle a thousand times larger than was ever built by human hands; while above our heads the turrets appeared as majestic as if we had not climbed a step nearer to their summits. A small plot or two of turf, never to be cropped by goat or heifer, on the ledge of a precipice; a bunch of slender flowers hanging from a chink--and one luxuriant plot of the bright blue monkshood, lodged like a little garden amid the stone-work of an Italian villa--were the sole marks of vegetation that met our eyes in the ascent, except a few distorted pine-trees on one of the summits, which reminded us of watchmen, on the look-out. A weather-beaten, complex, wooden frame, something like a large sentry-box, hanging on the side of one of the crags, helped out this idea, especially as we were told it had been placed there in troublesome times to give warning of approaching danger. It was a very wild object, that could not but be noticed; and _when_ noticed the question must follow--how came it there? and for what purpose? We were preceded by some travellers on mules, who often shouted as if for their own pleasure; and the shouts were echoed through the circuit of the rocks. Their guide afterwards sang a hymn, or pensive song: there was an aërial sweetness in the wild notes which descended to our ears. When _we_ had attained the same height, _our_ guide sang the same air, which made me think it might be a customary rite, or practice, in that part of the ascent. The Gemmi Pass is in the direct road from Berne to the Baths of Leuk. Invalids, unable to walk, are borne on litters by men, and