139. There is, in fact, no way that we can see of disposing of the excess of snow above the snow-line; there is no way of making good the constant waste of the ice below the snow-line; there is no way of accounting for the medial moraines of the glacier, but by supposing that from the highest snow-fields of the Col du Géant, the Léchaud, and the Talèfre, to the extreme end of the Glacier des Bois, the whole mass of frozen matter is moving downwards. 140. If you were older, it would give me pleasure to take you up Mont Blanc. Starting from Chamouni, we should first pass through woods and pastures, then up the steep hill-face with the Glacier des Bossons to our right, to a rock known as the _Pierre Pointue_; thence to a higher rock called the _Pierre l'Échelle_, because here a ladder is usually placed to assist in crossing the chasms of the glacier. At the Pierre l'Échelle we should strike the ice, and passing under the Aiguille du Midi, which towers to the left, and which sometimes sweeps a portion of the track with stone avalanches, we should cross the Glacier des Bossons; amid heaped-up mounds and broken towers of ice; up steep slopes; over chasms so deep that their bottoms are hid in darkness. 141. We reach the rocks of the Grands Mulets, which form a kind of barren islet in the icy sea; thence to the higher snow-fields, crossing the _Petit Plateau_, which we should find cumbered by blocks of ice. Looking to the right, we should see whence they came, for rising here with threatening aspect high above us are the broken ice-crags[B] of the Dôme du Goûté. The guides wish to pass this place in silence, and it is just as well to humour them, however much you may doubt the competence of the human voice to bring the ice-crags down. From the Petit Plateau a steep snow-slope would carry us to the Grand Plateau, and at day-dawn I know nothing in the whole Alps more grand and solemn than this place. [B] Named _séracs_ from their resemblance in shape and colour to an inferior kind of curdy cheese called by this name at Chamouni. 142. One object of our ascent would be now attained; for here at the head of the Grand Plateau, and at the foot of the final slope of Mont Blanc, I should show you a great crevasse, into which three guides were poured by an avalanche in the year 1820. [Illustration: CREVASSE ON GRAND PLATEAU.] 143. Is this language correct? A crevasse hardly to be distinguished from the present one undoubtedly existed here in 1820. But was it the identical crevasse now existing? Is the ice riven here to-day the same as that riven fifty-one years ago? By no means. How is this proved? By the fact that more than forty years after their interment, the remains of those three guides were found near the end of the Glacier des Bossons, many miles below the existing crevasse.