355. We reach Zermatt, but do not halt here. On the mountain ridge, 4,000 feet above the valley, we discern the Riffelberg hotel. This we reach. Right in front of us is the pinnacle of the Matterhorn, upon the top of which it must appear incredible to you that a human foot could ever tread. Constancy and skill, however, accomplished this, but in the first instance at a terrible price. In the little churchyard of Zermatt we have seen the graves of two of the greatest mountaineers that Savoy and England have produced: and who, with two gallant young companions, fell from the Matterhorn in 1865. 356. At the Riffelberg we are within an hour's walk of the famous Görner Grat, which commands so grand a view of the glaciers of Monte Rosa. But yonder huge knob of perfectly bare rock, which is called the Riffelhorn, must be our station. What the Cleft Station is to the Mer de Glace, the Riffelhorn is to the Görner glacier and its tributaries. From its lower side the rock, easy as it may seem, is inaccessible. Here, indeed, in 1865, a fifth good man met his end, and he also lies beside his fellow countrymen in the churchyard of Zermatt. Passing a little tarn, or lake, called the Riffel See, we assail the Riffelhorn on its upper side. It is capital rock-practice to reach the summit; and from it we command a most extraordinary scene. 357. The huge and many-peaked mass of Monte Rosa faces us, and we scan its snows from bottom to top. To the right is the mighty ridge of the Lyskamm, also laden with snow; and between both lies the Western Glacier of Monte Rosa. This glacier meets another from the vast snow-fields of the Cima di Jazzi; they join to form the Görner glacier, and from their place of junction stretches the customary medial moraine. On this side of the Lyskamm rise two beautifully snowy eminences, the Twins Castor and Pollux; then come the brown crags of the Breithorn, then the Little Matterhorn, and then the broad snow-field of the Théodule, out of which springs the Great Matterhorn, and which you and I will cross subsequently into Italy. 358. The valleys and depressions between these mountains are filled with glaciers. Down the flanks of the Twin Castor comes the Glacier des Jumeaux, from Pollux comes the Schwartze glacier, from the Breithorn the Trifti glacier, then come the Little Matterhorn glacier and the Théodule glacier, each, as it welds itself to the trunk, carrying with it its medial moraine. We can count nine such moraines from our present position. And to a still more surprising degree than on the Mer de Glace, we notice the power of the ice to yield to pressure; the broad névés being squeezed on the trunk of the Görner into white stripes, which become ever narrower between the bounding moraines, and finally disappear under their own shingle. [Illustration: THE GÖRNER GLACIER, WITH MONTE ROSA IN THE DISTANCE, AND THE RIFFELHORN TO THE LEFT.]