But these red clouds of the morning, magnificent though they were, suggested thoughts which tended to qualify the pleasure which they gave: they did not indicate good weather. Sometimes, indeed, they had to fight with denser masses, which often prevailed, swathing the mountains in deep neutral tint, but which, again yielding, left the glory of the sunrise augmented by contrast with their gloom. Between eight and nine A.M. we commenced the setting out of our first line, one of whose termini was a point about a hundred yards higher up than the Montanvert hotel; a withered pine on the opposite mountain side marking the other terminus. The stakes made use of were four feet long. With the selfsame baton which I had employed upon the Mer de Glace in 1857, and which Simond had preserved, the worthy fellow now took up the line. At some places the snow was very deep, but its lower portions were sufficiently compact to allow of a stake being firmly fixed in it. At those places where the wind had removed the snow or rendered it thin, the ice was pierced with an auger and the stake driven into it. The greatest caution was of course necessary on the part of the men; they were in the midst of concealed crevasses, and sounding was essential at every step. By degrees they withdrew from me, and approached the eastern boundary of the glacier, where the ice was greatly dislocated, and the labour of wading through the snow enormous. Long detours were sometimes necessary to reach a required point; but they were all accomplished, and we at length succeeded in fixing eleven stakes along this line, the most distant of which was within about eighty yards of the opposite side of the glacier. [Sidenote: STORM ON THE GLACIER. 1859.]