Having made ourselves acquainted with the motion of the glacier, we are prepared to examine those rents, fissures, chasms, or, as they are most usually called, _Crevasses_, by which all glaciers are more or less intersected. They result from the motion of the glacier, and the laws of their formation are deduced immediately from those of the motion. The crevasses are sometimes very deep and numerous, and apparently without law or order in their distribution. They cut the ice into long ridges, and break these ridges transversely into prisms; these prisms gradually waste away, assuming, according to the accidents of their melting, the most fantastic forms. I have seen them like the mutilated statuary of an ancient temple, like the crescent moon, like huge birds with outstretched wings, like the claws of lobsters, and like antlered deer. Such fantastic sculpture is often to be found on the ice cascades, where the riven glacier has piled vast blocks on vaster pedestals, and presented them to the wasting action of sun and air. In Fig. 24 I have given a sketch of a mass of ice of this character, which stood in 1859 on the dislocated slope of the Glacier des Bois. [Sidenote: FANTASTIC ICE-MASSES.] [Illustration: Fig. 24. Fantastic Mass of ice.] It is usual for visitors to the Montanvert to descend to the glacier, and to be led by their guides to the edges of the crevasses, where, being firmly held, they look down into them; but those who have only made their acquaintance in this way know but little of their magnitude and beauty in the more disturbed portions of glaciers. As might be expected, they have been the graves of many a mountaineer; and the skeletons found upon the glacier prove that even the chamois itself, with its elastic muscles and admirable sureness of foot, is not always safe among the crevasses. They are grandest in the higher ice-regions, where the snow hangs like a coping over their edges, and the water trickling from these into the gloom forms splendid icicles. The Goerner Glacier, as we ascend it towards the old Weissthor, presents many fine examples of such crevasses; the ice being often torn in a most curious and irregular manner. You enter a porch, pillared by icicles, and look into a cavern in the very body of the glacier, encumbered with vast frozen bosses which are fringed all round by dependent icicles. At the peril of your life from slipping, or from the yielding of the stalactites, you may enter these caverns, and find yourself steeped in the blue illumination of the place. Their beauty is beyond description; but you cannot deliver yourself up, heart and soul, to its enjoyment. There is a strangeness about the place which repels you, and not without anxiety do you look from your ledge into the darkness below, through which the sound of subglacial water sometimes rises like the tolling of distant bells. You feel that, however the cold splendours of the place