The sunbeams called us early on the morning of the 1st of August. No cloud rested on the opposite range of the Valais mountains, but on looking towards the AEggischhorn we found a cap upon its crest; we looked again--the cap had disappeared and a serene heaven stretched overhead. As we breasted the alp the moon was still in the sky, paling more and more before the advancing day; a single hawk swung in the atmosphere above us; clear streams babbled from the hills, the louder sounds reposing on a base of music; while groups of cows with tinkling bells browsed upon the green alp. Here and there the grass was dispossessed, and the flanks of the mountain were covered by the blocks which had been cast down from the summit. On reaching the plateau at the base of the final pyramid, we rounded the mountain to the right and came over the lonely and beautiful Maerjelen See. No doubt the hollow which this lake fills had been scooped out in former ages by a branch of the Aletsch glacier; but long ago the blue ice gave place to blue water. The glacier bounds it at one side by a vertical wall of ice sixty feet in height: this is incessantly undermined, a roof of crystal being formed over the water, till at length the projecting mass, becoming too heavy for its own rigidity, breaks and tumbles into the lake. Here, attacked by sun and air, its blue surface is rendered dazzlingly white, and several icebergs of this kind now floated in the sunlight; the water was of a glassy smoothness, and in its blue depths each ice mass doubled itself by reflection.[A] [Sidenote: THE ALETSCH GLACIER. 1858.] The Aletsch is the grandest glacier in the Alps: over it we now stood, while the bounding mountains poured vast feeders into the noble stream. The Jungfrau was in front of us without a cloud, and apparently so near that I proposed to my guide to try it without further preparation. He was enthusiastic at first, but caution afterwards got the better of his courage. At some distance up the glacier the snow-line was distinctly drawn, and from its edge upwards the mighty shoulders of the hills were heavy laden with the still powdery material of the glacier.