From Sixt we ascend through forest by the side of the rushing stream, through a landscape that is enlivened with as many splashing waterfalls as greeted Ulysses and his companions with their music when they came to the afternoon land of the Lotos Eaters. A little below the Eagle's Nest, the pleasant summer home of the late Mr. Justice Wills, the forest virtually ceases, and the road ends altogether; and thenceforward on to Chamonix we have only a mountain track, or mule-path, which mounts at first abruptly by a series of sudden zig-zags, but afterwards for an interval keeps a leveller upland route across wild and desolate pastures that lie round the big mountain tarn known as the Lac d'Anterne, beyond which rise in superlative grandeur, for more than two thousand feet, the giddy, sheer rock precipices of the strangely named Tête-à-l'Ane. All this is very splendid, and every inch of going pleasant; but I have brought you all this distance for a single point of view that bursts suddenly into vision, without warning or preparation. Suddenly, as perhaps you are getting a little tired, or finding the landscape a trifle monotonous, literally almost a single step brings you to a little break in the ridge of the opposite hill, whence the whole majestic chain of Mont Blanc--not only the monarch himself, but his whole range of attendant satellites and regally shattered aiguilles, from the Aiguille du Tour, on the left, to the Aiguille du Gouter, on the right--leaps splendidly into view--such a vision of splintered crags, and snows of dazzling, unsullied purity, and dark hollows of sullen glacier, and plinth of green pasture and forest, as certainly you will not find anywhere else in the Alps, nor, for ought I know, though the scale may be bigger, among Andes or Himalayas. Nor does all this magnificence here rise, as it rises when seen from closer and more familiar quarters, from the Flegère or the Brévent, directly from the foreground of the rather shabby Vale of Chamonix, with its electric railways to Argentière and the Montanvert, and with its unspeakable vulgarity of an aerial flight, or whatever they call their piece of villainy, up the pinnacles of the Aiguille du Midi, and with Chamonix itself in the centre, a mass of obtrusive roofs; but here it springs heavenward from above, and beyond, the long, dark ridge of the sombre Brévent itself, which serves in its comparative humility at once for measure and foil; whilst immediately below us are the dark, unpeopled depths (save for a small, solitary inn) of the upland valleys of the Diosaz and its tributary streams. Around is utter solitude, and wherever the eye can penetrate; and in front this unspeakably splendid chain, revealed in a single second, and viewed in its total length. A man would perhaps do well, who wishes to appreciate to perfection this sovereign of Alpine hills, never to approach it more closely than this crest of the Col d'Anterne.