Visitors like ourselves, looking up to the Cervin, see a long couloir which looks smooth and easy. Javelle says that it is cut up by veritable ravines plowed by avalanches or worn in the strata of the rock, so that the whole surface is far more rugged than it appears. The adamantine gneiss with strata of serpentine schist wears but slowly; but sometime the proud apex will be undermined and fall with a world-shaking crash.
After they had climbed with much difficulty and fatigue for about an hour they discovered the hut which some enterprising guides had constructed of planks, walled up with stones. For a hundred feet the precipice is perpendicular and to reach it they had to cling with their fingers to the roughness of the rock. It is at a height of more than thirty-eight hundred meters.
They reached it, and, while the guide was preparing supper, Javelle went out to a hump in the crag to enjoy the spectacle:--
"My eyes turned first of all toward the summit of Le Cervin. The tawny head of the colossus rose just above us. Through the crystalline air of those upper regions it seemed scarcely five hundred feet away and the rock stood out in startling ruggedness. The mighty flank of the pyramid, tremendously seamed and naked, lay before me: Below lay the lonely white plains of the Furgg and the Théodule glaciers; in front beyond them Monte Rosa tossed up its magnificent cluster of peaks....
"From the hut on Le Cervin no disrespect to Monte Rosa is possible. The true sovereign is restored to rank and position. The mountain is seen to be vast, mighty, magnificent as it is not from any other point of view; its rivals are humbled, and its summit, gracious and noble rather than haughty, shines unquestionably the highest of all in the sky."
"The vast triangular shadow of Le Cervin stretched before us across the Furgg and the Théodule glaciers as far as the Gorner glacier. At our left the Zermatt valley already lay in a bluish darkness; it seemed as if the night were emerging from those depths. A moment later and the whole amphitheater of snow-covered cliffs shone with a divine glory. Only two tints, but those graduated in a thousand delicate shades, were used in this mighty painting. One was a soft deep azure, the azure of the invading shadows; the other a pure ethereal gold flung forth by the last rays of the sun. In the sky the two tints intermingling, shed a splendid violet reflection on the zenith."