From the summit of the Furka we descended to the Rhone glacier by one of the zigzag mountain roads. Looking down over the edge, we could see below, the ways we were yet to follow on the mountain face before accomplishing the descent. The horses dashed down at a flying pace. The inclination of the road was not sufficient to alarm; but the turns are always so frightfully abrupt as to make it seem as though the leader must dash off. But no; he invariably swung around just upon the outer edge, held, it seemed sometimes, by the traces, and with a crack of the driver's whip was off again before our fears, if we had any, could find words.
One of these abrupt turns fairly hangs over the glacier, where the icy river has fallen into broken masses from a higher point, before spreading out in the narrow valley just here where it ends. Only a short distance from the foot of the glacier is the inn, with its scattered out-buildings, where we were to spend the night. The sheer descent from the summit of the Furka is only about half a mile; but though our horses had galloped the whole distance, and the inn was in sight all the time, we were three hours reaching it; so many turns did the road make upon the face of the mountain.
It was a gloomy valley, shut in by mountains, and surrounded by lesser hills all soaked and dripping with icy streams that chilled the air. We gained the foot of the glacier from the inn by a rough path over and among the rocks, and stones, and heaps of gravel it had brought down and deposited here. From beneath the solid mass of ice flowed a hundred shallow streams, which, uniting, form the beginning of the River Rhone. We penetrated for a short distance the gallery cut into the glacier, surrounded and shut down upon by the walls and ceiling, of a deep blue color, and were preceded by an old man, who awoke the echoes by uttering a series of broken cries. What with the echoes and horrible chill, the place seemed most unearthly, and we were glad to retreat.
The roar of torrents, and hardly less thunderous noise of departing diligences, awakened us the next morning. We were soon off upon the road, skirting the mountains, rolling through the pleasant valleys, and passing village after village now. They seemed silent and deserted, their occupants perhaps busy in the fields, or serving at the inns, or among the mountains as guides. One was a mass of ruins, thrown down in the bed of a torrent, among which a few dull-faced peasants were at work, with a hopeless, aimless air, that promised little. A mountain stream, swollen to a flood by melting snows, had swept it away in a night.