§ 7. From the slope of the hill above, and to the west of, the village of Zermatt, the Matterhorn presents itself under the figure shown on the right hand in the opposite plate (+38+). The whole height of the mass, from the glacier out of which it rises, is about 4000 feet; and although, as before noticed, the first slope from the top towards the right is merely a perspective line, the part of the contour _c d_, Fig. 33, p. 181, which literally overhangs,[82] cannot be. An apparent slope, however steep, so that it does not overpass the vertical, _may_ be a horizontal line; but the moment it can be shown literally to overhang, it _must_ be one of two things,--either an actually pendant _face_ of rock, as at _a_, Fig. 77, or the under edge of an overhanging _cornice_ of rock, _b_. Of course the latter condition, on such a scale as this of the Matterhorn, would be the more wonderful of the two; but I was anxious to determine which of these it really was.
[Illustration: 38. The Cervin, from the East and North-east.]
§ 8. My first object was to reach some spot commanding, as nearly as might be, the lateral profile of the Mont Cervin. The most available point for this purpose was the top of the Riffelhorn; which, however, first attempting to climb by its deceitful western side, and being stopped, for the moment, by the singular moat and wall which defend its Malakhoff-like summit, fearing that I might not be able ultimately to reach the top, I made the drawing of the Cervin, on the left hand in Plate +38+, from the edge of the moat; and found afterwards the difference in aspect, as it was seen from the true summit, so slight as not to necessitate the trouble of making another drawing.[83]
§ 9. It may be noted in passing, that this wall which with its regular fosse defends the Riffelhorn on its western side, and a similar one on its eastern side, though neither of them of any considerable height, are curious instances of trenchant precipice, formed, I suppose, by slight slips or faults of the serpentine rock. The summit of the horn, _a_, Fig. 78, seems to have been pushed up in a mass beyond the rest of the ridge, or else the rest of the ridge to have dropped from it on each side, at _b c_, leaving the two troublesome faces of cliff right across the crag, hard, green as a sea wave, and polished like the inside of a seashell, where the weather has not effaced the surface produced by the slip. It is only by getting past the eastern cliff that the summit can be reached at all, for on its two lateral escarpments the mountain seems quite inaccessible, being in its whole mass nothing else than the top of a narrow wall with a raised battlement, as rudely shown in perspective at _e d_; the flanks of the wall falling towards the glacier on one side, and to the lower Riffel on the other, four or five hundred feet, not, indeed, in unbroken precipice, but in a form quite incapable of being scaled.[84]