Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456, page 39 by Various Authors
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achieving the formidable passage of this terrible glacier. The rest of the journey was comparatively easy, though the elevation--above 9000 feet--and the steepness were trying enough. But all sense of fatigue forsook me when the huge portal--the tiny notch as seen from Gèdres--yawned in all its stern magnificence before me. It was a fit reward for all my toil, and I felt that I would have willingly endured even greater sufferings to make acquaintance with such a scene as now met my astonished gaze.
Eager to achieve the crowning feat of my undertaking, I hastened onwards; and with beating heart I soon stood within the jaws of the mighty portal, through which swept the howling wind. A step more, and I was in Spain. Glaciers slope away on each side of the wall; but all along the front of the Brêche, on the French side, the glacier is scooped out into a deep fosse or cavity, by the action of the sun's rays pouring from the south through the opening. A wild world of mountains appeared to the south, those in the foreground covered with snow, and the more distant looming hazily over the plains of Saragossa. And this was Spain!--wondrous land, defying description, and in memory resembling, not realities, but fragments of tremendous dreams. Towards France, the scene is softer. Mountains there are, sky-piled, but there are forests too, the home of wolves
Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave! Burning for blood; bony, and gaunt, and grim;
and vales of emerald, and silver streams, and gleaming lakes. But how hope to convey anything like a faithful impression of the panorama seen from the Brêche-de-Roland! I will not attempt it, preferring rather to advise the reader, should he not be stricken in years, to see it himself.
My guide produced the contents of his wallet, which, thanks to Madame Cazean's provident forethought, were good and abundant; and having placed the wine-flasks in the ice--there was enough at hand to ice the great Heidelberg tun--I sat down on the