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Petersburg Canal was too much for the long couloirs, hence some other plan had to be found. The plan adopted was that invented by Mr. James Burt, and which had been used with the greatest success on the New Amsterdam Canal.
The human energy no longer freezes itself in fish-ponds, and starves itself in cells; but near the north pole, in central Africa, on Alpine "couloirs," and especially in what are nowadays called "psycho-physical laboratories," it maybe found as invincible as ever, and ready for every fresh demand.
The head of the glacier sends up a few finger-like branches through narrow couloirs; but these seemed too steep and short to be available, especially as I had no ax with which to cut steps, and the numerous narrow-throated gullies down which stones and snow are avalanched seemed hopelessly steep, besides being interrupted by vertical cliffs; while the whole front was rendered still more terribly forbidding by the chill shadow and the gloomy blackness of the rocks.
I had some horrible moments following on when the rope grew taut, for I had no help from it. We zigzagged down the rock, sometimes driven to the ice of the adjacent couloirs, sometimes on the outer ridge of the Black Stone, sometimes wriggling down little cracks and over evil boiler-plates. The snow did not lie on it, but the rock crackled with thin ice or oozed ice water.
It led us a wild, wild chase over crevasses, friable and treacherous stones covered with “verglass,” over dangerous couloirs and all the other things talked of in the Alps but forgotten in the Rockies, to high elevations, where frozen snow combed over the beetling crags, and the avalanches roared and thundered down the rocks, dashing the fragments of stone over the lower ice fields.
It may be remembered that the Suez Canal was mostly made by dredging, and that the dredgers had attached to them what the French called 'long couloirs' or spouts, into which water was pumped, and by this means the stuff brought up by the dredgers was carried to the sides of the canal, and there deposited. The great width of the St.
"You'll come to have a different notion of crevasses, sir," he said, with a quiet smile, "after you've bin among the seracs of the Grand Mulet, and up some of the couloirs of Monte Rosa."
But to return: Mrs Stoutley and party are now in the very heart of scenery the most magnificent; they have penetrated to a great fountain-head of European waters; they are surrounded by the cliffs, the gorges, the moraines, and are not far from the snow-slopes and ice-fields, the couloirs, the seracs, the crevasses, and the ice-precipices and pinnacles of a great glacial world; but not one of the party betrays the smallest amount of interest, or expresses the faintest emotion of surprise, owing to the melancholy fact that all is shrouded in an impenetrable veil of mist through which a thick fine rain percolates as if the mountain monarch himself were bewailing their misfortunes.
The couloirs are wide, lofty, richly carpeted; the walls of them encrusted with pale highly polished marbles, pilasters of which, with heavily gilded capitals, flank vast panels of looking-glass. The moulded ceilings are studded with electric lights, the glare of which is agreeably softened by pineapple-shaped globes of crystal glass.
A mass of boulders of all sizes, from a barn to a cobblestone, completely filled a chasm at the base of a semicircular wall of castellated clay cliffs. Into the pit we descended. The pinnacles above were impressively high, and between them were couloirs of debris that looked to us to be as perpendicular as the cliffs. Up one of these breakneck slides the guide pointed for our path.
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