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Eismeer looks directly upon the huge sea of snow and ice, with immense masses of dazzling white so close as to make one reel with awe and astonishment. In fact, this view is really oppressive in its wild magnificence, so near and so grand is it. The Jungfraujoch is different.
A white-haired American lady was in the train with me ascending to the Eismeer. "I have longed all my life," she said, "to see a glaysher to touch it and walk on it and now I am going to do it at last. I and my daughter here have come right away from America to go on these cars to the glaysher." When we were descending, I asked the old lady if she had been pleased.
I took three hours in the unwearied train descending from the Eismeer to Interlaken, and was back in my hotel in comfortable time for dinner, "mightily content with the day's journey," as Mr. Pepys would have said. I have always been sensitive to the action of diminished pressure, which produces what is called "mountain sickness" in many people.
At last, however, the little party succeeded in making their way across the Eismeer, and arrived without further mishap at the river leading to the Goat-King's Palace. This river flowed on the centre of the Glacier, between steep banks of transparent ice, every now and again disappearing into some vast cavern, where it swept with a hollow echoing under the ice-field.
It was a real triumph; for the Chamois flew down the mountain in the wildest confusion, falling down, and darting over each other in their hurry, and never stopping until they had reached their own haunts in the region of the distant Eismeer. "A glorious victory!" cried the Lieutenant, "and not a drop of blood shed."
Then we start again, and on we are driven by the current generated away down there in Lauterbrünnen, through the spiral tunnel, mounting a thousand feet more till we are landed at an opening cut on the further side of the rocky Eiger, which admits us to an actual footing on the great glacier called the Eismeer, or Icelake.
The route is by way of Lauterbrunnen, Wengen, and the Scheidegg, and after skirting the Eiger Glacier going by tunnel into the very bowels of the mountain. At Eigerwand, Rotstock, and Eismeer are stations, great galleries blasted out of the rock, with corridors leading to openings from which one has marvelous views.
The daughters worked in the house, the sons helped their father; and in the evening they all descended to the Glacier to collect any remnants of food left by the endless stream of visitors, who all through the summer toiled up to the Eismeer, and down again to the Inn on the other side of the valley. These travellers were a perpetual source of interest and amusement to the Goat family.
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