its legs, and this, of course, only made the blows that it received more severe. At last it ran away, and would have perished by rolling down a precipice, if the men had not caught hold of its tail. The end of the matter was that a man had to follow the mule, holding the end of the ladders, which obliged him to move his arms up and down incessantly, and to bow to the hind quarters of the animal in a way that afforded more amusement to his comrades than it did to him.
I was once more en route for the Matterhorn, for I had heard in the spring of 1863 the cause of the failure of Professor Tyndall, and learnt that the case was not so hopeless as it appeared to be at one time. I found that he arrived as far only as the northern end of "the shoulder." The point at which he says,[1] they "sat down with broken hopes, the summit within a stone's-throw of us, but still defying us," was not the notch or cleft at d (which is literally within a stone's-throw of the summit), but another and more formidable cleft that intervenes between the northern end of "the shoulder" and the commencement of the final peak. It is marked E on the outline which faces p. 83. Carrel and all the men who had been with me knew of the existence of this cleft, and of the pinnacle which rose between it and the final peak;[2] and we had frequently talked about the best manner of passing the place. On this we disagreed, but we were both of opinion that when we got to "the shoulder" it would be necessary to bear down gradually to the right or to the left, to avoid coming to the top of the notch. But Tyndall's party, after arriving at "the shoulder," was led by his guides along the crest of the ridge, and, consequently, when they got to its northern end, they came to the top of the notch, instead of the bottom—to the dismay of all but the Carrels. Dr. Tyndall's words are, "The ridge was here split by a deep cleft which separated it from the final precipice, and the case became more hopeless as we came more near." The Professor adds, "The mountain is 14,800
