CHAPTER XI.
PASSAGE OF THE COL DE TRIOLET, AND ASCENTS OF MONT DOLENT, AIGUILLE DE TRÉLATÊTE, AND AIGUILLE D'ARGENTIÈRE.
"Nothing binds men so closely together as agreement in plans and desires."
Cicero.
Ten years ago very few persons knew from personal knowledge how extremely inaccurately the chain of Mont Blanc was delineated. During the previous half-century thousands had made the tour of the chain, and in that time at least one thousand individuals had stood upon its highest summit; but out of all this number there was not one capable, willing, or able, to map the mountain which, until recently, was regarded the highest in Europe.
Many persons knew that great blunders had been perpetrated, and it was notorious that even Mont Blanc itself was represented in a ludicrously incorrect manner on all sides excepting the north; but there was not, perhaps, a single individual who knew, at the time to which I refer, that errors of no less than 1000 feet had been committed in the determination of heights at each end of the chain; that some glaciers were represented of double their real dimensions; and that ridges and mountains were laid down which actually had no existence.
One portion alone of the entire chain had been surveyed at the time of which I speak with anything like accuracy. It was not done (as one would have expected) by a Government, but by a private individual,—by the British De Saussure,—the late J. D. Forbes. In the year 1842, he "made a special survey of the
