moving figures amongst the snow of the Wild Gall. In vain we strained
our eyes through the greasy old telescope, for neither moving figures
nor stationary black dots were visible. Even Jakob with his eagle
eye confessed to seeing no trace of man either amongst the irregular
ash-colored rocks or upon the snowy curves of the Wild Gall, which,
like a huge white-crested breaker at sea, upheaved itself in the air
as in the very act of turning. Quite as solitary and untrodden did
it look as its still more stately sister, the Hoch Gall, a mountain
deservedly the especial pride of the district, its lofty pinnacle
piercing the sky, whilst a vast sheet of thick, pure snow hung
straight and smooth down its concave sides, a huge mountain-buttress
linking the lower portion of this snow pyramid to the white,
glittering expanse of the Gross Lengstein Glacier--a buttress of
many thousand feet, standing prominently forth like an antediluvian
monster, on whose gigantic pachydermatous flanks the shattered,
blasted stems of dead uniform fir trees shone out a silvery gray,
mingling in color with the loose, glittering débris which had slidden
into the upland valley just below. Two silver threads descending from
the glaciers of the Hoch Gall wound through these fallen stones into
the green turf of the Bachernthal, but whether formed of snow or water
it would have been difficult to decide, had not ever and anon a sound
as of a distant train been borne upon the breeze, proving them to be
brooks, which helped to swell the roaring, tumbling Giessbach, whose
boisterous acquaintance we had already made.

The Hoch Gall, which has been twice ascended, was first attempted in
1869 by a very adventurous, clever young Alpine climber, Karl Hofmann,
the only son of a well-known physician of Munich--a youth of whom it
is said that no study was too difficult, no danger too great, no
peak too high for him. Innumerable were the mountains which he scaled