CONSTRUCTION V. THE WALL VEIL 87

on each flank of it there is set a buttress, both of about equal height, their heads sloped out from the main wall about seven hundred feet below its summit. That on the north is the most important; it is as sharp as the frontal angle of a bastion, and sloped sheer away to the north-east, throwing out spur beyond spur, until it terminates in a long low curve of russet precipice, at whose foot a great bay of the glacier of the Col de Cervin lies as level as a lake. This spur is one of the few points from which the mass of the Mont Cervin is in anywise approachable. It is a continuation of the masonry of the mountain itself, and affords us the means of examining the character of its materials.

§ 4. Few architects would like to build with them. The slope of the rocks to the north-west is covered two feet deep with their ruins, a mass of loose and slaty shale, of a dull brick-red colour, which yields beneath the foot like ashes, so that, in running down, you step one yard, and slide three. The rock is indeed hard beneath, but still disposed in thin courses of these cloven shales, so finely laid that they look in places more like a heap of crushed autumn leaves than a rock; and the first sensation is one of unmitigated surprise, as if the mountain were upheld by miracle; but surprise becomes more intelligent reverence for the great Builder, when we find, in the middle of the mass of these dead leaves, a course of living rock, of quartz as white as the snow that encircles it, and harder than a bed of steel.¹

§ 5. It is one only of a thousand iron bands that knit the

¹ [Ruskin in the MS. had here added a further sentence:-

“Of the importance of this string-course to the mountain chain the reader may form some estimate, when he is told that it is found also on the opposite side of the valley; its white line traceable along every undulation of the mountains above Zermatt-that, though in places not above thirty feet thick, it extends over a surface on the least calculation of twelve square leagues, and the weight of the great Mont Cervin is set above it as if in a saucer of porcelain.”

Ruskin had noted this in his diary (Zermatt, August 2):-

“This vein of quartz is seen from the opposite side on the Col de Cervin to sweep back towards the Glacier de Zermatt underlying all the high peaks of the Weisshorn,” etc.

In the same diary he describes “a rough path: where it traversed the quartz, the steps of it looked like the most beautiful worn marble steps of some Italian duomo.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]