The Story of Mont Blanc.
By J. E. Muddock, F.R.G.S.
"Mont Blanc is the Monarch of Mountains;
They crown'd him long ago
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,
With a diadem of snow."—Byron.
"Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene—
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms.
Pile round it, ice and rock."—Shelley.
HERE are higher mountains, and ruggeder mountains, and mountains more difficult of ascent than Mont Blanc; but there is never a mountain in the wide world with such a strange story as that which will for all time cling to the "Monarch"—a story that is at once grim, tragic, pathetic, and even comical and absurd; a story, too, in which love and heroism play a strange part; and in the annals of science no mountain occupies such a distinguished place. Mont Blanc falls far short of other mountains as regards height—Gaurisankar, in the Himalayas, for instance, being 29,000 ft. But, in spite of this, it has been aptly styled "the Monarch of Mountains," and it well deserves the proud distinction, for it is unique, and proudly soars to the sky—
"In the wild pomp of mountain majesty."
Chamonix.
Men and women from all parts of the world have come to pay it homage, and wherever there is civilisation the name of Mont Blanc is known. At what period this name was first bestowed upon it is not very clear. Certainly it was not so called in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In an atlas by Mercator, published in 1595, there is mention of the village of Chamonix, but Mont Blanc and its satellites are simply referred to under the general term of "Glaciers." One grows dumb as he thinks of the thousands of years, and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions of years that the mighty dome of eternal snow has dominated the valley where Chamonix now stands. How small and paltry seem the affairs of man when compared with such an enduring monument of God's handiwork! As far back as the tenth century we read that a Priory stood at the foot of Mont Blanc. The valley at that time was wellnigh inaccessible, and for hundreds of years the Priors and holy brothers were undisturbed by the roar of the outer world, which reached not their solitude where the mighty mountain reigned supreme and changed not, though generation after generation of men came from the dust, lived their day, and then went down into the dust again, and in a little while were remembered no
