The glacier up which we had travelled, leading to the snow-filled cirque south of Mt. Gendarme, is of much interest; the ice is thickly veneered with stones and is strewn with glacier tables, and with numerous perfectly formed sand-cones, reaching a height of five feet. Most striking, however, is a great ice wall, 400 feet high, that separates the neve from the dry glacier and reaches right across it. The moving ice-field above flows over this cliff and sends down fragments to litter the floor of the glacier below. It is referred to here as the “Mural Glacier.”

— Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945]