Victor stands below the Aiguille du Dru (12,320 feet).

From Walter Woodburn Hyde, "The Ascent of Mont Blanc," in National Geographic, 24:8
(1913), 861-942.

This is a tote-sack or shoulder bag.

The Shelleys witnessed such an avalanche on their excursion to Chamonix: see Letter
4 of A History of a Six Weeks' Tour, where the diction is very close to that of this
passage.

The creature leaves the ruins of the De Lacey cottage about a year after he arrived
to take refuge there.

Even in social circumstances like this family outing Victor's separation of himself
from his companions is conspicuous. The extreme variability of his movements here
seems intended to remind us of his condition when he welcomed Clerval to Ingolstadt
(I:4:12), hysterical and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

This fable is told by both Aesop and his French follower, Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695),
in his Fables.

This is the Creature's second knowing reference to Milton's Paradise Lost (see I.670ff.
and X.418ff.): the first was when he remarked that Victor, in creating him, had cast
him as Satan rather than Adam (II:2:11). The oddity of these learned citations goes
unremarked for now, but will be explained five chapters later (II:7:7).

The simile is telling here. We will discover in the next chapter that the Alps can,
indeed, support another "race" of beings. Yet, however much human imagination may
discern in these altitudes the possibility of a transcendence of the human condition,
neither a human nor another kind of being can effectually manage to do so. Moreover,
"another race" of beings, if brought down from an imaginary conception to the solid
ground of normative human existence would be considered, like Victor's Creature, alien
and hounded from human society. The conflict between the unrestricted imagination
and human society is total.

The Arveiron is a glacial tributary the Shelleys visited on their excursion to Mont
Blanc. Their visit is described in the account headed July 24 in Letter 4 of A History
of a Six Weeks' Tour.

The Arve is fed by the glacier called the Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice), where the remaining
chapters of Volume 2 will take place: the river descends from the mountain through
the Chamounix Valley, turns to the east, and joins the Rhone river in its progress
toward Lyons.