Upon a discussion of the subject with him, it appeared that heconsidered the project distinctly and decidedly dangerous. I was notconvinced, yet I was not willing to try the experiment in any riskyway--that is, in a way that might cripple the strength and efficiencyof the Expedition. I was about at my wits' end when it occurred to me totry it on the Latinist.
He was called in. But he declined, on the plea of inexperience,diffidence in public, lack of curiosity, and I didn't know what all.Another man declined on account of a cold in the head; thought heought to avoid exposure. Another could not jump well--never COULD jumpwell--did not believe he could jump so far without long and patientpractice. Another was afraid it was going to rain, and his umbrella hada hole in it. Everybody had an excuse. The result was what the readerhas by this time guessed: the most magnificent idea that was everconceived had to be abandoned, from sheer lack of a person withenterprise enough to carry it out. Yes, I actually had to give thatthing up--while doubtless I should live to see somebody use it and takeall the credit from me.
Well, I had to go overland--there was no other way. I marched theExpedition down the steep and tedious mule-path and took up as good aposition as I could upon the middle of the glacier--because Baedekersaid the middle part travels the fastest. As a measure of economy,however, I put some of the heavier baggage on the shoreward parts, to goas slow freight.
I waited and waited, but the glacier did not move. Night was coming on,the darkness began to gather--still we did not budge. It occurred to methen, that there might be a time-table in Baedeker; it would be well tofind out the hours of starting. I called for the book--it could not befound. Bradshaw would certainly contain a time-table; but no Bradshawcould be found.
Very well, I must make the best of the situation. So I pitched thetents, picketed the animals, milked the cows, had supper, paregorickedthe men, established the watch, and went to bed--with orders to call meas soon as we came in sight of Zermatt.
I awoke about half past ten next morning, and looked around. We hadn'tbudged a peg! At first I could not understand it; then it occurred to methat the old thing must be aground. So I cut down some trees and riggeda spar on the starboard and another on the port side, and fooled awayupward of three hours trying to spar her off. But it was no use. Shewas half a mile wide and fifteen or twenty miles long, and there wasno telling just whereabouts she WAS aground. The men began to showuneasiness, too, and presently they came flying to me with ashy faces,saying she had sprung a leak.
Nothing but my cool behavior at this critical time saved us from anotherpanic. I ordered them to show me the place. They led me to a spot wherea huge boulder lay in a deep pool of clear and brilliant water. It didlook like a pretty bad leak, but I kept that to myself. I made a pumpand set the men to work to pump out the glacier. We made a success ofit. I perceived, then, that it was not a leak at all. This boulder haddescended from a precipice and stopped on the ice in the middle of theglacier, and the sun had warmed it up, every day, and consequently ithad melted its way deeper and deeper into the ice, until at last itreposed, as we had found it, in a deep pool of the clearest and coldestwater.
Presently Baedeker was found again, and I hunted eagerly for thetime-table. There was none. The book simply said the glacier was movingall the time. This was satisfactory, so I shut up the book and chose agood position to view the scenery as we passed along. I stood there sometime enjoying the trip, but at last it occurred to me that we didnot seem to be gaining any on the scenery. I said to myself, "Thisconfounded old thing's aground again, sure,"--and opened Baedeker tosee if I could run across any remedy for these annoying interruptions.I soon found a sentence which threw a dazzling light upon the matter.It said, "The Gorner Glacier travels at an average rate of a little lessthan an inch a day." I have seldom felt so outraged. I have seldom hadmy confidence so wantonly betrayed. I made a small calculation: One incha day, say thirty feet a year; estimated distance to Zermatt, three andone-eighteenth miles. Time required to go by glacier, A LITTLE OVER FIVEHUNDRED YEARS! I said to myself, "I can WALK it quicker--and before Iwill patronize such a fraud as this, I will do it."
When I revealed to Harris the fact that the passenger part of thisglacier--the central part--the lightning-express part, so to speak--wasnot due in Zermatt till the summer of 2378, and that the baggage, comingalong the slow edge, would not arrive until some generations later, heburst out with:
"That is European management, all over! An inch a day--think of that!Five hundred years to go a trifle over three miles! But I am not a bitsurprised. It's a Catholic glacier. You can tell by the look of it. Andthe management."
I said, no, I believed nothing but the extreme end of it was in aCatholic canton.
"Well, then, it's a government glacier," said Harris. "It's all thesame. Over here the government runs everything--so everything's slow;slow, and ill-managed. But with us, everything's done by privateenterprise--and then there ain't much lolling around, you can dependon it. I wish Tom Scott could get his hands on this torpid old slabonce--you'd see it take a different gait from this."
I said I was sure he would increase the speed, if there was trade enoughto justify it.
"He'd MAKE trade," said Harris. "That's the difference betweengovernments and individuals. Governments don't care, individuals do. TomScott would take all the trade; in two years Gorner stock would go totwo hundred, and inside of two more you would see all the other glaciersunder the hammer for taxes." After a reflective pause, Harris added, "Alittle less than an inch a day; a little less than an INCH, mind you.Well, I'm losing my reverence for glaciers."
I was feeling much the same way myself. I have traveled by canal-boat,ox-wagon, raft, and by the Ephesus and Smyrna railway; but when it comesdown to good solid honest slow motion, I bet my money on the glacier. Asa means of passenger transportation, I consider the glacier a failure;but as a vehicle of slow freight, I think she fills the bill. In thematter of putting the fine shades on that line of business, I judge shecould teach the Germans something.
I ordered the men to break camp and prepare for the land journey toZermatt. At this moment a most interesting find was made; a dark object,bedded in the glacial ice, was cut out with the ice-axes, and it provedto be a piece of the undressed skin of some animal--a hair trunk,perhaps; but a close inspection disabled the hair-trunk theory, andfurther discussion and examination exploded it entirely--that is, in theopinion of all the scientists except the one who had advanced it. Thisone clung to his theory with affectionate fidelity characteristic oforiginators of scientific theories, and afterward won many of the firstscientists of the age to his view, by a very able pamphlet which hewrote, entitled, "Evidences going to show that the hair trunk, in a wildstate, belonged to the early glacial period, and roamed the wastes ofchaos in the company with the cave-bear, primeval man, and the otherOoelitics of the Old Silurian family."
Each of our scientists had a theory of his own, and put forwardan animal of his own as a candidate for the skin. I sided with thegeologist of the Expedition in the belief that this patch of skin hadonce helped to cover a Siberian elephant, in some old forgotten age--butwe divided there, the geologist believing that this discovery provedthat Siberia had formerly been located where Switzerland is now, whereasI held the opinion that it merely proved that the primeval Swiss was notthe dull savage he is represented to have been, but was a being of highintellectual development, who liked to go to the menagerie.
We arrived that evening, after many hardships and adventures, in somefields close to the great ice-arch where the mad Visp boils and surgesout from under the foot of the great Gorner Glacier, and here we camped,our perils over and our magnificent undertaking successfully completed.We marched into Zermatt the next day, and were received with themost lavish honors and applause. A document, signed and sealed by theauthorities, was given to me which established and endorsed the factthat I had made the ascent of the Riffelberg. This I wear around myneck, and it will be buried with me when I am no more.
CHAPTE
R XL
[Piteous Relics at Chamonix]
I am not so ignorant about glacial movement, now, as I was when I tookpassage on the Gorner Glacier. I have "read up" since. I am aware thatthese vast bodies of ice do not travel at the same rate of speed; whilethe Gorner Glacier makes less than an inch a day, the Unter-Aar Glaciermakes as much as eight; and still other glaciers are said to go twelve,sixteen, and even twenty inches a day. One writer says that the slowestglacier travels twenty-five feet a year, and the fastest four hundred.
What is a glacier? It is easy to say it looks like a frozen river whichoccupies the bed of a winding gorge or gully between mountains. But thatgives no notion of its vastness. For it is sometimes six hundred feetthick, and we are not accustomed to rivers six hundred feet deep; no,our rivers are six feet, twenty feet, and sometimes fifty feet deep; weare not quite able to grasp so large a fact as an ice-river six hundredfeet deep.
The glacier's surface is not smooth and level, but has deep swales andswelling elevations, and sometimes has the look of a tossing sea whoseturbulent billows were frozen hard in the instant of their most violentmotion; the glacier's surface is not a flawless mass, but is a riverwith cracks or crevices, some narrow, some gaping wide. Many a man, thevictim of a slip or a misstep, has plunged down one of these and met hisdeath. Men have been fished out of them alive; but it was when theydid not go to a great depth; the cold of the great depths would quicklystupefy a man, whether he was hurt or unhurt. These cracks do not gostraight down; one can seldom see more than twenty to forty feet downthem; consequently men who have disappeared in them have been soughtfor, in the hope that they had stopped within helping distance, whereastheir case, in most instances, had really been hopeless from thebeginning.
In 1864 a party of tourists was descending Mont Blanc, and while pickingtheir way over one of the mighty glaciers of that lofty region, ropedtogether, as was proper, a young porter disengaged himself from the lineand started across an ice-bridge which spanned a crevice. It broke underhim with a crash, and he disappeared. The others could not see how deephe had gone, so it might be worthwhile to try and rescue him. A braveyoung guide named Michel Payot volunteered.
Two ropes were made fast to his leather belt and he bore the end of athird one in his hand to tie to the victim in case he found him. He waslowered into the crevice, he descended deeper and deeper between theclear blue walls of solid ice, he approached a bend in the crack anddisappeared under it. Down, and still down, he went, into this profoundgrave; when he had reached a depth of eighty feet he passed underanother bend in the crack, and thence descended eighty feet lower, asbetween perpendicular precipices. Arrived at this stage of one hundredand sixty feet below the surface of the glacier, he peered through thetwilight dimness and perceived that the chasm took another turn andstretched away at a steep slant to unknown deeps, for its course waslost in darkness. What a place that was to be in--especially if thatleather belt should break! The compression of the belt threatened tosuffocate the intrepid fellow; he called to his friends to draw him up,but could not make them hear. They still lowered him, deeper and deeper.Then he jerked his third cord as vigorously as he could; his friendsunderstood, and dragged him out of those icy jaws of death.
Then they attached a bottle to a cord and sent it down two hundred feet,but it found no bottom. It came up covered with congelations--evidenceenough that even if the poor porter reached the bottom with unbrokenbones, a swift death from cold was sure, anyway.
A glacier is a stupendous, ever-progressing, resistless plow. It pushesahead of it masses of boulders which are packed together, and theystretch across the gorge, right in front of it, like a long grave or along, sharp roof. This is called a moraine. It also shoves out a morainealong each side of its course.
Imposing as the modern glaciers are, they are not so huge as were somethat once existed. For instance, Mr. Whymper says:
"At some very remote period the Valley of Aosta was occupied by a vastglacier, which flowed down its entire length from Mont Blanc to theplain of Piedmont, remained stationary, or nearly so, at its mouthfor many centuries, and deposited there enormous masses of debris. Thelength of this glacier exceeded EIGHTY MILES, and it drained a basintwenty-five to thirty-five miles across, bounded by the highestmountains in the Alps.
"The great peaks rose several thousand feet above the glaciers, andthen, as now, shattered by sun and frost, poured down their showers ofrocks and stones, in witness of which there are the immense piles ofangular fragments that constitute the moraines of Ivrea.
"The moraines around Ivrea are of extraordinary dimensions. That whichwas on the left bank of the glacier is about THIRTEEN MILES long, andin some places rises to a height of TWO THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTYFEET above the floor of the valley! The terminal moraines (those whichare pushed in front of the glaciers) cover something like twenty squaremiles of country. At the mouth of the Valley of Aosta, the thickness ofthe glacier must have been at least TWO THOUSAND feet, and its width, atthat part, FIVE MILES AND A QUARTER."
It is not easy to get at a comprehension of a mass of ice like that. Ifone could cleave off the butt end of such a glacier--an oblong blocktwo or three miles wide by five and a quarter long and two thousandfeet thick--he could completely hide the city of New York under it,and Trinity steeple would only stick up into it relatively as far as ashingle-nail would stick up into the bottom of a Saratoga trunk.
"The boulders from Mont Blanc, upon the plain below Ivrea, assure usthat the glacier which transported them existed for a prodigious lengthof time. Their present distance from the cliffs from which they werederived is about 420,000 feet, and if we assume that they traveled atthe rate of 400 feet per annum, their journey must have occupied them noless than 1,055 years! In all probability they did not travel so fast."
Glaciers are sometimes hurried out of their characteristic snail-pace.A marvelous spectacle is presented then. Mr. Whymper refers to a casewhich occurred in Iceland in 1721:
"It seems that in the neighborhood of the mountain Kotlugja, largebodies of water formed underneath, or within the glaciers (either onaccount of the interior heat of the earth, or from other causes), and atlength acquired irresistible power, tore the glaciers from their mooringon the land, and swept them over every obstacle into the sea. Prodigiousmasses of ice were thus borne for a distance of about ten miles overland in the space of a few hours; and their bulk was so enormous thatthey covered the sea for seven miles from the shore, and remainedaground in six hundred feet of water! The denudation of the land wasupon a grand scale. All superficial accumulations were swept away, andthe bedrock was exposed. It was described, in graphic language, how allirregularities and depressions were obliterated, and a smooth surface ofseveral miles' area laid bare, and that this area had the appearance ofhaving been PLANED BY A PLANE."
The account translated from the Icelandic says that the mountainlikeruins of this majestic glacier so covered the sea that as far as the eyecould reach no open water was discoverable, even from the highest peaks.A monster wall or barrier of ice was built across a considerable stretchof land, too, by this strange irruption:
"One can form some idea of the altitude of this barrier of ice when itis mentioned that from Hofdabrekka farm, which lies high up on a fjeld,one could not see Hjorleifshofdi opposite, which is a fell six hundredand forty feet in height; but in order to do so had to clamber up amountain slope east of Hofdabrekka twelve hundred feet high."
These things will help the reader to understand why it is that a man whokeeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant byand by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit ofconceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he willonly remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enoughto give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.
The Alpine glaciers move--that is granted, now, by everybody. But therewas a time when people scoffed at the idea; they said you might as wellexpect leagues of solid rock to crawl along the gr
ound as expect leaguesof ice to do it. But proof after proof was furnished, and the finallythe world had to believe.
The wise men not only said the glacier moved, but they timed itsmovement. They ciphered out a glacier's gait, and then said confidentlythat it would travel just so far in so many years. There is record ofa striking and curious example of the accuracy which may be attained inthese reckonings.
In 1820 the ascent of Mont Blanc was attempted by a Russian and twoEnglishmen, with seven guides. They had reached a prodigious altitude,and were approaching the summit, when an avalanche swept several of theparty down a sharp slope of two hundred feet and hurled five of them(all guides) into one of the crevices of a glacier. The life of oneof the five was saved by a long barometer which was strapped to hisback--it bridged the crevice and suspended him until help came. Thealpenstock or baton of another saved its owner in a similar way. Threemen were lost--Pierre Balmat, Pierre Carrier, and Auguste Tairraz. Theyhad been hurled down into the fathomless great deeps of the crevice.
Dr. Forbes, the English geologist, had made frequent visits to the MontBlanc region, and had given much attention to the disputed question ofthe movement of glaciers. During one of these visits he completed hisestimates of the rate of movement of the glacier which had swallowedup the three guides, and uttered the prediction that the glacier woulddeliver up its dead at the foot of the mountain thirty-five years fromthe time of the accident, or possibly forty.
A dull, slow journey--a movement imperceptible to any eye--but it wasproceeding, nevertheless, and without cessation. It was a journeywhich a rolling stone would make in a few seconds--the lofty point ofdeparture was visible from the village below in the valley.