The Alps Part 7

It is not often that you can see the whole of a glacier in a single view, unless it be a very small glacier. Generally you see only a part; but, to one who knows, that part implies the whole. When you see a man's leg you know that there is the rest of him round the corner; from the att.i.tude of what is visible it is often possible to infer much about what is hidden. So, too, is it with a glacier. The more familiar a man is with glacier phenomena, the more certainly can he infer from the known to the unknown. How easy it is with a little practice to tell at a glance whether a bit of white beheld aloft is part of a glacier or merely a bed of winter snow that will presently disappear. The one is modelled by its own motion; the other merely borrows its modelling from the ground on which it lies inertly.

The sense of motion, unity, and life--it is when these are instinctively perceived in glaciers that a view of snow-mountains begins to possess its true significance. Before it had been discovered that glaciers move, people used to call them frightful, terrible, and so forth. Ignorance blinded men's eyes to the beauty that was actually in sight. Not knowing how to look, they could not see it. What forests, gra.s.s, and flowers are to the lower regions, that glaciers are to the higher--they are the vitalising element. Hence the importance to the mountain-lover of learning to know glaciers and familiarising himself with their structure, their ways, and their moods. It is easy enough to declare that every form and movement of a glacier is determined by the action of definite forces--so perhaps are all the ways and doings of men. But we pretend that they are not, and talk of our whims and moods, and may take the same liberty of speech about glaciers.

Every climber knows that there are glaciers of all sorts and characters, and every mountain traveller knows that they behave differently in different climates and lat.i.tudes. In the Arctic regions they flow faster and spread more widely. They have a more viscous appearance to the eye. They bulge and swell at the lower end, so that no one would ever have invented the name "snout" for the termination of an Arctic ice-stream. Moreover they break very readily into creva.s.ses, even upon gentlest inclines in their lower course, whilst high up they seem less ready to form ice-falls than in the Alps. Glaciers in Norway vary from the Arctic to the temperate character as you go from north to south. The glaciers of Lyngen resemble those of Greenland. The glaciers of Jotunheim are almost Alpine--more than Alpine, indeed, in the development of their glorious ice-cascades, but less than Arctic in the outreach of their lower extremities. The glaciers of the Tropics, again, present peculiarities of their own, due to the fact that the ice evaporates rather than melts. Thus their surfaces are dry and almost granitic in aspect. Their towering seracs seldom fall. Avalanches are much rarer than one would expect. Glacier streams are insignificant.

Thus it is in the Bolivian Andes and thus also in the regions of Kenya and Ruwenzori. In the great Asiatic mountain territory there are glaciers of many types, corresponding to the great variety of climates.

Those of Sikkim seem to be almost of the tropical character. Those of the Mustagh are of the temperate sort; and there are many intermediate varieties.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 49. FURGGEN GLACIER ICEFALL. Furggjoch at top of picture.]

Alpine glaciers are of the medium type, lying as they do half-way between the Arctic and tropical extremes. They have not the rapid flow of the Arctic nor the dry rigidity of the tropical sort. Their walls are not silent as in the Central Andes, nor thundered over by continual avalanches like those of the upper Baltoro. They are of medium size also. In a single day almost any of them may be ascended from snout to snow-field, and descended again. To explore their remotest recesses no elaborately equipped expedition is required. Yet they are large enough to be imposing, and penetrate deep enough into the heart of the hills to isolate their votaries completely from the world of human habitation. It is to this medium quality that the Alps owe much of their charm. This, too, it is that makes them an almost perfect mountain play-ground. Were they but a little smaller, how much they would lose that is most precious! Were they larger, how many persons that now can afford the cost and the strength to explore them would have to linger at their gates wistfully looking in. In area, too, they are large enough for grandeur and yet small enough for easy access. No part of them is beyond the range of a summer holiday, yet a commanding view of them is as apparently limitless as is the view from the greatest Asiatic peaks which, thus far, have been climbed. They are the only range of snow-mountains in the world thus blessed with moderation.

It is for this reason that the Alpine climber so soon acquires an understanding of glaciers as units. A novice, after a single year's Alpine experience, can talk easily and with understanding of all the parts of a glacier. It takes twenty seasons to know them well, but the foundations of knowledge can be laid in one. The modern tendency amongst climbers is to devote their main attention to rock-scrambling; but those who have spent the best years of their life amongst mountains, generally end by giving their hearts to glaciers and the high regions of snow. The best advice that can be given to a young climber is, "Learn to know glaciers." They offer the strongest contrast to the ordinary surroundings of life. They present the most varied phenomena. They most readily impress the imagination. They are the vital element, the living inhabitants of the high world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 50. THE GLETSCHERHORN FROM THE PAVILION, HOTEL CATHREIN, CLOSE TO CONCORDIA HUT. One of the finest situations for views of the ice-world where no climbing is required.]

If elsewhere I have praised the charms of contrast, of pa.s.sing from low to high, from fertile to barren, let me here exalt another method.

Who that has tried it will not agree that it is likewise well, sometimes, to hide oneself in the very heart of the upper snows, and there dwell for a while apart from the haunts of men? Formerly this was difficult to accomplish, but now, in the Alps at any rate, it is easy; for well-found high-level huts are many. Such, for instance, is the Becher Refuge, planted in the midst of the Tirolese ubelthal glacier, or the Kursinger Hut, on the north slope of the Gross Venediger. Settled in either of these, you are in the midst of the high snowy world. The _neves_ are within a stone's throw, and the final peaks may be gained by a morning's walk. The Concordia Hut (now Hotel, I believe) is similarly situated; whilst the hut on the top of the Signal Kuppe of Monte Rosa is yet more highly elevated. It is easy to spend a day or two in any of these huts, and so to pa.s.s before the eyes the whole daily drama as it is played upon the heights. So easy is it, that one wonders why more mountain-lovers do not avail themselves of the opportunity. The drawback, of course, is that such a hut is a centre of human activity.

You forsake the hordes of men below, only to join a colony above.

Solitude in these places is not to be had except in bad weather.

There is one way, and one only, by which fully to experience the long emotion of a dweller in the heights: it is to camp out. Few, indeed, are they who have tried it in the Alps. Some have slept in a tent on the mountain-side before a great climb; but they are fewer now than a score of years ago. It is not, however, to such brief lodging I refer; but to a settlement made and victualled for several days. Mr. Whymper, I believe, is one of the few English climbers who has spent many days together with a tent at high alt.i.tudes in the Alps, and he has not published any notice of his experiences. It is a thing I have long wished to do, knowing so well the charms of such life in other mountain regions.

From a high-planted camp you can climb if you must, but you can also enjoy yourself without climbing. To awake on a fine morning in the midst of the snow-fields and see the coming of day at leisure, with no preparations to be made for immediate departure; then to watch the sun climb aloft and flood the depths of the valleys with its glory; to spend the whole day at leisure in the vicinity of your tent, strolling now to look into some bergschrund, now to scramble on to some neighbouring point of rock, returning at intervals to dine, or read some pleasant book, or to sketch in the shadow of the tent;--that is the way to let the mountain-glory sink in. My climbing days on the heights have left me pleasant memories enough, but the high-level days of idleness have been more delightful, even when they were days of storm and driving snow.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 51. THE TRUGBERG. Looking up the Aletsch glacier from corner of Marjelen See.]

To be in the midst of a storm at a high alt.i.tude is a wonderful experience, which all climbers pa.s.s through sooner or later; but it is an uncomfortable experience. When you are camping-out high up you can enjoy a storm far more easily. I have sat warmly in my sleeping-bag and looked out for hours through a c.h.i.n.k of the tent-door, fascinated to watch the whirling of the snow and to listen to the wild music of the gale. It is not the fine weather alone that is fair. There is a yet grander glory in the storms. What can be more superb than to watch the oncoming of such a visitant, to see the white valleys and dark precipices swallowed up in the night of its embrace, to feel the power of its might and the volume of its onrush, and to see and feel all this with the sense of security such as a limpet may be conceived to feel in the presence of waves breaking upon it? Who would not wish to spend a few hours in the Eddystone Lighthouse in the midst of a December gale?

That would surely be worth while; like standing beneath the Falls of Niagara.

Equally wonderful is it when the winds are still and a white fog envelops your little camp. Then you know what it is like to be alone.

Above, around, and below all is impalpable whiteness. You might be floating in the air on a bit of snow-carpet for all the eye can tell you to the contrary. Never is silence more emphatic, not even in the darkest hour of the night. The ear strains with listening and hears only the pulsations of the heart, till some distant falling stone or rumbling avalanche, some crack of a new-forming creva.s.se, some slight shifting of a near snow-bed, sends a shiver through the air. And then, perhaps, there is a writhing in the mist and shortly forms emerge. You cannot tell at first whether they are tiny objects near at hand or remote ma.s.ses. Under such circ.u.mstances I have mistaken a little fragment of paper drifting along the snow for a polar bear! Presently avenues of clearness open up to close again. Finally, the mist grows thin and glittering, the sunshine penetrates it, there is a moment of scorching heat, and lo! all is clear, and the great world around is perfectly revealed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 52. PALLANZA--SUNSET.]

What beauty there is in the great snow-fields that wearied waders through their soft envelope are in no condition to appreciate! For to be seen at their grandest they must be seen in the full glare of mid-daylight, when details are swallowed up in radiant, all-enveloping splendour. Every one knows the glory of overpowering sound. For that orchestras are enlarged and choruses increased in number. Who that has heard the full-throated music of ten thousand men, singing as one, will forget the majesty of that voluminous sonorance? The thunder of great guns is used, by common consent, to express the salutations of a people.

What is true of sound is also true of light. Great views are enn.o.bled by the splendour of full sunshine. There is an indescribable charm about desert sunrises and sunsets, but the glory of the desert is greatest at noon when the sunshine seems to swallow up the world and almost to hide it in excess of brightness. As with the deserts so is it with the snow-fields. When the eye can barely suffer to rest on them, they are most impressive. If there be specks of dust upon the snow, they disappear then from vision. With the brightness comes perfect purity, and the very idea of possible contamination vanishes away.

Reference has been made above to the beauty of linear form presented by many mountains projected against the sky. The great snow-fields have a beauty of surface form, a delicacy and perfection of modelling, far more remarkable. The graceful outline of a rock-peak, such as the Matterhorn, is, after all, a conception based upon a fact. The actual outline is a line elaborately jagged, which the eye converts into a continuous curve by purposely neglecting to observe the small indentations. But the curvature of a _neve_ is often apparently perfect. Its slight imperfections are too small for the eye to see even when they are looked for. Where it curves over, the outline of its edge is as delicate as any line that can be fashioned by the most elaborate artifice. No razor's edge is apparently more true. So also are the surfaces, in the perfection of their rise and fall. Not more perfect are the heavings of the last dying swell on a calming tropical ocean. But the swelling of the snows is still, and can be watched from dawn to eve with the incredibly delicate shades upon it that change with the hours yet never grow coa.r.s.e, only towards the day's end they become blue and bluer, till the pink lights of sunset melt against them before the pallor of night comes on.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 53. KRANZBERG--ROTTHALHORN--AND JUNGFRAU: SUNSET.]

The details of the snow-fields are few, except when the surface is forced to break up by submerged inequalities of the glacier's bed. Then _neve_ ice-falls are formed, which are far more majestic than the ice-falls of the middle region (such as that of the Col du Geant). The high ice-falls are always deeply covered with recent snow, and the broken white mantle upon the tumbled chaos produces mysterious hollows and gives rise to long fringes of glittering icicles not elsewhere in summer to be seen. To gaze into a creva.s.se in such a situation is to look into a veritable fairy's grotto, where the recesses are bluer and the walls more white than the memory ever avails to recall, and where the icicles seem to be hung for the very purpose of sublime decoration.

Glimpses of such sights are often granted to the mere climber as he hastily scrambles over a bergschrund by an insecure snow-bridge; but he has no time to stop for half an hour and let his fancy play truant in the depths. To do that, one must be living aloft, with all the day to spend as one pleases, no peak to attain and return from, within short time-limits, and no companions to say "Hurry up."

Perhaps these pages may have the good fortune to inspire some mountain-lover with the wish to camp out aloft. A suggestion may, therefore, not be out of place. Let the intending high-level resident choose the situation of his camp with care. It must be out of the way of excursionists, or he will be invaded by continual visitors, who will expect entertainment and will thus deplete his stores and spoil his solitude. It ought not, however, to be difficult of access, or the problem of revictualling will be complicated and expensive. Such a camp should consist of two tents--one of them for guides or porters. The traveller's tent should be solid, and should possess a double roof or fly, so that it may be occupied with comfort in the hot hours of the day. It should be so firmly planted that no gale can overthrow it. Its furniture should be sufficient for comfort. Do not plan to move on from day to day, but settle down for a week or more at one spot, where there are rocks for a tent platform, and short scrambles that can be safely undertaken alone. Let the snow-field be near also, a snow-field that can be traversed on _ski_, and do not forget to take the _ski_ with you, nor fear that you will not be able to use them on fairly level ground without previous practice. Keep a man with you to fetch water and do the rough cooking, so that all your time may be your own to enjoy to the full a rare opportunity which may not come again.

The middle region of the glaciers is the region best known to the votaries of the Alps, because it is the most accessible from the popular hotels. This middle region may be defined as limited by the snow-line above and the tree-level below. It is therefore larger towards the end of the season as the snow-line is pushed up by the melting of the winter snows. On the Aletsch glacier it roughly corresponds with the stretch between the Belalp and the Concordia; on the Gorner glacier with the corresponding stretch between the Riffelhorn and the foot of Monte Rosa.

Its characteristic features are the open creva.s.ses and the flowing or standing water on the surface of the ice. This is the place to come to for glacier picnics. It is the paradise of the moderate walker or the superannuated mountaineer. It is a safe region for the experienced to wander over alone, and for the inexperienced to visit with experts. You can start late and be back early. You need not venture forth before the weather has declared its intentions. Hence it is the popular glacier belt, and its beauties are best known and most widely appreciated.

If it lacks the aloofness and romance of the _neves_, it possesses ample charms of its own. The impressive silence of the heights is here replaced by a chorus of the voices of many waters. The large simplicity and sweeping forms of the snow-fields give way here to a multiplicity of detailed forms that require time to appreciate and understand. Every step in this area yields a new wonder, a fresh incident, another surprise. All around is continual change as you go along. There is no end to the features that demand and reward your attention. No wonder that glacier wandering at this level should be so popular an amus.e.m.e.nt.

What is its princ.i.p.al and characteristic charm? Undoubtedly the water, and the phenomena to which it gives rise. To begin with, there are the streams, small and great. The little trickles, that creep between the lumps of the uneven surface and deepen the furrow dividing them. They flow and unite together like the veins of a leaf, thus giving rise to larger arteries, and these by their union to yet larger. Thus the main drainage torrents are formed, which, on great Arctic and Himalayan glaciers, become veritable rivers, impossible to be leapt over or forded. The beds of these torrents are blue in colour and like transparent gla.s.s in aspect--a lovely contrast with the general surface of the glacier. For that is made white by the innumerable fissures that penetrate its surface, due to the dissolvent effect of the sun's heat, from which the icy water protects the bed of a stream. It is a favourite pastime to sit beside such a torrent and watch the water flow by between its white banks, one in bright sunshine, the other, perhaps, in shadow, with the blue ribbon of transparent ice between them and crystalline water scampering along with an aspect of joy in freedom.

But there is a grim fate in store for it not far ahead. It must make haste to laugh in the sunshine while it can, and to display its short-lived clearness. Next time we see it, it will be thick and unclean with sediment, and far below in the valleys where men live and work.

Little, however, does it seem to care as it hurries and dances along, and throws up its little glittering, splashing hands into the air. We follow it downward, and soon hear a musical booming not far away, like the note of a deep organ pipe. It is a _moulin_ or pot-hole, a cylindrical perforation of the glacier into which the torrent leaps, and where it disappears, to flow thenceforward in darkness along the rocky bed of the glacier, till it reappears at the snout into the open valley.

Even lovelier than the streams are the pools on the surface of a glacier, when they have a clean floor unsoiled by moraine or sandy deposit. These pools are sometimes of large dimensions. They, too, have blue basins with white edges. Looked down upon from a distance, they appear like great sapphire eyes gazing at the heavens. Seldom, if ever, in the Alps are such pools found in the _neve_ region; to behold them there, one must go to Arctic glaciers, of which they form one of the chief glories. If the lakes on the Gorner glacier do not equal those for purity or perfection of contrast between untainted blue and unsullied white, they are none the less most lovely. Sometimes a lake may be found not on but beside a glacier, where the ice forms one bank and the mountain another. Such are the Marjelen See by the Great Aletsch, and the little-visited lake at the west foot of Monte Rosa. On these you may see floating or stranded ma.s.ses of ice, and perchance find one that has recently turned over, displaying its blue part that was before submerged.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 54. MaRJELEN SEE AND GREAT ALETSCH GLACIER. Winter ice not yet melted on the lake.]

Now and again, if you look for them, you will find creva.s.ses filled with water, whose depth renders up a yet bluer tone than can elsewhere be met with in the regions of ice. Perhaps, at one end the creva.s.se will be roofed over, and there you may gaze into the deep shadow and find the blue deepen almost to black. If you drop in a stone, you may hear the bubbles come rippling up and the wavelets lapping against the sides. If the roof be thin enough, a hole may be made in it with the ice-axe, and a beam of sunshine admitted which will increase the scale of the harmony in blue. Well do I remember one glorious pool of water, roofed over with a dome of ice, through which the sunshine glimmered. At one side was a natural portal, at the other a window. Two or three white blocks of ice floated on the water, and its uneven depths were of all tones from sky-blue to black; but that was in Spitsbergen, where glacier details are far lovelier than the Alps can show.

But the middle glacier region, the region of what is fantastically called the "dry glacier," presents other charms than those of water.

Note, for example, the brilliance of its surface and the peculiarity of its texture. It consists of an infinite mult.i.tude of loosely compacted rounded fragments of ice with a little water soaking down between them.

If you watch it closely, you will see that the moving water makes a shimmering in the cracks between the ice-fragments. You will also observe that the blue of the solid ice below the skin of fragments appears dimly through the white, and the least tap with an ice-axe to sc.r.a.pe away the surface reveals it clearly. Each little fragment of ice has a separate glitter of its own, so that the whole surface sparkles with a frosted radiance. It is not the same at dawn after a cold night, for then there is no water between the fragments, but all is hard and solid. No sooner, however, does the sun shine upon them, than the bonds are released and the ice-crystals begin to break up with a gentle tinkling sound and little flashes of light reflected from tiny wet mirror-surfaces. One can spend hours watching these small phenomena as happily as gazing upon the great mountains themselves. Size is a relative term. The biggest mountain in relation to the earth is no greater than is one of these small ice-fragments in relation to a glacier. Reduce the scale in imagination and the smallest object may be endowed with grandeur, for all such conceptions are subjective.

The open creva.s.ses that are never far away on the dry glacier are full of beauties. It is not easy to tire of peering down into them. Sometimes one may be found into which a man armed with an ice-axe may effect a descent. He will not stay there long, for the depths are cold. Once I was able not only to descend into a creva.s.se but to follow it beyond its open part into the very substance of the glacier. It was a weird place, good to see but not good to remain in, and I was glad to return to sunshine very soon.

The moraines and scattered stones that are frequently encountered on the dry glacier are more interesting than beautiful. It is well to make the acquaintance of the medial moraines and to scramble over them, first for the wider view that one gets from the top, and next in order to realise their dimensions, always larger than one expects. Seen from a distance medial moraines look smaller than they are. The eye must be educated to realise their true dimensions. When that has been accomplished, the great scale of the glacier that carries them can be felt, but not before.

There is generally a breeze blowing over a dry glacier, so that when the pleasant luncheon-hour arrives, a sheltered spot must be sought out, one open to the sun and protected against the breeze, with good water near at hand, and stones of convenient dimensions for seats and tables.

Experienced wanderers will detect such spots far sooner than novices. It is with them as with good camping grounds: they are not easy to identify at a glance, but they are well worth hunting out.

So also is it with points suitable for photography. A dry glacier is full of details for a camera, and yet how few good photographs does one see taken at this level among the mountains, unless they be distant views. Nowhere are there better foregrounds to be discovered; yet when they are looked for, how hard it is to find them. The composition is generally faulty in the inexperienced amateur's picture. But those who are experienced in the art seem to find suitable foregrounds everywhere.

It is the result of much taking thought.

Generally it happens that the return from a day's glacier wandering leads up the hillside along the margin, so that as we ascend, the area of our adventures spreads itself out below, and the eye can range over the whole of it at once. We look for the place where we lunched, for the broad streams with difficulty crossed, for the large pools we looked down into. They are not often discoverable. What looked so important near at hand has shrunk to an insignificant unidentifiable detail. The river is one of hundreds of the same kind. The pools are innumerable.

The moraine stretches along for miles, and one of its mounds seems like another. We thus begin to realise the size of the great icy expanse. Our track over it has revealed but little of the mult.i.tude of sights there are to see. We have but glanced at a few samples out of countless thousands. Were we to return on the morrow we could not retrace our steps, nor find again the objects we saw to-day. For a moment the grand scale of the glacier imposes itself upon us, but before night has gone we shall have forgotten it. Only by coming again and yet again does it gradually sink into our understandings and become a part of the habit of thought with which we approach the Alps.

CHAPTER X

ALPINE PASTURES

It is to be feared that the reader, whose persistence has availed to carry him thus far through the adventure of this book, may bring an accusation against me, on the ground that each form and type of scenery, as in its turn it has come to be discussed, has been described in language of too superlative praise, as though it and it alone were pre-eminent above all other Alpine forms and types. Let me forthwith confess that the accusation is well founded; for the fact is that, whether the attention be turned upon peaks of rock or domes of snow, upon cliffs or aiguilles, upon snow-fields or ice-falls, upon pa.s.ses, alps, or valleys, the kind under immediate consideration always seems the finest, the central type and the most beautiful. We quit the valleys for the high snows in search of beauty. From the heights we return to the valleys on the same quest. Everywhere we may find it, and to find it is all we need ask; for it is like pure gold, whereof no fragment is intrinsically more precious than another. Each new-found nugget seems for the moment best of all.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 55. THE CASTLE OF ZaHRINGEN-KYBURG, THUN.]

Beauty is not the prerogative of any zone or level of the mountains more than of any other. It is of different kinds in different regions, but not of different degrees. Some kinds may appeal to one man more than other kinds, but these in their turn will be preferred by a man of different disposition, and neither can boast that his taste is superior.

Youthful vigour may find the keen consciousness of beauty most readily arising after difficulties have been overcome. Age may feel its sense of beauty deadened by toil. In neither case is the power of appreciation to be regarded as a test of the quality of the beauty perceived; it is merely an indication of the character of the person perceiving it.

The normal Alpine climber is more sensitive to the beauty of the high regions than to the beauty of low levels. Nor is the fact surprising. He values that which he wins by toil, as is the natural habit of man. Yet he will by no means deny that there are beauties of the valleys and the middle regions, though he may freely confess that they appeal to him less powerfully. But even he, lying upon some high pasture or in the borders of a wood on some off-day, when the sun shines brightly and the peaks that he knows and loves look down upon him through a clear atmosphere, will realise consciously enough the fascination of the scene. The beauty of the middle region, however, stands in need of no apology, of no lengthy recommendation, for this is the region which the ordinary traveller most frequents and specially a.s.sociates with his Alpine ramblings. The valleys are the home of the tripper; the alpine pastures, of the tourist; the snows, of the climber. Each cla.s.s perhaps looks down upon the one below, but each is well rewarded and may rest content with what it receives.

The gra.s.sy region between the belt of forest and the snows is known in Switzerland as the alps or high pastures, and it is from these "alps"

that the great mountain range of Central Europe takes its name. An alp is essentially a summer grazing ground. It is the locality of cattle and horses, sheep and goats. A high Alpine village without an alp is an exceptional place. The normal village needs an alp for its equipment as much as it needs fields and woodland. The fact that there is an alp for summer grazing enables the gra.s.s lands at lower levels to be used as hay-fields; thus a supply of winter feed for the cattle is procured. Hay is also cut on some of the lower alps, but that is an exceptional use.