IN THE ALPS
(SWITZERLAND)
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
The foot of the high mountains that form the chain of Mount Blanc, clothed with forests and pastures, revealed hues of delightful intensity and vigour. Imagine an immense piece of green velvet crumpled into large folds like the curtain of a theatre with the deep black of its hollows and the golden glitterings of its lights; this is a very faint image for the grandeur of the object, but I know of none that could better describe the effect.
Scheele’s green, mineral green, all those greens that result from the combinations of Prussian blue and yellow ochre, or Naples yellow, the mixture of indigo and Indian yellow, Veronese green and vert prasin could not reproduce that quality of green that we might properly call mountain green and which passes from velvety black into the tenderest shades of green. In this play of shades, the firs form the shadows; the deciduous trees and the spaces of meadow or moss, the lights. The undulations and the cleft ravines of the mountain break these great masses of green, this vigorous foreground, this energetic répoussoir, rendering the light tones of the zones, (bare of verdure and crowned by the high lights of the snows,) more vaporous and throwing them back. In the various more open places, the grass grows green in the sun; and trees resembling little black patches sown upon this light ground give it the appearance of tufted material. But when we speak of trees and firs, woods and forests, do not picture to yourselves anything but vast blots of dark moss upon the slopes of the mountains: the highest trunks there assume the proportion of a blade of grass.
The road turns towards the left, and, gliding between stones and blocks that have fallen down or drifted into the valley by means of the winter torrents and avalanches, soon enters a forest of birch-trees, firs, and larches whose openings allow you to see on the other side the Aiguilles Rouges and le Brevent, which face Montanvert. The ascent was gentle enough and the mules climbed it with easy gait; in comparison with the road which we scaled the night before to go to the Pierre pointue, the route was a true alley of the Bois de Boulogne. The zigzags of the road turned at angles sufficiently long not to fatigue either the rider or his mount. The sunlight played in the foliage of the forest that we traversed and made a shadow shot through with rays float over us. Upon the rocks at the foot of the trees, mosses of emerald green gleamed and lovely little wild flowers brightly bloomed, while in the spaces through the branches a bluish mist betrayed the depth of the abyss, for the little caravan, going along single file and constantly ascending, had now reached the Caillet fountain, which is regarded as half-way up the mountain. This fountain, of excellent water, runs into a wooden trough. The mules halt there to drink. A cabin is built near the fountain and they offer you a glass of water made opalescent with a few drops of kirsch, cognac, beer, and other refreshments. We regaled our guides with a glass of brandy, which, notwithstanding their sobriety, they seemed to prefer to that diamond liquid that sprang from the rock.
From this point, the road began to grow steeper; the ascents multiplied without, however, offering any difficulties to mules or pedestrians. The air became more keen. The forest grew lighter, the trees stood at greater intervals from each other and stopped as if out of breath. They seemed to say to us, “Now, go up alone, we cannot go any further.” The rounded plateau that we mount by keeping to the right is not desolate and denuded as one would believe; a grass, sturdy enough and enamelled with Alpine flowers, forms its carpet, and when you have gone beyond it, you perceive the châlet or inn of Montanvert below the Aiguille de Charmoz.
From this plateau you have a superb view, an astonishing, apocalyptic view, beyond all dreams. At your feet, between two banks of gigantic peaks, flows motionless, as if congealed during the tumult of a tempest, that broad river of crystal which is called the Mer de Glace, and which lower towards the plain is called the Glacier des Bois. The Mer de Glace comes from a high altitude; it receives many glaciers as a river its tributaries. We will speak of it presently, but for the moment let us occupy ourselves with the spectacle that unfolds beneath our eyes.
Opposite the inn of Montanvert, the glacier is half a league from one bank to the other, perhaps even more, for it is difficult to gauge distance in the mountains with exactness; it is about the width of the Thames, the Neva or the Guadalquiver towards their mouth. But the slope is much more abrupt than was ever that of any river. It descends by large waves rounded at their tops, like billows that never break into foam and whose hollows take a bluish colour. When the ground that serves as a bed for this torrent of ice becomes too abrupt, the mass is dislocated and breaks up into slabs that rest one upon the other and which resemble those little columns of white marble in the Turkish cemeteries that are forced to lean to right or left by their own weight; crevasses more or less wide and deep manifest themselves, opening the immense block and revealing the virgin ice in all its purity. The walls of these crevasses assume magical colours, tints of an azure grotto. An ideal blue that is neither the blue of the sky nor the blue of the water, but the blue of ice, an unnamed tone that is never found on the artist’s palette illumines these splendid clefts and turns sometimes to a green of aqua marine or mother of pearl by gradations of astonishing delicacy. On the other bank, clearly detached by its sharp escarpment like the spire of a gigantic cathedral, the high Aiguille du Dru rises with so proud, so elegant, and so bold a spring. Ascending the glacier, the Aiguille Verte stands out in front of it, being even higher though the perspective makes it appear lower. From the foot of the Aiguille du Dru, like a rivulet towards a river, descends the Mont Blanc glacier. A little further to the right, the Aiguille du Moine and that of Léchaud show themselves, obelisks of granite which the sunlight tints with reflections of rose and the snow makes gleam with several touches of silver. It is difficult to express in words the unexpected outlines, the strange flashes, the tops cut and indented in the form of saw-teeth, gable-ends and crosses that are affected by these inaccessible peaks with almost vertical walls,—often even sloping outwards and overhanging. Running your eye along the same bank of the glacier and descending towards the valley, you see the Aiguille du Bochard, le Chapeau, which is nothing more or less than a rounded mountain, grassy and enamelled with flowers, not so high as Montanvert, and the forests which have given to this portion of the Mer de Glace the name of Glacier des Bois, bordering it with a line of sombre verdure.
MONT BLANC.
There are in the Mer de Glace two veins that divide it throughout its length like the currents of two rivers that never mingle: a black vein and a white vein. The black one flows by the side of the bank where the Aiguille du Dru rears itself, and the white one bathes the foot of Montanvert; but words when we speak of colour only half describe shades, and it must not be imagined that this demarcation is as clearly defined as we have indicated. It is, however, very sensible.
On looking towards the upper portion of the glacier, at the spot where it precipitates itself into the rock passage which conducts it to the valley like a furiously boiling cascade with wild spurts which some magic power has turned into ice at its strongest leap, you discover, arranged like an amphitheatre, the Montagne des Périades, the Petites Jorasses, the Grandes Jorasses, and the Aiguille du Géant, covered with eternal snow, the white diadem of the Alps which the suns of summer are powerless to melt and which scintillate with a pure and cold brilliancy in the clear blue of the sky.
At the foot of the Périades, the glacier, as may be seen from Montanvert, divides into two branches, one of which ascends towards the east and takes the name of the Glacier de Léchaud, while the other takes its course behind the Aiguilles de Chamouni towards Mont Blanc du Tacul, and is called the Glacier du Géant. A third branch, named the Glacier du Talifre, spreads out over the slopes of the Aiguille Verte.
It is in the middle of the Talifre where lies that oasis of the glaciers that is called the Jardin, a kind of basket of Alpine flowers, which find there a pinch of vegetable earth, a few rays of sunshine, and a girdle of stones that isolate them from the neighbouring ice; but to climb to the Jardin is a long, fatiguing and even dangerous excursion, necessitating a night’s sleep at the châlet of Montanvert.
We resumed our journey not without having gathered several bunches of rhododendrons of the freshest green and brightest rose, that opened in the liberty and solitude of the mountains by means of the pure Alpine breeze. You descend by the same route more rapidly than you ascended.
AIGUILLE DU DRU, ALPS.
The mules stepped gaily by the side of their leaders, who carried the sticks, canes and umbrellas, which had now become useless. We traversed the forest of pines pierced here and there by the torrents of stones of the avalanches; we gained the plain and were soon at Chamouni to go to the source of the Arveiron, which is found at the base of the Glacier des Bois, the name that is assumed by the Mer de Glace on arriving in the valley.
This is an excursion that you can make in a carriage. You follow the bottom of the valley, cross the Arve at the hamlet of Praz, and after having passed the Hameau des Bois, where you must alight, you arrive, winding among masses of rocks in disorder and pools of water across which logs are placed, at the wall of the glacier, which reveals itself by its slit and tortured edges, full of cavities and gashes where the blue-green hatchings colour the transparent whiteness of the mass.
The white teeth of the glacier stand out clearly against the sombre green of the forests of Bochard and Montanvert and are majestically dominated by the Aiguille du Dru, which shoots its granite obelisk three thousand nine hundred and six metres into the depths of the sky, and the foreground is formed by the most prodigious confusion of stones, rocks and blocks that a painter could wish for giving value to those vapourous depths. The Arveiron foams and roars across this chaos and, after half an hour of frantic disordered course, loses itself in the Arve.
Les Vacances de Lundi (Paris, 1881).