Mountains at once excite and satisfy an ideal in the soul, which holds kin with the divine in nature. They ennoble life by their majesty and fortify it by their stately beauty. The human mind thirsts after immensity and immutability, and duration without bounds; but it needs some tangible object from which to take its flight, something present to lead to futurity, something bounded from whence to rise to the infinite. “Earth has built the great watch-towers of the mountains, and they lift their heads far up into the sky and gaze ever upward and around to see if the judge of the world comes not.”[94] Their cloud-capped summits are awful in their mysterious shrouds of darkness, and their sudden thunder crashing amid overhanging precipices is often terrible in its shock. With many their gloomy sublimity, hard, jagged, and torn, produces an uncomfortable feeling: Goethe wrote, “Switzerland with its mountains at first made so great an impression upon me that it disturbed and confused me, only after repeated visits did I feel at my ease among them.” There is something inexpressibly interesting in their society, their age, their duration without change, and their majestic repose; their fixed, frozen, changeless glory. The sun rolls his purple tides of light through the air that surrounds their summits, but his beams wake no seed-time and ripen no harvest. The moon and the stars rise and move, and decline along the horizon, century after century, but the sweet vicissitudes of the season and of time move not the sympathies of these pale, stern peaks, over which broods one eternal winter. Upon them the vivifying and ordering syllables of creation seem never to have passed; a realm of chaos reserved to the primeval empire of the formless and the void; where there is brilliance without warmth, summer without foliage, and days but no duties. Beneath the overwhelming radiance of a world of light, whose reflection makes every valley beneath them rejoice, these giants flaunt their crowns of snow everlastingly in the very face of the sun. They are so sharply defined and distinct that they seem to be within arm’s reach; apparent nearness, yet a sense of untraversable remoteness, like heaven itself, at once the most distant from us and the nearest. Their angle of elevation, seen from a distance, is very small indeed. Faithfully represented in a drawing, the effect would be insignificant; but their aerial perspective amply restores the proportions lost in the mathematical perspective. “Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery,” and there is no Landseer for Alpine pictures. They are too vast and too simple; and the scene, though its objects are so few, is too expanded for the canvas.
The Glaciers of the Alps, frozen streams of ice, are remarkable phenomena of nature, and possess the greatest interest for geologists. The name Glacier is French; the German word is Gletscher, and the Italian Ghiacciaio. Ruskin calls them “silent and solemn causeways, broad enough for the march of an army in a line of battle, and quiet as a street of tombs in a buried city;” Longfellow describes them as “resembling a vast gauntlet, of which the gorge represents the wrist, while the lower glacier, cleft by its fissures into fingers, like ridges, is typified by the hand.” With the exception of the Engadine, where the limits do not begin below ten thousand and seventy feet, in the other parts of Switzerland the limit of the glaciers and of the eternal snow is met with at eight thousand seven hundred and forty to nine thousand one hundred and eighty feet. The average height of the snow-line fluctuates according to north or south aspect, and greater or less exposure to the south wind, but in exceptionally warm summers, the snow completely melts away on summits having an altitude of over eleven thousand feet. The common expression, the “line of perpetual snow,” is misleading; it is only correctly used to indicate the altitude above which the mountains always appear white, because at that height it is merely the surface which at times thus gets partially melted. These masses of ice or glaciers are called streams, because, though imperceptibly, they really move along; they are continually descending towards the valley from the mountain-tops:
“The glacier’s cold and restless mass
Moves onward day by day.”
Their immobility is only apparent, they move and advance without ceasing. Careful investigation has ascertained the rate of motion of a glacier to be as much as two feet in twenty-four hours; but it is a curious fact that the whole stream does not move at the same rate; the centre moves quicker than the sides and drags them after it. Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist, began in 1842 a series of careful observations on the Aar glacier, taking up his abode in a little hut constructed on purpose, and called the “Hôtel des Neuchâtelois.” Men mocked at him when he set up his stakes on the glacier to discover the rate of the invisible motion, but he persisted in his minute, painstaking labors, futile and inconsequential as they seemed to the unscientific mind, till he plucked out from every glacier in Switzerland the heart of its mysterious movement. He held that the differences in speed between different and sundry parts of the same glacier were the results of unequal density and of unequal declivity. Savants differ as to the causes which set the glacier in motion. Schaelzer holds that its expansion arises from thaw; Professor Hugi is of the same opinion, that the glacier, like an enormous sponge filled with aqueous particles, expands and grows larger when it freezes. Of all the theories that of De Saussure is the most generally accepted. He attributes the forward movement of a glacier to gravitation,—that is to say, to the pressure of the superior masses on the inferior. Certain naturalists affirm that the glaciers add to their power by their own cold, and that in time, without the intervention of some new natural phenomenon, they will eventually extend themselves downward into the valleys that lie on the next level beneath, overcoming vegetation and destroying life. There must be a limit somewhere to the increase of the ice, and it is almost certain that these limits have been attained during the centuries that the present physical formation of Switzerland is known to have existed. As a whole, the contest between heat and cold ought to be set down as producing equal effects.
The constant heavy pressure on the glacial ice, and the tension resulting from obstacles in the channel followed by it, cause splits of large masses to occur, and force them so far to separate that there is no chance of regelation. These splits are the crevasses met with in many glaciers, and one of the most dangerous features to climbers, especially when they are concealed by a treacherous coating of snow. The transverse crevasses are so close together and form such a bewildering labyrinth that it requires a good pilot and experienced guide to steer clear of their difficulties. In proportion as the glacier develops, these crevasses or fissures enlarge. Some of them form into deep valleys, abysses, and unfathomable gulfs. If one falls into a crevasse, it is alleged he hears everything that is said above him, but cannot make himself heard. The ice of these fissures has tints of extraordinary fineness and delicacy; it is of a pale and tender blue, but if you detach a piece to examine it in full light, its beautiful ideal blue color disappears, and you have nothing in your hand but a pale, colorless block. The crevasses, at times all lined with the purest, smoothest snow, open up like great alcoves, hung in clouds of ice with delicate ornaments thrown on them by the wind. They modify and change every spring, when the winter’s accumulation of snow melts under the action of the heat, and the frost of the nights incorporates it with the glacier. The guides, therefore, before conducting parties at the beginning of the season, sound the old crevasses, and study the new features of the glacier, its curves, its bridges of snow suspended in the air, its abysses covered with a frail surface, its fantastic architecture of staircases and terraces of ice. The glacier ice, made of annual beds disposed in vertical bands of white and blue, does not resemble ordinary ice, which is homogeneous throughout; it is granular, traversed by a multitude of small canals, by a net-work of veins in which a bluish water circulates, and which penetrates the whole thickness of the ice. The water that escapes from a glacier is either black, like ink, or green, like absinthe, or white, like milk; it is always troubled, and charged with mud or earth full of fertilizing matter. So, while the glaciers make the higher valleys into a land of desolation and misery, lower down on the slopes that drink life from its flood, it is a garden, an orchard, a rich vine country, smiling hill-sides, shaded with trees and crowned with flowers. While a glacier is a stream of ice, it is not formed of frozen water, but of frozen snow. The snow of the mountain-top is a fine dry powder, which is formed into a granular mass by the action of the sun shining on it in the middle of the day; what is thus partially melted quickly freezes again each evening into globular forms, consequently a glacier is not slipping like ordinary ice. This process has gone on for unknown ages. Geologists think that the glaciers of the present day are “mere pigmies as compared to the giants of the glacial epoch;” and that their action has had much to do with the architecture of the Alps; that the ice exerts a crushing force on every point of its bed which bears its weight, and the glaciers would naturally scoop out and carve the mountains and valleys into the slopes which we now see; and that the plains of Italy and Switzerland are covered with débris of the Alps. These geologists are pretty well agreed that the Lake of Geneva was excavated by a glacier. Whatever may be thought of the erosive theory, there is no doubt that these dreary wastes of ice are of great use in the economy of nature. They are the locked-up reservoirs, the sealed fountains which immediately fertilize the plains of Lombardy, the valley of the Rhone, and of Southern Germany, and from which the vast rivers traversing the great continents of our globe are sustained. The summer heat, which dries up sources of water, first opens out their bountiful supplies. When the rivers of the plain begin to shrink and dwindle within their parched beds, the torrents of the Alps, fed by the melting snow and glaciers, rush down from the mountains and supply the deficiency. Professor Hugi’s hypothesis, that the glacier is alive, is often suggested by the singular noises produced by the forcing of air and water through passages in the body of the glacier. In the eyes of the credulous mountaineers who live in the silence which broods over the sombre cliffs, the glacier is a place of grief and exile, of penance and punishment, of expiation and tears, such a place as described by Dante in his “Inferno,” where
“... various tongues,
Horrible languages, outcries of woe,
Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse,
With hands together smote, that swelled the sounds,