Made a tumult that forever whirls
Round through that air, with solid darkness stained,
Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies.”
The peasants tell old stories of ice-gods ruling and thundering with strange sounds, and the “lamentations and loud moans” of prisoners in these frozen caves. The legends people the glaciers only with gloomy, unhappy beings, trembling with fear, weighed down by some malediction. Professor Helm has made a careful survey of the Alpine glaciers, and reckons them at eleven hundred and fifty-five, of which Swiss territory includes four hundred and seventy-one. He estimates the total superficial area of these glaciers between three thousand and four thousand square kilometres; the area of the Swiss glaciers is put down as eighteen hundred and thirty-nine square kilometres. They begin in the Canton of Glarus, extend to the Grisons, thence to the Canton of Uri, and finally down to Bern. Of these Swiss glaciers, one hundred and thirty-eight are of the first rank,—that is, over four and three-quarters of a mile long. Eight glaciers unite at the foot of Monte Rosa, seven at the foot of the Matterhorn, and five at the foot of the Finsteraarhorn. The Mer de Glace, which surrounds the Bernina, is more than sixteen leagues in circumference. Its tempestuous waves, with azure reflections like lava, pile themselves in the defiles, precipitate themselves into the gorges, or run by a rapid descent into the depths of the valleys; sometimes they leap up between two points of rocks, dart into space, and remain suspended above the abyss till the day when their frozen sheet is broken up and hurled into its depths. There are few grander sights than the Bernina, with its boldly contoured granitic rocks and its glaciers creeping low down into the valleys. The Canton of Grisons, of which the Engadine forms a part, counts more than one hundred and fifty glaciers. The great ice-fields of the Bernese Oberland consist of one hundred and eight to one hundred and twenty square miles in extent, and are the most extensive in Europe. The boundaries are the Valais, the Grimsel, the valley of the Aar, and the Gemmi, and spread over more than two hundred and thirty thousand acres. The longest glacier is the Gross Aletsch of the Bernese Oberland; it is fifteen miles long, and has a basin forty-nine and eight-tenths square miles, and a maximum breadth of nineteen hundred and sixty-eight yards. The Rhone glacier is admired for its natural beauties, more especially on account of its terminal face, furrowed by huge crevasses. The lowest point to which a Swiss glacier is known to have descended is three thousand two hundred and twenty-five feet, attained by the Lower Grindelwald glacier in 1818. As to the thickness of the glaciers there exist no reliable data. In the series of investigations and measurements made by Professor Agassiz on the Aar glacier, fifty years ago, he excavated to a depth of two hundred and sixty metres (over eight hundred and thirty feet), and did not get to the bottom. He estimated the depth of the Aar glacier, at a point below the junction of the Finsteraarhorn and Lauter-Aar glaciers, at four hundred and sixty metres, or about fifteen hundred and ten feet. In viewing these glaciers no one, however sceptical, however unimaginative, can doubt the honesty of the great fiery Swiss naturalist’s belief in the historical reality of a glacial epoch, that this part of Switzerland is the natural result of the terrific orgy and dynamic force of profound glaciation, and that
“Yon towers of ice
Since the creation’s dawn have known no thaw.”
The upper part of the glacier is known as the Névé or Firn, and it is the lower part alone which is designated among the Swiss as the glacier. The névés are those fields of dazzling snow which extend above the zone of the glaciers, and their incessant transformation produces the glaciers. This snow of the névés does not resemble that lower down; it is harder, colder, and has the appearance of needles of pounded ice or little crystallized stars, and the alternations from frost to thaw give to this snow the brilliance of metal and a consistency approaching that of ice. The name Moraine is given to those piles of stones, pebbles, blocks of rock, débris of all sorts that the glacier brings down with it in its course, and which it gets rid of as soon as possible. “The glacier is always cleansing itself,” and if it expands, it breaks up and disperses its moraine; it pushes it, throwing out and piling on the sides even the largest blocks of stone. If, on the contrary, it contracts, part of this chaos of débris, left in its place, becomes covered by degrees with a carpet of turf. When two glaciers descend by opposite valleys, abutting on the same bed, and meet, their moraines mingle with one another, and are sometimes piled up till they attain a width of almost a thousand feet and a height of about seventy. The Moulins form conduits for the surface-water, to carry it to the under-ground streams flowing beneath the glacier.
Enormous masses of snow accumulate in some angle or on some ledge of the mountains until they either fall by their own weight or are broken off by oscillations of the air, or the warm ground thaws the lower stratum, and then the mass begins to slide, gaining in bulk and speed in its course. This is the terrible avalanche, and dwellings and even entire villages are buried from thirty to fifty feet deep. It sometimes descends with a force which causes it to rebound up the side of the opposite mountain. The avalanche produces a prodigious roar, not a reverberation of sound, but a prolongation of sound more metallic and musical than thunder, and may be heard at a great distance. An avalanche may be set in motion by a very trifling disturbance of the air: the flight of a bird, the cracking of a whip, the conversation of persons going along, sometimes suffices to shake and loosen it from the vertical face of the cliffs to which it is clinging:
“Ye toppling crags of ice,
Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down