The prevailing forms which result from glacier action are more or less convex. Ultimately, all angles and almost all curves are obliterated, and large areas of flat surfaces are produced. This perfection of abrasion is rarely found except in such localities as have sustained a grinding much more severe than that which has occurred in the Alps. Not merely can the operations of extinct glaciers be traced in detail by means of the bosses of rock popularly termed roches moutonnées, but their effects in the aggregate, on a range of mountains or an entire country, can be recognized sometimes at a distance of fifteen or twenty miles, from the incessant repetition of these convex forms.
We finished up the 3d of August with a walk over the Findelen glacier, and returned to Zermatt at a later hour than we intended, both very sleepy. This is noteworthy only on account of that which followed. We had to cross the Col de Valpelline on the next day, and an early start was desirable. Monsieur Seller, excellent man! knowing this, called us himself, and when he came to my door I answered, “All right, Seller, I will get up,” and immediately turned over to the other side, saying to myself, “First of all, ten minutes’ more sleep.” But Seller waited and listened, and, suspecting the case, knocked again: “Herr Whymper, have you got a light?” Without thinking what the consequences might be, I answered, “No;” and then the worthy man actually forced the lock off his own door to give me one. By similar and equally friendly and disinterested acts Monsieur Seller has acquired his enviable reputation.
At four A.M. we left his Monte Rosa hotel, and were soon pushing our way through the thickets of gray alder that skirt the path up the exquisite little valley which leads to the Z’muttgletscher.
Nothing can seem or be more inaccessible than the Matterhorn upon this side, and even in cold blood one holds his breath when looking at its stupendous cliffs. There are but few equal to them in size in the Alps, and there are none which can more truly be termed precipices. Greatest of them all is the immense north cliff, that which bends over toward the Z’muttgletscher. Stones which drop from the top of that amazing wall fall for about fifteen hundred feet before they touch anything, and those which roll down from above and bound over it fall to a much greater depth, and leap wellnigh one thousand feet beyond its base. This side of the mountain has always seemed sombre, sad, terrible: it is painfully suggestive of decay, ruin and death; and it is now, alas! more than terrible by its associations.
“There is no aspect of destruction about the Matterhorn cliffs,” says Professor Ruskin. Granted—when they are seen from afar. But approach and sit down by the side of the Z’muttgletscher, and you will hear that their piecemeal destruction is proceeding ceaselessly, incessantly. You will hear, but probably you will not see; for even when the descending masses thunder as loudly as heavy guns, and the echoes roll back from the Ebihorn opposite, they will still be as pin-points against this grand old face, so vast is its scale.
If you would see the “aspects of destruction,” you must come still closer and climb its cliffs and ridges, or mount to the plateau of the Matterhorngletscher, which is cut up and ploughed up by these missiles, and strewn on the surface with their smaller fragments: the larger masses, falling with tremendous velocity, plunge into the snow and are lost to sight.
The Matterhorngletscher, too, sends down its avalanches, as if in rivalry with the rocks behind. Round the whole of its northern side it does not terminate in the usual manner by gentle slopes, but comes to a sudden end at the top of the steep rocks which lie betwixt it and the Z’muttgletscher; and seldom does an hour pass without a huge slice breaking away and falling with dreadful uproar on to the slopes below, where it is re-compacted.
The desolate, outside pines of the Z’mutt forests, stripped of their bark and blanched by the weather, are a fit foreground to a scene that can hardly be surpassed in solemn grandeur. It is a subject worthy of the pencil of a great painter, and one which would tax the powers of the very greatest.
Higher up the glacier the mountain is less savage in appearance, but it is not less impracticable; and three hours later, when we arrived at the island of rock called the Stockje (which marks the end of the Z’muttgletscher proper, and which separates its higher feeder, the Stockgletscher, from its lower but greater one, the Tiefenmatten), Carrel himself, one of the least demonstrative of men, could not refrain from expressing wonder at the steepness of its faces, and at the audacity that had prompted us to camp upon the south-west ridge, the profile of which is seen very well from the Stockje. Carrel then saw the north and north-west sides of the mountain for the first time, and was more firmly persuaded than ever that an ascent was possible only from the direction of Breuil.
Three years afterward, I was traversing the same spot with the guide Franz Biener, when all at once a puff of wind brought to us a very bad smell, and on looking about we discovered a dead chamois half-way up the southern cliffs of the Stockje. We clambered up, and found that it had been killed by a most uncommon and extraordinary accident. It had slipped on the upper rocks, had rolled over and over down a slope of débris without being able to regain its feet, had fallen over a little patch of rocks that projected through the débris, and had caught the points of both horns on a tiny ledge not an inch broad. It had just been able to touch the débris where it led away down from the rocks, and had pawed and scratched until it could no longer touch. It had evidently been starved to death, and we found the poor beast almost swinging in the air, with its head thrown back and tongue protruding, looking to the sky as if imploring help.