CHRISTIAN ALMER
Before recrossing the chain to Courmayeur we ascended the Aiguille Verte. In company with Mr. Reilly I inspected this mountain from every direction in 1864, and came to the conclusion that an ascent could more easily be made from the south than upon any other side. We set out upon the 28th from Chamounix to attack it, minus Croz, and plus a porter (of whom I will speak more particularly presently), leaving our comrade very downcast at having to kick his heels in idleness, whilst we were about to scale the most celebrated of his native aiguilles.
Our course led us over the old Mer de Glace, the glacier made famous by De Saussure and Forbes. The heat of the day was over, but the little rills and rivulets were still flowing along the surface of the ice; cutting deep troughs where the gradients were small, leaving ripple-marks where the water was with more difficulty confined to one channel, and falling over the precipitous walls of the great crevasses, sometimes in bounding cascades, and sometimes in diffused streams, which marked the perpendicular faces with graceful sinuosities.[[58]] As night came on, their music died away, the rivulets dwindled down to rills, the rills ceased to murmur, and the spark sparkling drops, caught by the hand of frost, were bound to the ice, coating it with an enameled film which lasted until the sun struck the glacier once more.
[58] Admirably rendered in the accompanying drawing by Mr. Cyrus Johnson. The “ripple-marks” are seen in the engraving upon p. 356.
ON THE MER DE GLACE
The weathering of the walls of crevasses, which obscures the internal structure of the glacier, has led some to conclude that the stratification which is seen in the higher glacier-regions is obliterated in the lower ones. Others—Agassiz and Mr. John Ball, for example—have disputed this opinion, and my own experiences accord with those of these accurate observers. It is, undoubtedly, very difficult to trace stratification in the lower ends of the Alpine glaciers, but we are not, upon that account, entitled to conclude that the original structure of the ice has been obliterated. There are thousands of crevasses in the upper regions upon whose walls no traces of bedding are apparent, and we might say, with equal unreasonableness, that it was obliterated there also. Take an axe and clear away the ice which has formed from water trickling down the faces and the weathered ice beneath, and you will expose sections of the mingled strata of pure and of imperfect ice, and see clearly enough that the primitive structure of the glacier has not been effaced, although it has been obscured.
