Two or three hours after we had reached the hotel, the thunderstorm, from the premonitory symptoms of which we had, in ascending, suffered, trailed by. The effects of these mountain storms are always interesting. Immediately below the hotel is a ravine, which widens as it descends towards the main valley. On the whole of the left side of this a pasty cloud, as dark as midnight, settled down for a time. Not a trace of any object could now be seen there but the cloud itself. The mountain side, the woods, the valley, were all equally and utterly obliterated. At short intervals this mass of black cloud below us was rent, and illuminated, by flashes of lightning. It seemed as if it was the bearer of the scarth of doom to all wrapped in it and below it. Then the sun burst out above us, and the broadest, and clearest, and most brilliant rainbow I have ever seen, I do not expect ever again to see another such, rested on the turbid blackness of the cloud. It was its nearness, as well as the contrast of the murky background, that made every band of colour so broad, clear, and brilliant. The air where we were standing was filled with a haze of its colours. It would have been strange, indeed, if man, at the time when he knew nothing of what produced the thunderstorm and the rainbow, had not taken one for the wrath, and the other for the smile of God. Our thoughts they still lift from ourselves, and direct towards the Mind that is in everything, but by another and more excellent way.
August 27.—At 9 A.M. started for the ascent of the Eggischhorn. Reader, if you also have made the same start, let us go over the old ground together. If you have not, then let me endeavour to tell you of something you would be the better for seeing. Jean Ott we took with us for our guide. You must call to mind that we are setting out from a height of 7,000 feet above the level we are accustomed to at home. There are no trees above us, or to the right, or left. Our way is all over the flowery Alpine turf, interspersed with rocks. We shall have to climb not quite 2,000 feet more. After a time we shall lose the flowers and the turf: but of that presently. On this morning there had been scuds of rain, but the weather was evidently clearing for a fine day. When we had got about half a mile from the inn, where the path takes a curve round a depression in the mountain side, there came on a heavy shower. A party of Frenchmen were a little ahead of us. They did not like the rain, and returned to the inn. Just, however, at the point where we were, the rocks, which had rolled down in bygone ages from the summits above the depression, had, as you would have expected, lodged in the axis of the depression. At two or three steps from the path they are so piled up as that some project sufficiently to give shelter from rain. We clambered into one of these chance-formed cavities, and remained in it, quite protected, till the rain was over. While there, we observed how the interstices were being filled up by the decay of mosses and lichens. In about twenty minutes the sun was again bright, and there were no more clouds likely to make showers, and so, without any misgivings, we resumed our ascent over the flowery turf, interspersed with rocks. We soon came to a descending rib of the mountain. From this we first saw ice, that of the Viescher glacier. Upon this we turned our backs, and went up the mountain rib. The turf and flowers now began to die out. The little bright indigo Gentian became scarce. We then came upon loose rocky débris from the heights above, with a ravine between us and the summit of the Eggischhorn filled with this loose, naked débris and snow. We rounded the top of this ravine by a good path, in places very narrow, and like a rude rock staircase. And now we were close to the summit, which is composed entirely of a pile of clean slabs and blocks of rock, piled up into a steep mountain cone. It did not take us long to climb these clean slabs and blocks. Then we were on the summit—some dozen feet square, surrounded by a rail.
In the last part of the ascent we had seen nothing but the place where, at each step, we were to set our foot. Now the last step of the ascent had been taken, and one step more would carry us down, 2,000 feet, to the Great Aletsch glacier. All the great mountains, and the great ice-field of the Bernese Oberland, are before us. For some moments not a word is spoken. If at that moment we had had anything to say, we should have done as well if we had stayed at home.
Your first glance can only be at the great glacier so far beneath your feet. This, in your previous thoughts, had occupied the chief place in the scene you were coming to look upon, and have now reached. You wish at once to see what it is like, and to ascertain your relation to it. It is a mile wide, and looks precisely like what it is, a river of ice. All inequalities of surface are, from this height, effaced; and it is, to the eye, as level, though not as glassy, as water. And no river could have such clearly defined banks, for here they are mountains escarped as regularly as if the width and grades of the enormous channel had been cut by human hands working by plans and measurements. This is a conspicuous feature: having observed it, you then raise your eyes to make out the relations of the glacier to the mountains on either side of it, and beyond it. If you were to look across it, you would be looking west. But you do not begin by looking across it, because it is itself the great object; and, therefore, you look up it. You see, following it up, that it takes a gentle curve, a point or two to the west of north. For about five miles up it continues of about the same width. It then expands like an open fan. The fan-like expansion is a continuation of about five miles more. This expansion is, in reality, the great snow-field that is the chief feeder of the glacier; and which not only feeds it, but also by its own descent compacts and forces forward the glacier. Around the further side of the expanded fan stand, beginning on the left, the Mittaghorn, the Gletscherhorn, the Jungfrau, the Mönch, the Viescherhorn. These are more than ten miles off, but the distance appears much less, the objects being so large, and the atmosphere, at these heights, so clear. You see many black summits amid the snow, and many long, lofty scars; but of course the snow on the summits that are unpeaked, and on the sides that are not precipitous, preponderates in the scene. As these are the most prominent and interesting objects, you take mental photographs of them first. You then think of the Finsteraarhorn. You soon find him before you, due north: of course, to the right of the great glacier, and some little way back from it. By the air line he is seven miles from you. Between you and him is the Walliser Viescherhorn, and several subordinate peaks. Between the Walliser Viescherhorn and the Finsteraarhorn is the great snow-field that feeds the Viescher glacier we had a passing glimpse of as we were coming up. You now look across to the west side of the Great Aletsch. There you have before you the Aletschhorn, and an archipelago of connected peaks, entirely surrounded, and everywhere permeated, by snow-fields and glaciers. You see the confluence with the Great Aletsch of two of these subsidiary glaciers, the Mittler Aletsch, exactly opposite to you, and the Ober Aletsch, four miles lower down. Of course you see but little of the glacier to the back of this archipelago; that is the Lötschen, the outflow of which passes down the Lötschenthal to join the Rhone at Grampel. Two miles below the junction of the Ober Aletsch, the Great Aletsch itself terminates. You can see almost to its termination.
You have, then, from your lofty observatory, the whole of this marvellous scene spread out before you. No part of it is seen indistinctly. You have a full and clear view of the mountains supporting the snow-fields; the snow-fields feeding the glaciers; the lateral glaciers converging into the main-trunk glacier; the main-trunk glacier flowing by at your feet, a true river. Though the eye does not see the motion, the mind, aided by the eye, does. For you see that it is streaked with the moraine lines, which came in with the lateral glaciers, and which it is, obviously, carrying on; and you see the wave-like marks on its surface, more advanced, down stream, in the centre than on the sides, which tell you that the centre is moving faster than the sides. There is nothing to mar the unity, nothing wanting to the completeness, of this grand display of Alpine nature.
In the Märjelensee there is even something de luxe. The north side of the Eggischhorn is as precipitous as the west; in fact the north and west sides form a kind of right angle; and you are standing, up in the air over this angle, at an elevation of 2,000 feet above the glacier, from which the summit takes its last rise—all but a vertical one on these sides. The north side is the south wall of a deep fissure, which connects the channel, the broad valley channel, of the Aletsch with that of the Viescher glacier. This fissure is considerably lower than the surface of the Aletsch glacier; but it is not of sufficient depth, or width, to allow any part of the Aletsch to pass into it, which also appears at this point to have its bearing on the opposite side. It, therefore, flows by this depression in cliffs of ice. Just where it passes the depression or fissure is a little lake, occupying the first part of the depression. Its waters, therefore, wash against the ice-cliffs of the Aletsch, which are its western boundary. The water being slightly warmer than the ice has a tendency to undermine it; and as the glacier has here lost its retaining wall of rock, and is somewhat expanded on the outer side of the curve it here makes, it comes to pass that masses of ice frequently detach themselves from the passing ice-cliffs of the glacier and fall into the lake; and then float off in the form of icebergs to the further end of the lake, from which point issues a little stream, the outflow of the lake, which connects it, when full, with the Viescher glacier. As looked down into from the top of the Eggischhorn, this little lake, with its green glass-smooth water, and white icebergs,—in part the cliffs from which they have fallen are of a tender blue,—and with the sober-coloured Alpine pasture occupying the rest of the depression and reaching down to the Viescher glacier, and with the black mountain on the north of it, is a sight that must be quite unique, and is as charming and interesting as unique.
But if not one of all the near objects we have just been looking at were visible from the Eggischhorn, still it would be worth climbing for the sake of the many distant objects it has to show you. On the north-east you may see the Tödi, and on the south-west Mont Blanc—neither, of course, on account of the distance, and of the intervening heights, very conspicuous. But all between—the many summits of the Zermatt Alps, Monte Leone, overlooking the Simplon, the Galenstock, and the summits of the St. Gothard group, are each grandly distinct; and show—which is what they are—like the nucleus, the ganglion, the structural centre of a Continent.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE RIEDER ALP—THE BELL ALP.
Minds that have nothing to confer,