Two only of the party, both competent mountaineers, accompanied me to the track of our glissade, but none of us ventured on the ice where it originated. Just before stepping upon the snow, a stone some tons in weight, detached by the sun from the heights above us, came rushing down the line of our descent. Its leaps became more and more impetuous, and on reaching the brow near which we had been brought to rest it bounded through the air, and with a single spring reached the lower glacier, raising a cloud of ice-dust. Some fragments of rope found upon the snow assured us that we were upon the exact track of the avalanche, and then the search commenced. It had not continued twenty minutes when a cheer from one of the guides—Christian Michel of Grindelwald—announced the discovery of the watch. It had been brought to the surface in the manner surmised, and on examination seemed to be dry and uninjured. I noticed, moreover, that the position of the hands indicated that it had only run down beneath the snow. I wound it up, hardly hoping, however, to find it capable of responding. But it showed instant signs of animation. It had remained eighteen days in the avalanche, but the application of its key at once restored it to action, and it has gone with unvarying regularity ever since.
Mr. Hutchinson has published the following note of the accident in the ‘Alpine Journal’:
‘As one of the party concerned in the accident on the Piz Morteratsch last July, I trust I shall not be thought presumptuous in bearing my testimony to the entire accuracy of Professor Tyndall’s account. I can add no facts of any importance to those there mentioned, unless it be that we estimated the distance down which we were carried at fully 1,000 feet—a conclusion which, Mr. Tyndall tells me, was confirmed by his subsequent visit to the spot. The angle of the slope we did not measure, nor can I give the time of our descent with any accuracy; it seemed to me a lifetime. From the moment that the snow cracked, Jenni behaved with the greatest coolness and courage. But he ought not to have taken us down the ice-slope so late in the day—it was then nearly half-past two o’clock—and that after a warning word from Professor Tyndall and myself. Of Walter’s conduct the less said the better; our opinion of his courage was not raised by this trial of it.’
[Until Mr. Gossett’s letter reached me a few days ago I was not aware of the singular likeness between the loss of Bennen’s watch and of my own.—April 1871.]
THE GORGE OF PFEFFERS (SHOWING EROSIVE ACTION).
XX.
ALPINE SCULPTURE.
To the physical geologist the conformation of the Alps, and of mountain-regions generally, constitutes one of the most interesting problems of the present day. To account for this conformation, two hypotheses have been advanced, which may be respectively named the hypothesis of fracture and the hypothesis of erosion. Those who adopt the former maintain that the forces by which the Alps were elevated produced fissures in the earth’s crust, and that the valleys of the Alps are the tracks of these fissures. Those who hold the latter hypothesis maintain that the valleys have been cut out by the action of ice and water, the mountains themselves being the residual forms of this grand sculpture. To the erosive action here indicated must be added that due to the atmosphere (the severance and detachment of rocks by rain and frost), as affecting the forms of the more exposed and elevated peaks.
I had heard it stated that the Via Mala was a striking illustration of the fissure theory—that the profound chasm thus named, and through which the Hinter-Rhein now flows, could be nothing else than a crack in the earth’s crust. To the Via Mala I therefore went in 1864 to instruct myself by actual observation upon the point in question.