DISMAL QUARTERS. 1858.
Immediately after this achievement I was forsaken by my friends, and remained the only visitor in the hotel. A dense gray cloud gradually filled the entire atmosphere, from which the rain at length began to gush in torrents. The scene from the windows of the hotel was of the most dismal character; the rain also came through the roof, and dripped from the ceiling to the floor. I endeavoured to make a fire, but the air would not let the smoke of the pine-logs ascend, and the biting of the hydrocarbons was excruciating to the eyes. On the whole, the cold was preferable to the smoke. During the night the rain changed to snow, and on the morning of the 22nd all the mountains were thickly covered. The gray delta through which a river of many arms ran into the Mattmark See was hidden; against some of the windows of the salle à manger the snow was also piled, obscuring more than half their light. I had sent my guide to Visp, and two women and myself were the only occupants of the place. It was extremely desolate—I felt, moreover, the chill of Monte Rosa in my throat, and the conditions were not favourable to the cure of a cold.
On the 23rd the Allalein glacier was unfit for work; I therefore ascended to the summit of the Monte Moro, and found the Valaisian side of the pass in clear sunshine, while impenetrable fog met us on the Italian side. I examined the colour of the freshly fallen snow; it was not an ordinary blue, and was even more transparent than the blue of the firmament. When the snow was broken the light flashed forth; when the staff was dug into the snow and withdrawn, the blue gleam appeared; when the staff lay in a hole, although there might be a sufficient space all round it, the coloured light refused to show itself.
My cough kept me awake on the night of the 23rd, and my cold was worse next day. I went upon the Allalein glacier, but found myself by no means so sure a climber as usual. The best guides find that their powers vary; they are not equally competent on all days. I have heard a celebrated Chamouni guide assert that a man's morale is different on different days. The morale in my case had a physical basis, and it probably has so in all. The Allalein glacier, as I have said, crosses the valley and abuts against the opposite mountain; here it is forced to turn aside, and in consequence of the thrust and bending it is crumpled and crevassed. The wall of the Mattmark See is a fine glacier section: looked at from a distance, the ridges and fissures appear arranged like a fan. The structure of the crumpled ice varies from the vertical to the horizontal, and the ridges are sometimes split along the planes of structure. The aspect of this portion of the glacier from some of the adjacent heights is exceedingly interesting.
THE VAULT OF THE ALLALEIN. 1858.
On the morning of the 25th I had two hours' clambering over the mountains before breakfast, and traced the action of ancient glaciers to a great height. The valley of Saas in this respect rivals that of Hasli; the flutings and polishings being on the grandest scale. After breakfast I went to the end of the Allalein glacier, where the Saas Visp river rushes from it: the vault was exceedingly fine, being composed of concentric arches of clear blue ice. I spent several hours here examining the intimate structure of the ice, and found the vacuum disks which I shall describe at another place, of the greatest service to me. As at Rosenlaui and elsewhere, they here taught me that the glacier was composed of an aggregate of small fragments, each of which had a definite plane of crystallization. Where the ice was partially weathered the surfaces of division between the fragments could be traced through the coherent mass, but on crossing these surfaces the direction of the vacuum disks changed, indicating a similar change of the planes of crystallization. The blue veins of the glacier went through its component fragments irrespective of these planes. Sometimes the vacuum disks were parallel to the veins, sometimes across them, sometimes oblique to them.
Several fine masses of ice had fallen from the arch upon its floor, and these were disintegrated to the core. A kick, or a stroke of an axe, sufficed to shake masses almost a cubic yard in size into fragments varying not much on either side of a cubic inch. The veining was finely preserved on the concentric arches of the vault, and some of them apparently exhibited its abolition, or at least confusion, and fresh development by new conditions of pressure. The river being deep and turbulent this day, to reach its opposite side I had to climb the glacier and cross over the crown of its highest arch; this enabled me to get quite in front of the vault, to enter it, and closely inspect those portions where the structure appeared to change. I afterwards ascended the steep moraine which lies between the Allalein and the smaller glacier to the left of it; passing to the latter at intervals to examine its structure. I was at length stopped by the dislocated ice; and from the heights I could count a system of seven dirt-bands, formed by the undulations on the surface of the glacier. On my return to the hotel I found there a number of well-known Alpine men who intended to cross the Adler pass on the following day. Herr Imseng was there: he came to me full of enthusiasm, and asked me whether I would join him in an ascent of the Dom: we might immediately attack it; and he felt sure that we should succeed. The Dom is the highest of the Mischabel peaks, and is one of the grandest of the Alps. I agreed to join the Curé, and with this understanding we parted for the night.
AVALANCHE AT SAAS. 1858.
Thursday, 26th August.—A wild stormy morning after a wild and rainy night: the Adler pass being impassable, the mountaineers returned, and Imseng informed me that the Dom must be abandoned. He gave me the statistics of an avalanche which had fallen in the valley some years before. Within the memory of man Saas had never been touched by an avalanche, but a tradition existed that such a catastrophe had once occurred. On the 14th of March, 1848, at eight o'clock in the morning, the Curé was in his room; when he heard the cracking of pine-branches, and inferred from the sound that an avalanche was descending upon the village. It dashed in the windows of his house and filled his rooms with snow; the sound it produced being sufficient to mask the crashing of the timbers of an adjacent house. Three persons were killed. On the 3rd of April, 1849, heavy snow fell at Saas; the Curé waited until it had attained a depth of four feet, and then retreated to Fée. That night an avalanche descended, and in the line of its rush was a house in which five or six and twenty people had collected for safety: nineteen of them were killed. The Curé afterwards showed me the site of the house, and the direction of the avalanche. It passed through a pine wood; and on expressing my surprise that the trees did not arrest it, he replied that the snow was "quite like dust," and rushed among the trees like so much water. To return from Fée to Saas on the day following he found it necessary to carry two planks. Kneeling upon one of them, he pushed the other forward, and transferred his weight to it, drawing the other after him and repeating the same act. The snow was like flour, and would not otherwise bear his weight. Seeing no prospect of fine weather, I descended to Saas on the afternoon of the 26th. I was the only guest at the hotel; but during the evening I was gratified by the unexpected arrival of my friend Hirst, who was on his way over the Monte Moro to Italy.
THE FÉE GLACIER. 1858.