It is perfectly true: words fail to express one’s feelings.
Just earth and rocks and snow and ice and light and shade. What power must have been exerted to squeeze those mighty strata and tip them up and bend them over and hurl them against one another. Everything is relative, and I find I can imagine what an ant might feel when climbing over the furrows of a plowed field. The earth itself seems so small when poised in the universe—just a microscopic atom, and the mightiest mountains are only the wrinkles of an apple. Yet here we were ten thousand feet above the sea with a vast panorama of mountains on every side. More than a score of Horns, besides Jochs and Cime and Grats and Gabeln; twenty of them are more than four thousand meters high; Monte Rosa topping them all with her four thousand six hundred and thirty-eight meters. Somehow mountains do not sound so high when expressed in meters, but one does not belong to Metrical Societies without being consistent! A dozen immense glaciers pour their cracking, dazzling, monstrous streams of liquid solidity down, for ever changing yet, like rivers of waters, for ever the same. Year after year appear the great crevasses where the glacier tumbles over a precipice and becomes a cataract of ice, yet remains the same. Verily the mountains themselves, seen by the great eye of the Father of Time are moving; he sees that the whole crest of the Alps is slowly moving northward: this is proved by the fact that one side is steeper than the other.
It is rather amusing to see how many persons have been disgusted with their first view of a glacier. They are covered, in many cases, with mud, and look dirty and unkempt. They plow out the rocks; great showers of boulders fall down on them, and especially where they have flowed down to the melting level and begun to deposit their freight, making what are called terminal moraines, they are not white and glittering. But, seen from a distance, the glaciers of the high Alps are most impressive. And to think that a very slight lowering of the average temperature of the year would bring these great cold snaky monsters over the habitations of men again. The ice-age might once more be renewed and wipe out our civilization.
While we were on the Gornergrat I saw and heard an avalanche. A small snow-ball may start one. Roaring louder and louder with thunderous echoes it hurls itself down the steep incline, and, like a colossal, titanic bomb-shell, it bursts into the valley. The noise made by a snow-slide from a steep roof is startling enough, but imagine it multiplied a thousand times,—as if the top of the world were tumbling. It is impossible to estimate the thousands of tons of ice and snow that go dashing and crashing and smashing into the valleys. It is Nature engaged in her slow but certain work of destruction. The bombardment of the avalanches is one of the most impressive phenomena in the mountains.
ON THE GLACIER.
I do not know whether Tennyson ever climbed to the Gornergrat, but he gives a picture of Monte Rosa which is well worth remembering:—
“I climbed the roofs at break of day;
Sun-smitten Alps before me lay,
I stood among the silent statues