The Spell of Switzerland

by Nathan Haskell Dole

We had to go back to Martigny, and as we were so near we went to see the Gorges du Trient. This is a colossal fissure from one hundred and eighty to three hundred meters deep, and frequently not more than a couple of meters across. The only access is by a wooden gallery nearly half a mile long hung on iron cramps and supports, while far below rushes the torrent with a deafening roar.

From Martigny one follows a zigzagging road over the Col de la Forclaz and then passes Argentière over the Col des Montets to Chamonix. The chief feature is the Tête Noire which Miss Havergal, who climbed it, declares “is a magnificent high level valley or gorge, winding for four or five hours at a good height along mountains with as picturesque a combination of heights and depths, rocks, torrents, cascades, pine trees, ferns, flowers and precipices as exists anywhere.”

For the first time on our trip we had trouble with the Moto. First one of the front tires burst with a report that woke the echoes like a gun. Then, when going down a long incline, the brakes caused so much friction that we nearly got on fire; but by waiting for a while the danger was passed and we reached Chamonix safely.

The name of Chamonix, or, as the French spell it, Chamouni, is derived from the Latin campus munitus, champs muni, the fortified field. The earliest mention of the name in the modern form is found in an atlas of 1595; but in 1091, Aymon, Count of Geneva, bestowed the valley on the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Michel de la Cluse; it was then called by its Latin name. Three hundred years later a priory was founded there, which, in the early part of the Sixteenth Century, came into the jurisdiction of the Canons of Sallanches, who so maltreated the peasantry that at last they rose in revolt, destroyed the monastery and wrought their freedom. It was occasionally visited in the Seventeenth Century, but in 1741 two Englishmen, Pococke and Windham, with six others and five servants, went there from Geneva. The feud between the Chamoniards and the monks of Sallanches had, in some way, made people believe that the valley was inhabited by brigands, and the Pococke-Windham party went armed and camped out in the open air with sentinels posted. Their bravery is commemorated in the “Englishmen’s Stone,” bearing their names and the date. The following year Pierre Martel, the son of a Geneva shoemaker, hearing about their wonderful adventures among the glaciers, was moved to see them for himself. He wrote an account of his journey and for the first time gave a name to Mont Blanc. What a pity he did not give a better one! He set the fashion of visiting “the glaciers” and people began to come more and more, to see them and to study them.

The young scientist De Saussure was one of the first to make a study of glacial action. Then, in 1762, the young Duc d’Enville made a study of the glaciers of Savoy, and wrote an interesting account of them, which may be found in the Annuaire du Club Alpin for 1893. Seventy years later Professor Forbes began to make scientific studies of the motion of the glaciers and was the first to discover that they were really rivers of ice moving like other rivers, faster in the centre than at the sides. He calculated that their daily progress was ten inches near the top, twenty-five inches near the bottom, at the centre, and sixteen inches at the sides. He discovered in the ice, fragments of wood which were recognized as belonging to a ladder which De Saussure had left at the upper end of the Mer de Glace in 1788. They had been brought down five thousand meters in forty-five years. In 1837 Louis Jean Rodolphe Agassiz, whom America claims as one of her glories, though he was born on Lake Morat “In the pleasant Pays de Vaud,” read a paper before the Helvetic Society of Natural Sciences meeting at Neuchâtel, in which he propounded the now-accepted theory. As it was opposed he made tests of the motion of the glaciers at Chamonix, at Zermatt and near the Grimsel-Pass. He spent a number of years in this work, assisted by Count de Pourtalès and others. All sorts of tests were made but the proof of time is absolutely convincing.

Thus in 1820 a party had reached the upper end of the Grand Plateau and were just starting up the “ancien passage” when the snow on which they were climbing began to slide. All of them were swept down to the edge of the great crevasse which they had safely crossed a short time before. Three of the guides were swallowed up in it. In 1861 the remains of their bodies began to appear at the lower end of the Glacier des Bossons, more than a kilometer from the place. Bits of clothing, a cooked leg of mutton, a forearm with its hand came into sight. One of the surviving guides was present when they were discovered and exclaimed:—“Who would have thought I should once more shake hands with my good comrade again!” These remains had travelled more than one hundred and fifty meters a year for forty-one years.

De Saussure’s monument stands on the east bank of the Arve; Balmat’s on the other side, near the church.

The valley of Chamonix is supposed to be due to glacial action. Those who have studied it show that it is a part of the great folding up of the Jurassic strata nipt in between crystalline rocks by the tremendous lateral compression to which Switzerland was subjected as the earth cooled and shrank. The Valais, the Urserental and the region of the Vorder Rhein belong to the same cosmic cataclysm.

“JAGGED NEEDLES AND PINNACLES OF CRUEL ROCK.”