The Spell of Switzerland

by Nathan Haskell Dole

“To reëstablish the communications which had been interrupted on the road the people made a bridge of long ladders, planks and trunks of fir-trees. Ropes attached to these ladders stretched over the top of the bank. At each fresh onslaught—and there were three or four a day—a man stationed in the gorge blew a whistle to announce it and the ropes were immediately pulled to prevent the bridge from being carried away.

“M. de Bons, an eye-witness, described one of these coulées. ‘A whitish vapor rose into the air as it left the gorge. At the same instant a dull noise and a violent gust of wind apprised us of the approach of the coulée. The moving mass came down upon us with irresistible force but so slowly that a man at his ordinary walking pace could have gone on his way without being overtaken by it. Enormous blocks of stone seemed literally to float on the stream; at times they stood out of the liquid mass as if they were as light as a feather; then again they would tip and sink into the mud till nothing could be seen of them. A little farther down they could be seen again coming gradually to the surface, to float for a while until finally swallowed up, repeating at various stages of their progress the same scenes and the same accidents.

“‘The bed of the torrent was remarkably narrow at one point. Huge boulders were stopped there and formed a barrier against which the fragments carried along by the river were collected. For some minutes a strange conflict was waged here, the rushing débâcle of ice and water endeavoring to flow back for a long distance; the river rose till it almost caused a freshet. At last by carrying the débris along, it succeeded in effecting an outlet and overthrew all the obstacles impeding its course. Rocks, trees, lumps of ice, débris of every kind all went whirling round and round with a long, savage roar, then disappeared in the current and were borne downwards across the slopes of the Bois Noir.’

“Since 1835 there has been scarcely any disturbance in the mountain. The waters, however, are at work, and who can predict that a still more terrible catastrophe will not some day desolate the valley of the Rhône?

“The people no longer see the hand of demons in these devastations nor do they exorcize the mountain; but a pious custom has it that each year a procession makes its way to a hill above La Rasse with a cross standing on it and there invokes the Creator’s protection by their prayers.”

To the eye that sees, the solid rock is just as much liquid and in commotion as the flowing river; it is all in a state of flux. The mountain-tops are plunging down into the valleys and then the rains and the rivers grasp them and roll them and reduce them, until the porphyry and the granite and the limestone become almost microscopic sand, which, as every one knows, blows and flows like water. These beautiful little lakes, which one sees everywhere in Switzerland, if they should be able to write their autobiographies—indeed they are able to write their autobiographies and in hieroglyphics which Science can read—would tell us and do tell us of many a rock-fall which has stopped the descent of rivers.

I remember some weeks later, as we were riding in the “Moto,” as I call the touring-car, up to Flims—a most absurd and flimsy squashing up of the Latin name flumina, the streams—my attention was called to the enormous glacial rock-fall which ages ago blocked up the whole valley of the Rhine to a depth of between two and three thousand feet. The river, much surprised, had to go to work to cut through the mass of débris. There are still several of the lakes which came from the same catastrophe—if that can be called a catastrophe—which probably affected no human being for the worse. Many of these rock-falls, however, have ruined whole populations; churches and houses have been swept away. Sometimes, after a long-continued rain, the whole side of a mountain-slope will begin to sweep down. One sees the same thing in a smaller scale on the side of a gulley where a road has been lowered. The laws of gravitation, the erosive powers of water, the effects of frost, are just the same at wholesale as they are at retail.

The bay sweeping in between the cone of the Dranse and the Pointe d’Yvoire is called La Grande Conche. We lengthened our course by following the shore, though we kept well out beyond the mouths of the two torrents which Emile told us were Le Redon and Le Foron. Yvoire is different from the other promontories of the lake: the huge blocks of stone which are scattered about make it evident that it is the remains of a terminal moraine. This and huge boulders which have been discovered in the bottom of the lake prove that the hollow valley in which the lake lies was scooped out by a glacier which as it melted left its freight of stone brought down from distant mountain-sides.