Fig. 3.—Diagrams to show the "folding" of rock strata. A. Normal horizontal position of the strata, a, b, c, d; xy, horizontal line. B. Folding due to a shortening of the horizontal xy by lateral pressure, acting in the direction of the arrow and due to shrinkage. C. More extreme case of folding, in which a raised ridge is made to fall over so as to bring the lowest layer d above a, b and c.
This crumbling and folding has gone on at great depths—that is to say, some miles below the surface (a mere nothing compared with the 8,000 miles diameter of the globe itself), though we now see the results exposed, like the pastry folded by a cook. Immense time has been taken in the process. A folding movement involving a vertical rise of an inch in ten years would not be noticed by human onlookers, but in 600,000 years this would give you a vertical displacement of more than 5,000 ft. (nearly a mile!). It has been shown that in Switzerland, along a line of country extending from Basle to Milan, strata of 10,000 ft. to 20,000 ft. in thickness, which, if straightened out, would give a flat area of that thickness, and of 200 miles in length, have been buckled and folded so as to occupy only a length of 130 miles! The former tight-fitting skin of horizontal rock layers has "had to" buckle to that extent here (and in the same way in other mountain ranges in other parts of the world), because the whole terrestrial sphere has shrunk, owing to the gradual cooling of the mass, whilst the crust has not shrunk, not having lost heat.
Filled with interest and delight in these things, I reached the railway station at Lauterbrünnen, from whence the little train is driven far up the mountain, even into the very heart of the Jungfrau, by an electric current generated by a turbine, itself driven by the torrent at our feet, the waters of which have descended from the glaciers far above, to which it will carry us. In a few minutes I was gently gliding in the train up the to the "Wengern Alp" and the "Little Scheidegg"—a slope up which I have so often in former years painfully struggled on foot for four hours or more. One could to-day watch the whole scene, in ease and comfort, during the two hours' ascent of the train. And a marvellous scene it is as one rises to the height of 8,000 ft., skirting the glaciers which ooze down the rocky sides of the Jungfrau, and mounting far above some of them. At the Scheidegg I changed into a smaller train, and with some thirty fellow-passengers was carried higher and higher by the faithful, untiring electric current. After a quarter of an hour's progress we paused high above the "snout" of the great Eiger glacier, and descended by a short path on to it, examined the ice, its crevasses and layers, and its "glacier-grains," and watched and heard an avalanche. The last time I was here it took a couple of hours to reach this spot from the Scheidegg, and probably neither I nor any of my fellow-passengers could to-day endure the necessary fatigue of reaching this spot on foot. Then we remounted the train, and on we went into the solid rock of the huge Eiger. The train stops in the rock tunnel and we got out to look, through an opening cut in its side, down the sheer wall of the mountain on to the grassy meadows thousands of feet below.
Then we start again, and on we are driven by the current generated away down there in Lauterbrünnen, through the spiral tunnel, mounting a thousand feet more till we are landed at an opening cut on the further side of the rocky Eiger, which admits us to an actual footing on the great glacier called the Eismeer, or Icelake. We lunch at a restaurant cut out as a cavern in the solid rock, and survey the wondrous scene. We are now at a height of 10,000 feet, and in the real frozen ice-world, hitherto accessible only to the young and vigorous. I have been there in my day with pain, danger, and labour, accompanied by guides and held up by ropes, but never till now with perfect ease and tranquillity and without "turning a hair," or causing either man or beast to labour painfully on my behalf. We had taken two hours only from Lauterbrünnen; in former days we should have started in the small hours of the morning from the Scheidegg, and have climbed through many dangers for some six or seven hours before reaching this spot.
I confess that I am not enchanted with all of the modern appliances for saving time and labour—the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, and the aeroplane. But these mountain railways fill me with satisfaction and gratitude. When the Jungfrau railway was first projected, some athletic Englishmen with heavy boots and ice-axes, protested against the "desecration" of regions till then accessible only to them and to me, and others of our age and strength. They declared that the scenery would be injured by the railway and its troops of "tourists." As well might they protest against the desecration caused by the crawling of fifty house-flies on the dome of St. Paul's. These mountains and glaciers are so vast, and men with their railroads so small, that the latter are negligible in the presence of the former. No disfiguring effect whatever is produced by these mountain railways; the trains have even ceased to emit smoke since they were worked by electricity. I quite agree with those who object to "funiculars." The carriages on these are hauled up long, straight gashes in the mountain side, which have a hideous and disfiguring appearance. But I look forward with pleasure to the completion of the Jungfrau railway to the summit. I hope that the Swiss engineers will carry it through the mountain, and down along the side of the great Aletsch glacier to the Bel Alp and so to Brieg. That would be a glorious route to the Simplon tunnel and Italy!
I took three hours in the unwearied train descending from the Eismeer to Interlaken, and was back in my hotel in comfortable time for dinner, "mightily content with the day's journey," as Mr. Pepys would have said. I have always been sensitive to the action of diminished pressure, which produces what is called "mountain sickness" in many people. Many years ago I climbed by the glacier-pass known as the Weissthor from Macugnaga to the Riffel Alp, with a stylographic pen in my pocket. The reservoir of the pen contained a little air, which expanded as the atmospheric pressure diminished, and at 10,000 feet I found most of the ink emptied into my pocket. Probably one cause of the discomfort called "mountain sickness" arises from a similar expansion of gas contained in the digestive canal, and in the cavities connected with the ear and nose. The more suddenly the change of pressure is effected, the more noticeable is the discomfort. But I was rather pleased than otherwise to note, as I sat in the comfortable railway carriage, that when we passed 8,000 feet in elevation the old familiar giddiness, and tendency to sigh and gasp, came upon me as of yore, as I gathered was the experience of some of my fellow-passengers: and when we were returning, and had descended half-way to Lauterbrünnen, I enjoyed the sense of restored ease in breathing which I well remember when the whole experience was complicated by the fatigue of a long climb. A white-haired American lady was in the train with me ascending to the Eismeer. "I have longed all my life," she said, "to see a glaysher—to touch it and walk on it—and now I am going to do it at last. I and my daughter here have come right away from America to go on these cars to the glaysher." When we were descending, I asked the old lady if she had been pleased. "I can hardly speak of it rightly," she said. "It seems to me as though I have been standing up there on God's own throne." I do not sympathise with the Alpine monopolist who would grudge that dear old lady, and others like her, the little train and tramway by which alone such people can penetrate to those soul-stirring scenes. They are at least as sensitive to the beauty of the mountains as are the most muscular, most long-winded, and most sun-blistered of our friends—the acrobats of the rope and axe.
Interlaken
September, 1909