The Alps

by Sir William Martin Conway

Equally wonderful is it when the winds are still and a white fog envelops your little camp. Then you know what it is like to be alone. Above, around, and below all is impalpable whiteness. You might be floating in the air on a bit of snow-carpet for all the eye can tell you to the contrary. Never is silence more emphatic, not even in the darkest hour of the night. The ear strains with listening and hears only the pulsations of the heart, till some distant falling stone or rumbling avalanche, some crack of a new-forming crevasse, some slight shifting of a near snow-bed, sends a shiver through the air. And then, perhaps, there is a writhing in the mist and shortly forms emerge. You cannot tell at first whether they are tiny objects near at hand or remote masses. Under such circumstances I have mistaken a little fragment of paper drifting along the snow for a polar bear! Presently avenues of clearness open up to close again. Finally, the mist grows thin and glittering, the sunshine penetrates it, there is a moment of scorching heat, and lo! all is clear, and the great world around is perfectly revealed.

PALLANZA—SUNSET

What beauty there is in the great snow-fields that wearied waders through their soft envelope are in no condition to appreciate! For to be seen at their grandest they must be seen in the full glare of mid-daylight, when details are swallowed up in radiant, all-enveloping splendour. Every one knows the glory of overpowering sound. For that orchestras are enlarged and choruses increased in number. Who that has heard the full-throated music of ten thousand men, singing as one, will forget the majesty of that voluminous sonorance? The thunder of great guns is used, by common consent, to express the salutations of a people. What is true of sound is also true of light. Great views are ennobled by the splendour of full sunshine. There is an indescribable charm about desert sunrises and sunsets, but the glory of the desert is greatest at noon when the sunshine seems to swallow up the world and almost to hide it in excess of brightness. As with the deserts so is it with the snow-fields. When the eye can barely suffer to rest on them, they are most impressive. If there be specks of dust upon the snow, they disappear then from vision. With the brightness comes perfect purity, and the very idea of possible contamination vanishes away.

Reference has been made above to the beauty of linear form presented by many mountains projected against the sky. The great snow-fields have a beauty of surface form, a delicacy and perfection of modelling, far more remarkable. The graceful outline of a rock-peak, such as the Matterhorn, is, after all, a conception based upon a fact. The actual outline is a line elaborately jagged, which the eye converts into a continuous curve by purposely neglecting to observe the small indentations. But the curvature of a névé is often apparently perfect. Its slight imperfections are too small for the eye to see even when they are looked for. Where it curves over, the outline of its edge is as delicate as any line that can be fashioned by the most elaborate artifice. No razor's edge is apparently more true. So also are the surfaces, in the perfection of their rise and fall. Not more perfect are the heavings of the last dying swell on a calming tropical ocean. But the swelling of the snows is still, and can be watched from dawn to eve with the incredibly delicate shades upon it that change with the hours yet never grow coarse, only towards the day's end they become blue and bluer, till the pink lights of sunset melt against them before the pallor of night comes on.

KRANZBERG—ROTTHALHORN—AND JUNGFRAU: SUNSET

The details of the snow-fields are few, except when the surface is forced to break up by submerged inequalities of the glacier's bed. Then névé ice-falls are formed, which are far more majestic than the ice-falls of the middle region (such as that of the Col du Géant). The high ice-falls are always deeply covered with recent snow, and the broken white mantle upon the tumbled chaos produces mysterious hollows and gives rise to long fringes of glittering icicles not elsewhere in summer to be seen. To gaze into a crevasse in such a situation is to look into a veritable fairy's grotto, where the recesses are bluer and the walls more white than the memory ever avails to recall, and where the icicles seem to be hung for the very purpose of sublime decoration. Glimpses of such sights are often granted to the mere climber as he hastily scrambles over a bergschrund by an insecure snow-bridge; but he has no time to stop for half an hour and let his fancy play truant in the depths. To do that, one must be living aloft, with all the day to spend as one pleases, no peak to attain and return from, within short time-limits, and no companions to say "Hurry up."

Perhaps these pages may have the good fortune to inspire some mountain-lover with the wish to camp out aloft. A suggestion may, therefore, not be out of place. Let the intending high-level resident choose the situation of his camp with care. It must be out of the way of excursionists, or he will be invaded by continual visitors, who will expect entertainment and will thus deplete his stores and spoil his solitude. It ought not, however, to be difficult of access, or the problem of revictualling will be complicated and expensive. Such a camp should consist of two tents—one of them for guides or porters. The traveller's tent should be solid, and should possess a double roof or fly, so that it may be occupied with comfort in the hot hours of the day. It should be so firmly planted that no gale can overthrow it. Its furniture should be sufficient for comfort. Do not plan to move on from day to day, but settle down for a week or more at one spot, where there are rocks for a tent platform, and short scrambles that can be safely undertaken alone. Let the snow-field be near also, a snow-field that can be traversed on ski, and do not forget to take the ski with you, nor fear that you will not be able to use them on fairly level ground without previous practice. Keep a man with you to fetch water and do the rough cooking, so that all your time may be your own to enjoy to the full a rare opportunity which may not come again.

The middle region of the glaciers is the region best known to the votaries of the Alps, because it is the most accessible from the popular hotels. This middle region may be defined as limited by the snow-line above and the tree-level below. It is therefore larger towards the end of the season as the snow-line is pushed up by the melting of the winter snows. On the Aletsch glacier it roughly corresponds with the stretch between the Belalp and the Concordia; on the Gorner glacier with the corresponding stretch between the Riffelhorn and the foot of Monte Rosa. Its characteristic features are the open crevasses and the flowing or standing water on the surface of the ice. This is the place to come to for glacier picnics. It is the paradise of the moderate walker or the superannuated mountaineer. It is a safe region for the experienced to wander over alone, and for the inexperienced to visit with experts. You can start late and be back early. You need not venture forth before the weather has declared its intentions. Hence it is the popular glacier belt, and its beauties are best known and most widely appreciated.