The Alps

by Sir William Martin Conway

If it lacks the aloofness and romance of the névés, it possesses ample charms of its own. The impressive silence of the heights is here replaced by a chorus of the voices of many waters. The large simplicity and sweeping forms of the snow-fields give way here to a multiplicity of detailed forms that require time to appreciate and understand. Every step in this area yields a new wonder, a fresh incident, another surprise. All around is continual change as you go along. There is no end to the features that demand and reward your attention. No wonder that glacier wandering at this level should be so popular an amusement.

What is its principal and characteristic charm? Undoubtedly the water, and the phenomena to which it gives rise. To begin with, there are the streams, small and great. The little trickles, that creep between the lumps of the uneven surface and deepen the furrow dividing them. They flow and unite together like the veins of a leaf, thus giving rise to larger arteries, and these by their union to yet larger. Thus the main drainage torrents are formed, which, on great Arctic and Himalayan glaciers, become veritable rivers, impossible to be leapt over or forded. The beds of these torrents are blue in colour and like transparent glass in aspect—a lovely contrast with the general surface of the glacier. For that is made white by the innumerable fissures that penetrate its surface, due to the dissolvent effect of the sun's heat, from which the icy water protects the bed of a stream. It is a favourite pastime to sit beside such a torrent and watch the water flow by between its white banks, one in bright sunshine, the other, perhaps, in shadow, with the blue ribbon of transparent ice between them and crystalline water scampering along with an aspect of joy in freedom.

But there is a grim fate in store for it not far ahead. It must make haste to laugh in the sunshine while it can, and to display its short-lived clearness. Next time we see it, it will be thick and unclean with sediment, and far below in the valleys where men live and work. Little, however, does it seem to care as it hurries and dances along, and throws up its little glittering, splashing hands into the air. We follow it downward, and soon hear a musical booming not far away, like the note of a deep organ pipe. It is a moulin or pot-hole, a cylindrical perforation of the glacier into which the torrent leaps, and where it disappears, to flow thenceforward in darkness along the rocky bed of the glacier, till it reappears at the snout into the open valley.

Even lovelier than the streams are the pools on the surface of a glacier, when they have a clean floor unsoiled by moraine or sandy deposit. These pools are sometimes of large dimensions. They, too, have blue basins with white edges. Looked down upon from a distance, they appear like great sapphire eyes gazing at the heavens. Seldom, if ever, in the Alps are such pools found in the névé region; to behold them there, one must go to Arctic glaciers, of which they form one of the chief glories. If the lakes on the Gorner glacier do not equal those for purity or perfection of contrast between untainted blue and unsullied white, they are none the less most lovely. Sometimes a lake may be found not on but beside a glacier, where the ice forms one bank and the mountain another. Such are the Märjelen See by the Great Aletsch, and the little-visited lake at the west foot of Monte Rosa. On these you may see floating or stranded masses of ice, and perchance find one that has recently turned over, displaying its blue part that was before submerged.

MÄRJELEN SEE AND GREAT ALETSCH GLACIER

Winter ice not yet melted on the lake.

Now and again, if you look for them, you will find crevasses filled with water, whose depth renders up a yet bluer tone than can elsewhere be met with in the regions of ice. Perhaps, at one end the crevasse will be roofed over, and there you may gaze into the deep shadow and find the blue deepen almost to black. If you drop in a stone, you may hear the bubbles come rippling up and the wavelets lapping against the sides. If the roof be thin enough, a hole may be made in it with the ice-axe, and a beam of sunshine admitted which will increase the scale of the harmony in blue. Well do I remember one glorious pool of water, roofed over with a dome of ice, through which the sunshine glimmered. At one side was a natural portal, at the other a window. Two or three white blocks of ice floated on the water, and its uneven depths were of all tones from sky-blue to black; but that was in Spitsbergen, where glacier details are far lovelier than the Alps can show.

But the middle glacier region, the region of what is fantastically called the "dry glacier," presents other charms than those of water. Note, for example, the brilliance of its surface and the peculiarity of its texture. It consists of an infinite multitude of loosely compacted rounded fragments of ice with a little water soaking down between them. If you watch it closely, you will see that the moving water makes a shimmering in the cracks between the ice-fragments. You will also observe that the blue of the solid ice below the skin of fragments appears dimly through the white, and the least tap with an ice-axe to scrape away the surface reveals it clearly. Each little fragment of ice has a separate glitter of its own, so that the whole surface sparkles with a frosted radiance. It is not the same at dawn after a cold night, for then there is no water between the fragments, but all is hard and solid. No sooner, however, does the sun shine upon them, than the bonds are released and the ice-crystals begin to break up with a gentle tinkling sound and little flashes of light reflected from tiny wet mirror-surfaces. One can spend hours watching these small phenomena as happily as gazing upon the great mountains themselves. Size is a relative term. The biggest mountain in relation to the earth is no greater than is one of these small ice-fragments in relation to a glacier. Reduce the scale in imagination and the smallest object may be endowed with grandeur, for all such conceptions are subjective.

The open crevasses that are never far away on the dry glacier are full of beauties. It is not easy to tire of peering down into them. Sometimes one may be found into which a man armed with an ice-axe may effect a descent. He will not stay there long, for the depths are cold. Once I was able not only to descend into a crevasse but to follow it beyond its open part into the very substance of the glacier. It was a weird place, good to see but not good to remain in, and I was glad to return to sunshine very soon.