The telescopes, too, have often been the means of saving life. When Alpinists are in serious difficulty, the guides at once make signals, and a relief party is promptly sent to their aid. The signal is the repetition of a sound, the wave of a flag, or the flash of a lantern at regular intervals, at the rate of six signals a minute, followed by a pause of a minute, with a continuation every alternate minute. Observers using the telescopes have often detected these signals before anyone else and given the alarm, when aid has at once been dispatched to those in distress. Sometimes, too, telescope-watchers have discovered climbers in difficulty, and have sent someone to their help. Were it not for the instruments, in fact, many men and women who have ventured far without guides would have perished. Only the other week a lady tourist, who had gone up the mountain alone, had a narrow escape from death, and probably owes her life to the fact that a guide happened to be idly watching her through one of the telescopes. In endeavouring to take a short cut down to the hotel she missed her footing, and in an instant found herself shooting down towards the edge of a sheer drop of a hundred and fifty feet. By the merest chance she was thrown into the branches of a pine tree some twenty feet over the edge, and there she hung, unable to move. The horrified observer at once left the telescope and informed the hotel proprietor, and in just under the hour four guides with ropes had reached the spot and rescued her. She was comparatively uninjured, but almost dead with fright.
One might be inclined to think that with the numerous mountain railways that have penetrated into the very heart of the Alps during the last few years, the big observation telescope was really a superfluous luxury. As a matter of fact, however, the railways have rendered the telescope more necessary than ever. Indeed, the railway authorities do not consider their equipment complete unless at the very summit of their line they erect one of these giant instruments. These wonderful railways—monuments of engineering skill though they be—only land one several thousand feet below the actual summit. The view here, of course, is grand, but the snow-covered peak, the almost untrodden summit—the very thing the ordinary individual most wishes to see—is almost undiscernible to the naked eye. But with the telescope it is different. The summit comes right into the field of vision in an instant, grand and majestic, standing out boldly and clearly, appearing to be only a few yards away. Then the glass can be turned upon the whole surface of the mountain, and in this way one learns more about the formation of the rocks and glaciers and steep ridges than he would do by weeks of arduous climbing among them.
A word or two about the telescopes themselves will be appropriate here, for they are no ordinary instruments. The one at Nürren is valued at a hundred and twenty pounds. It is a double instrument, and two persons can look through it at the same time. The other instruments depicted in the various photographs are valued at from sixty-five to ninety pounds apiece. They were made by the famous optical firm of Carl Zeiss, of Jena, and represent the last word in telescope construction. Not all the telescopes through which visitors may peep for a small fee on the mountains of Switzerland were supplied by this firm, though there are certainly a large number of them. They are to be found on the Riffelalp, above Zermatt; on the Schynige Platte, near Interlaken; on the Rigi, the Weissenstein, near Solothurn; the Wengern-Alp, on the Jungfrau Railway; at Berne, Grindelwald, and other places.
THE FIVE-INCH TELESCOPE AT NÜRREN.
From a Photograph.
Without going into technicalities, it may be added that the instruments are fitted with the new Jena glass, which is perfectly transparent, and, therefore, gives a clear image. In cutting and polishing the glasses every care was taken to eliminate chromatic aberrations, this being of great importance for landscape observations, the image being thus freed from the distracting coloured borders with which every user of ordinary glasses is familiar. The instruments may be roughly divided into two classes: monocular and binocular (i.e., those through which the observation is made with one eye only, and those through which it is made with two). The former are mostly fitted with a revolving appliance, the turning of which allows of a rapid change of magnifying power. The object glasses in these instruments vary from four inches to five inches in diameter. The four-inch instrument magnifies objects thirty-five, fifty-three, and seventy-three times, according to the turning of the wheel, and the five-inch glass instrument thirty-five, fifty-eight, and a hundred and sixteen times.
The binocular instruments are contrivances astonishing in their effect. It is well known that our power of perspective rapidly decreases as the distance from the object increases. The reason of this is that the facial angle at which objects appear decreases with the distance, and finally becomes so slight that we lose all power of estimating it. We can, however, enlarge this angle by approaching the object, or by bringing it apparently near to us. This is accomplished in these five-foot telescopes by the employment of an artificial medium, so that separate objects in a landscape view twenty miles distant—houses, trees, people, etc.—appear as if they were only eighteen yards away. The effect is wonderful and charming. Mountain peaks and wooded valleys, which when seen through an ordinary telescope are all apparently on the same plane, stand out sharp, clear, and in glowing natural colours.
There is a telescope on the Uetliberg, close to Zürich, through which on a clear day it is possible to detect the stone signal on one of the peaks of the Diablerets, near Lausanne, almost at the other end of Switzerland, being a distance of not less than ninety-six miles. This signal is only about four feet high. Climbers on the Titlis, forty miles distant, can easily be seen through this telescope, as well as the hotel on the Faulhorn, sixty miles distant, and, in very fine weather, the small trigonometrical signal itself. From the instrument on the Rigi the crevasses in all parts of the Alpine chain, and also one of the church clocks in Schaffhausen, may be plainly seen. From the observation station on the Riffelalp the movements of the Matterhorn climbers can be followed as clearly as if they were within hailing distance. Through the telescope on the Schynige Platte in the Bernese Oberland the timid and unapproachable chamois may be observed on precipices miles distant, and persons on the four-miles-distant Faulhorn are easily distinguishable.