The Spell of Switzerland Part 22

"The vast triangular shadow of Le Cervin stretched before us across the Furgg and the Theodule glaciers as far as the Gorner glacier. At our left the Zermatt valley already lay in a bluish darkness; it seemed as if the night were emerging from those depths. A moment later and the whole amphitheater of snow-covered cliffs shone with a divine glory. Only two tints, but those graduated in a thousand delicate shades, were used in this mighty painting. One was a soft deep azure, the azure of the invading shadows; the other a pure ethereal gold flung forth by the last rays of the sun. In the sky the two tints intermingling, shed a splendid violet reflection on the zenith."

A slight hint at the dangers to which the climber is exposed was afforded just before they had left the couloir for the shoulder. A projecting k.n.o.b on which they had set foot slipped away and went bounding down the side a thousand meters: "The Cervin counted one more wrinkle!"

When they reached the arete they had their last chance for resting:--"Before us towered the escarpment of rugged red rocks and above them the last heights of Le Cervin, the crest of which was invisible. On both sides of the arete were blood-curdling abysses.

Seated on a narrow ridge, surrounded by precipices and near the scene of one of the most tragic of Alpine accidents, we pa.s.sed in silence one of those moments that refuse to be forgotten. About a hundred meters higher, on the steep slope, must have occurred the fall of the four unfortunates who were dashed to pieces during the first ascent. I tried to revisualize that dreadful drama. I failed; the abyss had resumed its eternal silence. What meant to it the fall of those four men, full of life, youth and intelligence? Only the least of the avalanches that furrow it in a season."

The two men roped themselves together, and using the extremest care to get a foothold either in the ice or on bosses of the rock, they mounted to the very edge of the vertical wall which measured the whole height of the Cervin. The summit, says Javelle, is only the culminating point of a sharp, notched arete about a hundred meters long. On the south side is a frightful precipice out of sight. "It is impossible to stand on the slender summit; its crest is too sharp and the wind playing over it usually crowns it with needles of ice. With his ax Knubel made a hole in the ice a little lower down. This was our seat, and what monarch ever had such a throne?

"All around the summit lay an immense bottomless void, above which stood the circle of the giants of the Valais--Monte Rosa and her proud rivals, the Mischabel, the Weisshorn, the Rothorn, La Dent Blanche; then all the Alps with their maze of gigantic ramifications from the Viso group to considerably beyond the Ortler, an innumerable army of glittering or somber peaks, the immense undulating line of which was lost in the blue at the two ends of the horizon. To the north extended the unbroken profile of the Jura; then beyond, merging into the sky, the hills of France toward the Haute-Champagne or the Franche-Comte."

After half an hour on the peak, Javelle and his guide started back and in safety reached the valley of Zermatt. Since then one might almost say familiarity with that wonderful peak has bred contempt.

Javelle, himself, in a later article describing another ascent, complains:--"To-day alas! for the true lovers of the Cervin, the whole of this side of the n.o.ble mountain seems to be profaned."

Already it has been planned to build a railway up Le Cervin. The day of conquering mighty peaks in the Alps is past. Scarcely one is now left for the adventurer to grapple with and the Alpine guides are finding profitable fields in the vastly mightier mountains of the Himalaya or the Canadian Rockies.

For the old and the lazy, for delicate women, the electric cars that climb Mont Blanc, and so many others of the Alpine mountains, give the effect of the height and the enormous stretch of horizon; but still, even though the Alpine Club builds shelters and attaches aerial ladders and climbing chains, there is something exhilarating in the actual climbing of lofty mountains, and that the danger is not wholly eliminated is shown by the reports that come every summer of some unfortunate parties who try to "negotiate" those jealous giants of the skies. And when one is standing or sitting on one of their peaks one can say with John Stuart Blackie:--

"I love the eye's free sweep from craggy rim; I love the free bird poised at lofty ease And the free torrent's far up-sounding hymn; I love to leave my littleness behind In the low vale where little cares are great."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NEEDLE OF THE MATTERHORN.]

CHAPTER XX

THE VALE OF CHAMONIX

We saw everything that there was to see at Zermatt--the relics of the early climbers in the little museum; the pathetic graveyard where the victims of their mad ambition are commemorated, and the Imfeld relief-maps of the surrounding region. Here I had my first experience in what one might call mountain-climbing by proxy; we took the electric train up to the Gornergrat. Sir John Lubbock says:--

"It is impossible to give any idea in words of the beauty of these high snow-fields. The gently curving surfaces, which break with abrupt edges into dark abysses or sink gently to soft depressions or meet one another in ridges, the delicate shadows in the curved hollows, the lines of light on the crests, the suggestion of easy movement in the forms, with the sensation of complete repose to the eye, the snowy white with an occasional tinge of the most delicate pink, make up a scene of which no picture or photograph can give more than a very inadequate impression, and form an almost irresistible attraction to all true lovers of nature."

It is perfectly true: words fail to express one's feelings.

Just earth and rocks and snow and ice and light and shade. What power must have been exerted to squeeze those mighty strata and tip them up and bend them over and hurl them against one another. Everything is relative, and I find I can imagine what an ant might feel when climbing over the furrows of a plowed field. The earth itself seems so small when poised in the universe--just a microscopic atom, and the mightiest mountains are only the wrinkles of an apple. Yet here we were ten thousand feet above the sea with a vast panorama of mountains on every side. More than a score of Horns, besides Jochs and Cime and Grats and Gabeln; twenty of them are more than four thousand meters high; Monte Rosa topping them all with her four thousand six hundred and thirty-eight meters. Somehow mountains do not sound so high when expressed in meters, but one does not belong to Metrical Societies without being consistent! A dozen immense glaciers pour their cracking, dazzling, monstrous streams of liquid solidity down, for ever changing yet, like rivers of waters, for ever the same. Year after year appear the great creva.s.ses where the glacier tumbles over a precipice and becomes a cataract of ice, yet remains the same. Verily the mountains themselves, seen by the great eye of the Father of Time are moving; he sees that the whole crest of the Alps is slowly moving northward: this is proved by the fact that one side is steeper than the other.

It is rather amusing to see how many persons have been disgusted with their first view of a glacier. They are covered, in many cases, with mud, and look dirty and unkempt. They plow out the rocks; great showers of boulders fall down on them, and especially where they have flowed down to the melting level and begun to deposit their freight, making what are called terminal moraines, they are not white and glittering. But, seen from a distance, the glaciers of the high Alps are most impressive. And to think that a very slight lowering of the average temperature of the year would bring these great cold snaky monsters over the habitations of men again. The ice-age might once more be renewed and wipe out our civilization.

While we were on the Gornergrat I saw and heard an avalanche. A small snow-ball may start one. Roaring louder and louder with thunderous echoes it hurls itself down the steep incline, and, like a colossal, t.i.tanic bomb-sh.e.l.l, it bursts into the valley. The noise made by a snow-slide from a steep roof is startling enough, but imagine it multiplied a thousand times,--as if the top of the world were tumbling. It is impossible to estimate the thousands of tons of ice and snow that go das.h.i.+ng and cras.h.i.+ng and smas.h.i.+ng into the valleys. It is Nature engaged in her slow but certain work of destruction. The bombardment of the avalanches is one of the most impressive phenomena in the mountains.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE GLACIER.]

I do not know whether Tennyson ever climbed to the Gornergrat, but he gives a picture of Monte Rosa which is well worth remembering:--

"I climbed the roofs at break of day; Sun-smitten Alps before me lay, I stood among the silent statues And statued pinnacles, as mute as they.

"How faintly flushed, how phantom fair Was Monte Rosa hanging there A thousand shadowy-penciled valleys And snowy dells in the golden air."

I had a pensive longing to spend the whole summer among this giant Brotherhood of peaks, making excursions to one after another--provided the weather allowed. From each summit, from each col and shoulder, there would be a different aspect of mountain scenery; different cloud-effects; different sunsets; different risks and different escapes. I do not know how many chances there are of putting hundred franc notes into the pockets of guides. But the zest of discovery is gone; all climbing now is only imitation and repet.i.tion, and it is of no use to regret the old days or to repine because one must turn one's back on the possibilities of adventure.

We returned as we came. As the train stopped at Stalden Will told me of a wonderful excursion he had enjoyed the preceding year. He and two German friends of his, one a professor, the other a doctor, had walked up to Saas-Fee and ascended the Allalinhorn.

"We had to go down, before we went up," said Will. "There is a bridge which crosses the Matter-Visp, and after getting to the other side we followed up through the Saastal by a path which gives you the most enchanting pictures of tumbling water-falls. We spent the night at Saas-Grund and the next morning early reached Saas-Fee, which, I think, affords one of the finest views in Switzerland. The glacier called the Fee is perfectly surrounded with magnificent peaks--I can't remember half of them; but they are all from ten to thirteen thousand feet high. The Alphubel is over fourteen thousand. We took guides and went up the Allalinhorn. There were six of us roped together and it was over snow all the way. The pa.s.s is nearly twelve thousand feet up, and cold. But the view from the rounded summit well repaid us for our pains. Directly across, so that one could almost leap it, is the jagged peak of the Rimpfischhorn, its black dorsal fin sticking out of the dazzling snow as ugly, though not so prominently uprising, as the Matterhorn. Switzerland," he added, "for a little country has more ups and downs in it than any other in the world."

At Visp our Moto was waiting for us. Some of the people whom we met did not believe that we had been permitted to ascend the Rhone valley, as it had been at one time closed to motor-cars. But either the report of what the French are doing to attract wealthy travellers by building _La route des Alpes_ wholly in French territory from Paris to Nice or a realization of the direct loss of patronage caused by illiberal motor-laws has changed some of the interpretations of them. In parts of Switzerland it is perfectly justifiable to shut automobiles out.

Where the roads are narrow and are used largely by pedestrians or for driving cattle and there is real danger it is probably for the interest of the many for the few to be subjected to restraint. Even the hotel-keepers of the Grisons and of the Bernese Oberland agree that more are benefited by excluding motor-cars than by admitting them, for there are a thousand that go by horses or on foot to every hundred that come in automobiles.

We had to go back to Martigny, and as we were so near we went to see the Gorges du Trient. This is a colossal fissure from one hundred and eighty to three hundred meters deep, and frequently not more than a couple of meters across. The only access is by a wooden gallery nearly half a mile long hung on iron cramps and supports, while far below rushes the torrent with a deafening roar.

From Martigny one follows a zigzagging road over the Col de la Forclaz and then pa.s.ses Argentiere over the Col des Montets to Chamonix. The chief feature is the Tete Noire which Miss Havergal, who climbed it, declares "is a magnificent high level valley or gorge, winding for four or five hours at a good height along mountains with as picturesque a combination of heights and depths, rocks, torrents, cascades, pine trees, ferns, flowers and precipices as exists anywhere."

For the first time on our trip we had trouble with the Moto. First one of the front tires burst with a report that woke the echoes like a gun. Then, when going down a long incline, the brakes caused so much friction that we nearly got on fire; but by waiting for a while the danger was pa.s.sed and we reached Chamonix safely.

The name of Chamonix, or, as the French spell it, Chamouni, is derived from the Latin _campus munitus_, _champs muni_, the fortified field.

The earliest mention of the name in the modern form is found in an atlas of 1595; but in 1091, Aymon, Count of Geneva, bestowed the valley on the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Michel de la Cluse; it was then called by its Latin name. Three hundred years later a priory was founded there, which, in the early part of the Sixteenth Century, came into the jurisdiction of the Canons of Sallanches, who so maltreated the peasantry that at last they rose in revolt, destroyed the monastery and wrought their freedom. It was occasionally visited in the Seventeenth Century, but in 1741 two Englishmen, Poc.o.c.ke and Windham, with six others and five servants, went there from Geneva.

The feud between the Chamoniards and the monks of Sallanches had, in some way, made people believe that the valley was inhabited by brigands, and the Poc.o.c.ke-Windham party went armed and camped out in the open air with sentinels posted. Their bravery is commemorated in the "Englishmen's Stone," bearing their names and the date. The following year Pierre Martel, the son of a Geneva shoemaker, hearing about their wonderful adventures among the glaciers, was moved to see them for himself. He wrote an account of his journey and for the first time gave a name to Mont Blanc. What a pity he did not give a better one! He set the fas.h.i.+on of visiting "the glaciers" and people began to come more and more, to see them and to study them.

The young scientist De Saussure was one of the first to make a study of glacial action. Then, in 1762, the young Duc d'Enville made a study of the glaciers of Savoy, and wrote an interesting account of them, which may be found in the Annuaire du Club Alpin for 1893. Seventy years later Professor Forbes began to make scientific studies of the motion of the glaciers and was the first to discover that they were really rivers of ice moving like other rivers, faster in the centre than at the sides. He calculated that their daily progress was ten inches near the top, twenty-five inches near the bottom, at the centre, and sixteen inches at the sides. He discovered in the ice, fragments of wood which were recognized as belonging to a ladder which De Saussure had left at the upper end of the Mer de Glace in 1788.

They had been brought down five thousand meters in forty-five years.

In 1837 Louis Jean Rodolphe Aga.s.siz, whom America claims as one of her glories, though he was born on Lake Morat "In the pleasant Pays de Vaud," read a paper before the Helvetic Society of Natural Sciences meeting at Neuchatel, in which he propounded the now-accepted theory.

As it was opposed he made tests of the motion of the glaciers at Chamonix, at Zermatt and near the Grimsel-Pa.s.s. He spent a number of years in this work, a.s.sisted by Count de Pourtales and others. All sorts of tests were made but the proof of time is absolutely convincing.

Thus in 1820 a party had reached the upper end of the Grand Plateau and were just starting up the "ancien pa.s.sage" when the snow on which they were climbing began to slide. All of them were swept down to the edge of the great creva.s.se which they had safely crossed a short time before. Three of the guides were swallowed up in it. In 1861 the remains of their bodies began to appear at the lower end of the Glacier des Bossons, more than a kilometer from the place. Bits of clothing, a cooked leg of mutton, a forearm with its hand came into sight. One of the surviving guides was present when they were discovered and exclaimed:--"Who would have thought I should once more shake hands with my good comrade again!" These remains had travelled more than one hundred and fifty meters a year for forty-one years.

De Saussure's monument stands on the east bank of the Arve; Balmat's on the other side, near the church.

The valley of Chamonix is supposed to be due to glacial action. Those who have studied it show that it is a part of the great folding up of the Jura.s.sic strata nipt in between crystalline rocks by the tremendous lateral compression to which Switzerland was subjected as the earth cooled and shrank. The Valais, the Urserental and the region of the Vorder Rhein belong to the same cosmic cataclysm.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "JAGGED NEEDLES AND PINNACLES OF CRUEL ROCK."]

The great-great-grandchildren of that prehistoric glacier still inhabit the mountain-valleys. The greatest of them is the Mer de Glace, on which every visitor must set his foot. Farther up the valley is l'Argentiere, which stretches from side to side between the rugged mighty ridges that lift themselves into fantastic jagged needles and pinnacles of cruel rock. It is at least a hundred meters deep, and one can look down into vivid blue creva.s.ses and hear the rus.h.i.+ng of the ever-wearing waters far below. The five glaciers make the five streams which the poets sing about. At one time the Glacier des Bois dammed the Arve, but in time the persistent river cut through it, forming the Pa.s.sage des Tines, which has a height of one hundred and seventy meters. The great erratic blocks of granite scattered through the valley are mute witnesses of the ancient days. The eye that can read will see all along the faces of the cliffs the hieroglyphics of the ice.

This is what William Cullen Bryant says about the Arve. By the way, I noticed that while Coleridge p.r.o.nounced it in two syllables, Sh.e.l.ley gives it one. So does Bryant:--

"Not from the sands or cloven rocks, Thou rapid Arve! thy waters flow; Nor earth within its bosom locks Thy dark, unfathomable wells below.

Thy springs are in the cloud, thy stream Begins to move and murmur first Where ice-peaks feel the noonday beam, Or rain-storms on the glacier burst.

"Born where the thunder and the blast, And morning's earliest light are born, Thou rushest swoln and loud and fast By these low homes as if in scorn: Yet humbler springs yield purer waves; And brighter, gla.s.sier streams than thine, Sent up from earth's unlighted caves, With heaven's own beam and image s.h.i.+ne.

"Yet stay! for here are flowers and trees; Warm rays on cottage roofs are here, And laugh of girls and hum of bees,-- Here linger till thy waves are clear.

Thou heedest not, thou hastest on; From steep to steep thy torrent falls, Till, mingling with the mighty Rhone, It rests beneath Geneva's walls."

"That expression, 'rests beneath Geneva's walls,' seems to me singularly inappropriate," said I. "I did not know it rested anywhere."

"By the way," said Will, "it is a curious thing: almost all visitors to the Rhone valley remember the river as a greyish muddy-looking stream; yet it is true, for seven months of the year it runs with a clear current, of a greenish colour very much like Niagara's. I suppose it does its work of disintegration mainly in the summer, when it has the help of the sun."