AVALANCHES AND GLACIERS
The avalanche is chiefly associated in the mind of the visitor to
Switzerland with thoughts of peril and destruction, the glacier with
the idea of a permanent field of ice set decoratively to adorn a
mountain-side. Neither impression represents all of the truth.
Avalanches are destructive, and glaciers decorative. But the avalanche
is normally, to the dweller in the Alps, the welcome harbinger of
spring; the glacier the hard-working labourer which brings down soil
from the mountain rocks for the enrichment of the plains.
The first avalanche is the sign to the Swiss that
_Solvitur acris hiems_,
and though he will not "draw his fishing boats down by rollers to the
sea," in all other respects he will share the song of joy in which
Horace records for the Italian husbandman the welcome due to the
spring. The avalanche may be sometimes terrible in its destruction, as
in lower lands a flood may sometimes be; but on their record, year by
year, they do not cause any appalling loss of life or of property.
Some deaths, some destruction, can be set to their account, but Nature
exacts a penalty from man everywhere, on plain, on mountain, and on
sea. Inundations of plains, storms at sea, cause probably a much
greater proportionate loss of life and property than avalanches.
In Switzerland, spring is the great time for avalanches. They fall all
the year round, chiefly from high levels, but it is in the spring that
the greatest avalanches come adrift. Certain spring avalanches descend
with remarkable regularity in particular places, one every year. An
avalanche falls at a recognised spot in the neighbourhood of almost
every village, which dates from its advent the opening of the spring.
This spring avalanche is no sudden freak of Nature, but an inevitable
affair, slowly engendered. The snow that piles up during the winter
months, on what in summer are the grass slopes below the snow-line,
gradually becomes unstable as spring melting advances. The mass loses
its cohesion, ceases to bind firmly together, and tends to flow
downwards. The trend of the ground decides the way of its fall. If the
fields upon which it lies are of small area and slope conveniently,
the avalanche will slide gently down to its appointed place. But if
the disposition of the ground is such that a great mass of snow is
collected in a basin which has a narrow outlet, from this a great
avalanche will rush like a cataract down the mountain-side until it
reaches a barrier sufficiently strong to put a stop to its current.
It is this type of avalanche which is the most likely to do great
mischief; but even this pours down rather than falls down the hill
slope. Sir Martin Conway recalls his observations of avalanches in
their actual progress along the Simplon Road one spring:
Near Berisal I crossed one which had recently come to rest,
traversing the road. By its rugged white surface, broken into
great protuberances, its solidity, and its general form, it
resembled a small glacier. To climb on to it one had to cut
steps, so steep were the sides. Higher up I crossed several
more such fallen masses, through which gangs of workmen were
cutting out the road. Towards the top of the pass the snow was
tumbling in smaller masses. Over a hundred little avalanches
crossed the road within a couple of hours. Then they stopped.
On the Italian side similar conditions obtained, but it was not
till I reached Isella that the greatest fall took place, or
rather was taking place, for it had begun before I arrived, and
it continued after I had passed. There, a narrow gorge, with
vertical cliff-sides facing one another, debouches on the main
valley. It leads upwards to a great cirque in the hills, a
cirque that is a grass-covered alpine pasture in the summer.
The avalanche was pouring out through this gorge and piling
itself up upon the main valley-floor. How the mass of it was
being renewed from behind I could not see. Doubtless all the
hillsides above were shedding their snow, and it was flowing
down and crowding into and through the gorge with a continuous
flow. As the pressure was relieved below by the outpouring of
the avalanche on to the valley floor, more snow came down--snow
mixed with slush, and semi-liquid under the great pressure that
must have been developed....
It is not easy to suggest to the reader the grandeur of effect
that was produced. The volume of noise was terrific--a noise
more massive and continuous than thunder, and no less deep
toned.... The avalanche, pouring through the massive gateway of
the hills and polishing its sides, came forth with an aspect of
weight and resistless force that was extraordinarily
impressive. Yet Nature did not seem to be acting violently,
though her might was plain to see. She appeared to act with
deliberation: one looked for an end of the snow-stream to come,
but it flowed on and on, pulsating but not failing. The
pressures that must be developed were easily conceived;
correspondingly evident became the strength of the hills that
could sustain them as if they had been but the stroking of a
hand.
Later in the season the traveller often encounters, in
deep-lying valleys, the black and shrunken remnants of these
mighty avalanches, melted down by summer heats. Little idea can
they give him of the splendour of their birth and the white
curdled beauty of their surface when they first come to rest.
In the nature of things they travel far and fall low, well into
the tree-belt, and even down to the chestnut-level on the
Italian side. It is a strange sight to see these vast,
new-fallen masses lying in their accustomed beds, but
surrounded by trees all freshly verdant with the gifts of
spring. Yearly each one falls in the same place, falls
harmlessly and duly expected. Its coming is welcomed. Its voice
is the triumphant shout of the coming season of summer
exuberance and fertility. Nature, newly awakened, cries aloud
with a great and solemnly joyous cry, and the people dwelling
around hear her and arise to their work upon the land.
The avalanche, then, is one of the great natural forces of the
mountains, which is not necessarily or even ordinarily destructive.
But, like other natural forces--the fresh in the river or the gale at
sea,--it can be very terrible, and, again like other natural forces,
the wisdom and precaution of man can do much to minimise the danger of
the avalanche and to avert any serious destruction by its agency. The
Swiss people, so practical, so economical, so courageous, carry on a
persistent scientific campaign against the unruly element in these
torrents of ice, setting up lines of defence everywhere. The first and
most important line of defence is the forest; and for this reason the
forest laws of Switzerland are very severe. A man is not allowed to
fell a tree in his own wood without the forester's consent. Everything
is done to preserve the natural rampart afforded by a mass of pines.
In the second place, where avalanches descend regularly every year,
stone galleries are built, or tunnels are mined out of the solid rock
to protect roads. There are many examples of these galleries and
tunnels in the Zuege, near Davos.
Scientific engineers are eager to add to these plans of defence. They
believe that the root of the mischief ought to be attacked. In places
where avalanches are expected, they recommend the building of terraces
and dwarf-walls, so as to arrest the earliest snow-slip. Lower down,
in the forest zone, piles should be driven into the ground, and fenced
with wattling. These precautions, and others on similar lines, are now
being taken, and most of the well-known avalanche tracks are being
surrounded by various defensive works designed to arrest any tendency
to mischief that they show. Destruction from avalanches there will
continue to be in exceptional cases, for Nature insists, now and
again, on displaying some unwonted, abnormal display of her power
which sets at nought all precautions of man. A _Titanic_ goes to the
bottom of the sea to show that the shipbuilder can claim only a human
and therefore limited surety against disaster. An avalanche may one
day shock Europe by rushing unexpectedly down to overwhelm a whole
Swiss village. But the danger from them has been diminished largely,
and continues to be diminished. It is necessary to go back to the past
to obtain the record of any great number of avalanche disasters.
The Swiss classify avalanches into several sorts. The first of these,
in order of maturity, is the _Staub-Lawine_ or Dust-Snow Avalanche.
This is a collection of loose snow, freshly fallen, which has been
caught up in one of those sectional tornadoes which spring up on the
mountain slopes, and is driven down on the wings of the wind to the
valley below. This form of avalanche is, because of its suddenness,
the most dangerous to human life, and is also the most difficult to
provide against. Measures to prevent the accumulation of drift snow
in dangerous pockets or wind-swept slopes are in some degree
efficacious. Mr. Symonds records the experience of a Swiss who was
caught in a Dust-Avalanche:
[Illustration: DAVOS IN WINTER. The home of John Addington Symonds.]
A human victim of the dreadful thing, who was so lucky as to be
saved from its clutch, once described to me the sensations he
experienced. He was caught at the edge of the avalanche just
when it was settling down to rest, carried off his feet, and
rendered helpless by the swathing snow, which tied his legs,
pinned his arms to his ribs, and crawled upward to his throat.
There it stopped. His head emerged, and he could breathe; but
as the mass set, he felt the impossibility of expanding his
lungs, and knew that he must die of suffocation. At the point
of losing consciousness, he became aware of comrades running to
his rescue. They hacked the snow away around his thorax, and
then rushed on to dig for another man who had been buried in
the same disaster, leaving him able to breathe, but wholly
powerless to stir hand or foot.
The usual spring avalanche is called the _Schlag-Lawine_ or
Stroke-Avalanche. These, as already described, push down a slope of
the mountains like a swiftly flowing river. Danger from the
_Schlag-Lawine_, which is just as usual and inevitable a process of
Nature as the growing of the trees or the splitting of rocks by frost,
has been very largely reduced. This form of avalanche can be traced
to its sources and its course and flow regulated by channels and
break-ices. It has a secondary form called the _Grund-Lawine_ or
ground avalanche. This is the avalanche which aroused the poetic anger
of Mr. Symonds:
The peculiarity of a _Grund-Lawine_ consists in the amount of
earth and rubbish carried down by it. This kind is filthy and
disreputable. It is coloured brown or slaty-grey by the rock
and soil with which it is involved. Blocks of stone emerge in
horrid bareness from the dreary waste of dirty snow and slush
of water which compose it; and the trees which have been so
unlucky as to stand upon its path are splintered, bruised,
rough-handled in a hideous fashion. The _Staub-Lawine_ is
fury-laden like a fiend in its first swirling onset, flat and
stiff like a corpse in its ultimate repose of death, containing
men and beasts and trees entombed beneath its stern unwrinkled
taciturnity of marble. The _Schlag-Lawine_ is picturesque,
rising into romantic spires and turrets, with erratic
pine-plumed firths protruding upon sleepy meadows. It may even
lie pure and beautiful, heaving in pallid billows at the foot
of majestic mountain slopes where it has injured nothing. But
the _Grund-Lawine_ is ugly, spiteful like an asp,
tatterdemalion like a street Arab; it is the worst, the most
wicked of the sisterhood. To be killed by it would mean a
ghastly death by scrunching and throttling, as in some grinding
machine, with nothing of noble or impressive in the
winding-sheet of foul snow and debris heaved above the mangled
corpse.
But the _Grund-Lawine_ is really the most beneficial avalanche of the
Alps, doing quickly the work, which a glacier does slowly, of carrying
down soil from the heights to the plains. It is rare in the Swiss
Alps, more common in mountains of younger age going through earlier
processes of disintegration. Perhaps, if one is to look at an
avalanche chiefly as an instrument of death, the _Grund-Lawine_ has a
greater objectionableness than the _Staub-Lawine_. But any form of
death by avalanche is best avoided: and the difference between death
by the _Grund-Lawine_ and death by the _Staub-Lawine_ is purely
aesthetic. And the _Grund_ usually kills quickly whilst the _Staub_ may
take a freakish turn and bury you alive in a cranny or cavern which
the avalanche has sealed by passing over it. Men have slowly died of
hunger in such circumstances. Yet, so long as life lasts, there is
hope; no pains are spared in ransacking the snow after an avalanche;
and cases of almost miraculous deliverance occasionally occur. One
February (records Mr. Symonds) a young man called Domiziano Roberti,
in the neighbourhood of Giornico, saw an avalanche descending on him.
He crept under a great stone, above which there fell a large tree in
such a position that it and the stone together roofed him from the
snow, which soon swept over him and shut him up. There he remained 103
hours in a kind of semi-somnolence, and was eventually dug out,
speechless and frightfully frost-bitten, but alive.
The avalanche record of a single village (Fetan) of Switzerland--a
village which is characterised as a very unlucky one--will give some
idea of the real extent of the toll of the avalanche. In the year 1682
a great avalanche swept over it. Six persons were killed, but the rest
of the villagers, expecting some such catastrophe, had abandoned their
houses. In one dwelling nothing was left standing but the living-room
and one bedroom. These, however, contained the mother of the family
and all her children, who escaped unhurt. In 1720 an avalanche
demolished fifteen houses. In one of them a party of twenty-six young
men and women were assembled. They were all buried in the snow, and
only three survived. Altogether thirty-six persons perished at that
time. In 1812 a similar catastrophe occurred, destroying houses and
stables. But on this occasion the inhabitants had been forewarned and
left the village. A curious story is told about the avalanche of
1812. One of the folk of Fetan, after abandoning his home to its fate,
remembered that he had forgotten to bring away his Bible. In the teeth
of the impending danger, through the dark night, he waded back across
the snowdrifts, and saved the book. In 1888 there was further
destruction at this village by avalanche, but with no loss of life.
That is a particularly unlucky village, evidently badly situated. But
since 1720 the snow-falls have caused no loss of life there.
The down-coming of an avalanche, if it be sudden and swift, is often
accompanied by a great blast of wind, which gives it an additional
danger. This wind may in some cases be partly caused by the
displacement of the air from the fall; in most cases, it is probable,
the wind was in chief part the original cause of the snow-fall. The
blast of the avalanche is known as the _Lawinen-Dunst_, and many
thrilling stories are told of hairbreadth escapes from its blast. A
carter driving with a sledge and two horses across the Albula Pass was
hurled--horses, sledge, and all--across a gully by the wind. A woman
was lifted into the air and carried to the top of a lofty pine-tree,
to which she clung and was saved. Of more tragic tone is the record
of the man lifted by an avalanche blast and smashed to pieces against
a stone, of a house lifted up in the air and dashed down, killing most
of its inhabitants.
The avalanche is snow in quick movement towards the valleys. The
glacier is snow--pressed into ice--in slow movement. A river of ice,
its flow to be measured by the records of months, not of moments--that
is the glacier of Alps and Polar lands. Its mission in nature is the
same as that of a river, to grind down mountain rocks and to carry the
detritus for the enrichment of the plains below. The glaciers of the
Polar lands, coming down as they do to the edge of the ocean, are
responsible for the icebergs of those seas. Compared with Polar
glaciers the Alpine ones are puny, no larger, as a rule, than a large
iceberg--which represents just a fragment broken off an Arctic or
Antarctic glacier. But the Alpine examples of glaciers, small though
they be, are grandly impressive in their natural surroundings. Such a
one as the Silvretta, for instance, stretching its length for nearly
twenty miles across the mountains, looks magnificently vast. From a
distance a glacier seems to be white, with bands of grey, or of black
from the moraines (strips of earth and stones showing on the surface).
Studied at close hand it is a pageant of varied colours due to the
variations of light and shade on its surface, and to the manner in
which the refraction of the light is affected by the partial melting
of the topmost layer of the snow. From this melting come little
trickles of water which combine to form streams and then torrents. The
beds of these torrents are blue in colour and like transparent
glass--a lovely contrast with the general surface of the glacier. For
that is made white by the innumerable fissures that penetrate its
surface, fissures which are caused by the heat of the sun, from which
the beds of the streams are protected. Yet more beautiful than the
streams are the pools occasionally found on the surface of a glacier,
when they have clean floors unsoiled by a moraine. They, too, have
blue basins with white edges. Looked down upon from a distance, they
appear like great sapphires. 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 Maerjelen See by the Great Aletsch, and the lake
at the west foot of Monte Rosa. On these one may see floating masses
of ice. Now and again will be found crevasses filled with water, whose
depth gives a yet bluer tone.
Sir Martin Conway (from whose expert study of glaciers I have freely
quoted) gives the palm for glacier colouring to what is called the dry
glacier.
"Note," he writes, "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."
[Illustration: MAeRJELEN SEE AND GREAT ALETSCH GLACIER.]
Ordinarily a glacier surface is not diversified by any large features.
But sometimes peaks of rock rise as islands out of a sea of ice.
Sometimes, too, inequalities in the bed of the glacier acting with the
pressure of the ice mass cause great wrinklings on the surface (the
Col du Geant is an instance), and from the ridges thus formed hang
very beautiful ice-falls.
For the proper study of glacier beauty it is recommended to Alpine
travellers that they should arrange to camp for some days in the
glacier region. But there are good examples of glaciers within walking
distance of some of the higher hotels.