GLETSCH
Varied and uncertain as the weather was in Switzerland during July of
the year 1910, it showed a more decided character when I returned
there at the end of August. For three weeks there was no flood of
sunshine, no blazing of a cloudless blue sky, which is the one
condition necessary to the perfection of the beauty of Swiss
mountains, valleys and lakes. The Oberland was grey and shapeless, the
Lauterbruennen valley chilly and threatening; even the divine Jungfrau
herself, when not altogether obliterated by the monotonous,
impenetrable cloud, loomed in steely coldness--"a sterile promontory."
Crossing the mountains from the Lake of Thun, we came to Montreux,
only to find the pearl-like surface of the great Lake Leman
transformed into lead. Not once in eight days did the celestial
fortress called Les Dents du Midi reveal its existence, although we
knew it was there, immensely high and remote, far away above the great
buttresses of the Rhone valley. So completely was it blotted out by
the conversion of that most excellent canopy, the air, into a foul and
pestilent congregation of vapours, that it was difficult to imagine
that it was still existing, and perhaps even glowing in sunshine above
the pall of cloud. Italy, surely, we thought, would be free from this
dreadful gloom.
The southern slopes of the Alps are often cloudless when the colder
northern valleys are overhung with impenetrable mist. In four hours
you can pass now from the Lake of Geneva through the hot Simplon
Tunnel to the Lago Maggiore. So, hungering for sunshine, we packed,
and ran in the ever-ready train through to Baveno. Thirty years ago we
should have had to drive over the Simplon--a beautiful drive, it is
true--but we should have taken sixteen hours in actually travelling
from Montreux, and have had to pass a night _en route_ at Brieg! A
treacherous gleam of sunshine lasting half an hour welcomed us on
emerging from the Simplon tunnel, and then for eight days the same
leaden aspect of sky, mountain, and lake as that which we had left in
Switzerland was maintained. Even this could not spoil altogether the
beauty and interest of the fine old garden of the Borromeo family on
the Isola Bella. Really big cypress trees, magnificent specimens of
the Weymouth pine--the white pine of the United States, _Pinus
strobus_, first brought from the St. Lawrence in 1705, and planted in
Wiltshire by Lord Weymouth--a splendid camphor tree, strange varieties
of the hydrangea, and many other old-fashioned shrubs adorn the quaint
and well-designed terraces of that seat of ancient peace. The granite
quarries close behind Baveno, and the cutting and chiselling of the
granite by a population of some 2,000 quarrymen and stonemasons, were
not deprived of their human interest by rain and skies more grey than
the granite itself. But, at last, we gave up Italy in despair,
retreated through the tunnel one morning, and an hour after mid-day
were careering in a carriage along the Rhone valley--with jingling of
bells and much cracking of a harmless whip--upwards on a drive of
seven hours to the Rhone glacier, to the hotel called "Gletsch,"
staking all on the last chance of a change in the weather.
We passed the enclosed meadow near Brieg, whence three days later the
splendidly daring South-American aviator started on his flight across
the Alps, only to die after victory--a hero, whose courage and fatal
triumph were worthy of a better cause. After some hours, passing many
a black-timbered mountain village--the houses of which, set on stone
piles, are the direct descendants of the pile-supported lake dwellings
of the Stone Age on the shores of the Lake of Neuchatel--we came to
the upper and narrower part of the valley. The road ascended by
zig-zags through pine forests, in which the large blue gentian, with
flowers and leaves in double rows on a gracefully bowed stem, were
abundant. In open places the barberry, with its dense clusters of
crimson fruit, was so abundant as actually to colour the landscape,
whilst a huge yellow mullen nearly as big as a hollyhock, and bright
Alpine "pinks," were there in profusion. Before the night fell, a
long, furry animal, twice the size of a squirrel, and of dark brown
colour, crossed the road with a characteristic undulating movement, a
few feet in front of our carriage. It was a pine-marten, the largest
of the weasel and pole-cat tribe, still to be found in our own north
country. It must not be confused with the paler beech-marten of Anne
of Brittany, which often takes up its abode in the roofs of Breton
houses, according to my own experience in Dinard and the
neighbourhood. Night fell, and our horses were still toiling up the
mountain road. Impenetrable chasms lay below, and vast precipices
above us. We crossed a bridge, and seemed in the darkness to plunge
into the sheer rock itself, and, though thrilled with a delightful
sense of mystery and awe, were feeling a little anxiety at the
prospect of another hour among these gloomy, intangible dangers, when
we rounded a projecting rock, and suddenly a brilliant constellation
burst into view in the sky. It was the electric outfit of the
Belvedere Hotel, 7,500 feet above the sea, and far up more than a
thousand feet above us and the glacier's snout. In another minute the
great arc lamps of the Gletsch Hotel, close to us, blazed forth, and
we were welcomed into its snug hall and warmed by the great log-fire
burning on its hospitable hearth.
The next day we were early afoot in the most brilliant sunshine, under
a cloudless sky--really perfect Alpine weather. In the shade the
persisting night-frost told of the great height of the marvellous
amphitheatre which lay before us. The valley by which we had mounted
the previous night abruptly abandons its steep gradient and gorge-like
character, and widens into a flat, boulder-strewn plain, a little over
a mile in diameter, surrounded, except for the narrow gap by which we
had entered, by the steep, rocky sides of huge mountains. At the far
end of the plain, a mile off, the great Rhone glacier comes toppling
over the precipice, a snowy white, frozen cascade of a thousand feet
in height. It looks even nearer than it is, and the gigantic teeth of
white ice at the top of the fall seem no bigger than sentry-boxes,
though we know they are more nearly the size of church steeples. The
celebrated Furca road zig-zags up the mountain side for a thousand
feet close to the glacier, and when you drive up it and reach the
height of the Belvedere, you can step on to the ice close to the road.
Then you can mount on to the flat, unbroken surface of the broad
glacier stream above the fall, and trace the glacier to the
snow-covered mountain-tops in which it originates. There is no such
close and intimate view of a glacier to be had elsewhere in Europe by
the traveller in diligence or carriage. We walked by the side of the
infant Rhone, among the pebbles and boulders, to the overhanging snout
of the great glacier from beneath which the river emerges. A very
beautiful wine-red species of dwarf willow-herb (_Epilobium
Fleischeri_) was growing abundantly in tufts among the pebbles, and
many other Alpine plants greeted our eyes. The heat of the sun was
that of midsummer, whilst a delicate air of icy freshness diffused
itself from the great frozen mass in front of us.
Some large blocks of the glacier ice had fallen from above, and lay
conveniently for examination. Whilst the walls of the ice-caves which
have been cut into this and other glaciers present a perfectly smooth,
continuous surface of clear ice, these fragments which had fallen from
the surface exposed to the heat of the sun, were, as seen in the mass,
white and opaque. When a stick was thrust into the mass, it broke into
many-sided lumps of the size of a tennis-ball, which separated, and
fell apart in a heap, like assorted coals thrown from a scuttle,
though white instead of black. These were the curious glacier nodules,
"grains du glacier," or "Gletcherkoerne," characteristic of glacier ice
as contrasted with lake ice. This structure of the glacier ice is
peculiar to it, and is only made evident where the sun's rays
penetrate it and melt the less pure ice which holds together the
crystalline nodules. According to Dr. J. Young Buchanan, these nodules
are masses of ice crystals comparatively free from mineral matter,
whilst the water around them, which freezes less readily, contains
mineral impurities in solution. The presence of saline matter in
solution lowers, in proportion to its amount, the freezing-point of
the water. Accordingly, although frozen into one solid mass with the
nodules, the cementing ice melts under the heat of the penetrating
rays of the sun sooner--that is, at a lower temperature--than do the
purer crystalline nodules, and allows them to separate. It is owing to
this that the exposed surface of glacier ice is white and powdery,
disintegrated by the superficial heat, and forming a rough surface, on
which one can safely walk. Lake ice does not break up in this manner
under the sun's rays, but as it melts retains its smooth, slippery
surface. It is formed in water, and not from the cementing and
regelation of the powdery crystalline snow, as is glacier ice.
Pictures of the Rhone glacier published in the year 1820 and in the
eighteenth century show that in old days the terminal ice-fall did not
end abruptly in a narrowed "snout," as it does now, but spread out
into a very broad half-dome or fan-shaped, apron-like expanse, some
700 feet high and a quarter of a mile broad at the base. It was
considered one of the wonders of Switzerland, and was pictured in an
exaggerated way in travellers' books. In 1873, when I first drove down
the Furka road and saw the Rhone glacier, this wonderful, apron-like,
terminal expansion of the glacier was still in existence. It has now
completely disappeared. In those days, and for many years later, there
was only a mule-path over the adjacent Grimsel Pass, but now there is
a carriage road leading out of the Rhone glacier's basin northwards to
Meiringen, whilst the old-established Furka road, at the other side of
the amphitheatre, leads eastward to Andermatt, the St. Gothard, and
the Lake of Lucerne. Hence three great roads now meet at Gletsch.
Before leaving this wondrous spot we inspected some plump marmots, who
were leading a happy life of ease and plenty in a large cage erected
in front of the hotel; then in absolutely perfect weather we mounted
the Grimsel road. We heard the frequent whistling of uncaged marmots
as we ascended, and saw many of the little beasts sitting up on the
rocks and diving into concealing crevices as we approached, just as do
their smaller but closely allied cousins the prairie marmots
(so-called "prairie dogs") of North America. The view, as one ascends
the Grimsel, of the snow-peaks around Gletsch is a fine one in itself,
but is vastly enhanced in beauty by the plunge downwards of the rocky
gorge made by the Rhone as it leaves the flat-bottomed amphitheatre of
its birth. The top of the Grimsel Pass, which is a little over 7,000
feet above sea-level, is the most desolate and bare of all such
mountain passes. The rock is dark grey, almost black, and of unusually
hard character. It is unstratified, and so resistant that it is
everywhere worn into smooth, rounded surfaces, instead of being
splintered and shattered. A small, black-looking lake at the top of
the pass contains to this day the bones of 500 Austrians and French
who fought here in 1799. It is called the Totensee, or Dead Men's
Lake. At this point one stands on a great watershed, dividing the
rivers of the north from the rivers of the south. You may put one foot
in a rivulet which is carrying water down the Aar Valley, and through
the Lakes of Brienz and of Thun to the Rhine and North Sea, whilst you
keep the other in another little stream, whose particles will pass by
the Rhone gorge and valley through the Lake of Geneva to the great
Rhone and the Mediterranean. Three incomparably fine days--September
17th, 18th, and 19th--atoned for three weeks of sunless cloud. One of
them we spent in the high valley of Rosenlaui, where are hairy-lipped
gentians and the blue-iced glacier, but of these I have not space to
tell. Then the clouds and the rain resumed their odious domination,
and we left Lucerne and its lakes invisible, overwhelmed in grey fog,
and made for Paris.
_October, 1910_