GLACIERS
Incidentally, in the course of the preceding chapters, glaciers have
been frequently referred to, but they form so prominent a feature in
Alpine scenery as to demand a chapter alone. For, in fact, it is the
glaciers that most of us think about when we turn our minds to the Alps.
Minor ranges have walls of rock as precipitous and grand, gullies as
difficult to climb, valleys as beautiful and even as profound as the
Alps. Other European ranges are for a longer or shorter part of the year
snow-covered, and often deeply snow-covered, so as to present
snow-aretes, cornices, couloirs, and snow-slopes that might almost have
been stolen from the highest regions of so-called eternal snow. The
Pyrenees, if exception be made of one or two small glaciers of no
importance, are practically a range of this sort. They possess
fascinations, and great fascinations, but lacking glaciers they lack
what every traveller amongst them must feel to be the essential element
of greatness. Where glaciers exist the mountains are of the grand style.
A small Spitsbergen peak draped and surrounded by glaciers has a more
imposing effect than a great tropical hill, three times as big, which
lacks glaciers.
Snow that vanishes away before it is a year old is generally
feeble-looking stuff. It is only snow with a history, snow that has
weathered twenty hot summers, that really tells in a view. The first is
a mere inert covering of the ground; the second is a mighty and moving
agent. In short, the one is dead; the other is alive. A sheet of snow,
lying where it fell, is amorphous. It might be twice the size or half
the size and any single square yard of it would be the same. But a
glacier, the moving accumulation of a score or scores of winter
snow-falls, is a unit, and all its parts imply the rest. Increase or
diminish the area and you must needs change every detail, just as the
whole body of a man is modified when he begins to grow stout or to waste
away.
It is not often that you can see the whole of a glacier in a single
view, unless it be a very small glacier. Generally you see only a part;
but, to one who knows, that part implies the whole. When you see a man's
leg you know that there is the rest of him round the corner; from the
attitude of what is visible it is often possible to infer much about
what is hidden. So, too, is it with a glacier. The more familiar a man
is with glacier phenomena, the more certainly can he infer from the
known to the unknown. How easy it is with a little practice to tell at a
glance whether a bit of white beheld aloft is part of a glacier or
merely a bed of winter snow that will presently disappear. The one is
modelled by its own motion; the other merely borrows its modelling from
the ground on which it lies inertly.
The sense of motion, unity, and life--it is when these are
instinctively perceived in glaciers that a view of snow-mountains begins
to possess its true significance. Before it had been discovered that
glaciers move, people used to call them frightful, terrible, and so
forth. Ignorance blinded men's eyes to the beauty that was actually in
sight. Not knowing how to look, they could not see it. What forests,
grass, and flowers are to the lower regions, that glaciers are to the
higher--they are the vitalising element. Hence the importance to the
mountain-lover of learning to know glaciers and familiarising himself
with their structure, their ways, and their moods. It is easy enough to
declare that every form and movement of a glacier is determined by the
action of definite forces--so perhaps are all the ways and doings of
men. But we pretend that they are not, and talk of our whims and moods,
and may take the same liberty of speech about glaciers.
Every climber knows that there are glaciers of all sorts and
characters, and every mountain traveller knows that they behave
differently in different climates and latitudes. In the Arctic regions
they flow faster and spread more widely. They have a more viscous
appearance to the eye. They bulge and swell at the lower end, so that no
one would ever have invented the name "snout" for the termination of an
Arctic ice-stream. Moreover they break very readily into crevasses, even
upon gentlest inclines in their lower course, whilst high up they seem
less ready to form ice-falls than in the Alps. Glaciers in Norway vary
from the Arctic to the temperate character as you go from north to
south. The glaciers of Lyngen resemble those of Greenland. The glaciers
of Jotunheim are almost Alpine--more than Alpine, indeed, in the
development of their glorious ice-cascades, but less than Arctic in the
outreach of their lower extremities. The glaciers of the Tropics, again,
present peculiarities of their own, due to the fact that the ice
evaporates rather than melts. Thus their surfaces are dry and almost
granitic in aspect. Their towering seracs seldom fall. Avalanches are
much rarer than one would expect. Glacier streams are insignificant.
Thus it is in the Bolivian Andes and thus also in the regions of Kenya
and Ruwenzori. In the great Asiatic mountain territory there are
glaciers of many types, corresponding to the great variety of climates.
Those of Sikkim seem to be almost of the tropical character. Those of
the Mustagh are of the temperate sort; and there are many intermediate
varieties.
[Illustration: 49. FURGGEN GLACIER ICEFALL. Furggjoch at top of
picture.]
Alpine glaciers are of the medium type, lying as they do half-way
between the Arctic and tropical extremes. They have not the rapid flow
of the Arctic nor the dry rigidity of the tropical sort. Their walls are
not silent as in the Central Andes, nor thundered over by continual
avalanches like those of the upper Baltoro. They are of medium size
also. In a single day almost any of them may be ascended from snout to
snow-field, and descended again. To explore their remotest recesses no
elaborately equipped expedition is required. Yet they are large enough
to be imposing, and penetrate deep enough into the heart of the hills to
isolate their votaries completely from the world of human habitation. It
is to this medium quality that the Alps owe much of their charm. This,
too, it is that makes them an almost perfect mountain play-ground. Were
they but a little smaller, how much they would lose that is most
precious! Were they larger, how many persons that now can afford the
cost and the strength to explore them would have to linger at their
gates wistfully looking in. In area, too, they are large enough for
grandeur and yet small enough for easy access. No part of them is beyond
the range of a summer holiday, yet a commanding view of them is as
apparently limitless as is the view from the greatest Asiatic peaks
which, thus far, have been climbed. They are the only range of
snow-mountains in the world thus blessed with moderation.
It is for this reason that the Alpine climber so soon acquires an
understanding of glaciers as units. A novice, after a single year's
Alpine experience, can talk easily and with understanding of all the
parts of a glacier. It takes twenty seasons to know them well, but the
foundations of knowledge can be laid in one. The modern tendency amongst
climbers is to devote their main attention to rock-scrambling; but those
who have spent the best years of their life amongst mountains, generally
end by giving their hearts to glaciers and the high regions of snow. The
best advice that can be given to a young climber is, "Learn to know
glaciers." They offer the strongest contrast to the ordinary
surroundings of life. They present the most varied phenomena. They most
readily impress the imagination. They are the vital element, the living
inhabitants of the high world.
[Illustration: 50. THE GLETSCHERHORN FROM THE PAVILION, HOTEL CATHREIN,
CLOSE TO CONCORDIA HUT. One of the finest situations for views of the
ice-world where no climbing is required.]
If elsewhere I have praised the charms of contrast, of passing from
low to high, from fertile to barren, let me here exalt another method.
Who that has tried it will not agree that it is likewise well,
sometimes, to hide oneself in the very heart of the upper snows, and
there dwell for a while apart from the haunts of men? Formerly this was
difficult to accomplish, but now, in the Alps at any rate, it is easy;
for well-found high-level huts are many. Such, for instance, is the
Becher Refuge, planted in the midst of the Tirolese Uebelthal glacier, or
the Kuersinger Hut, on the north slope of the Gross Venediger. Settled in
either of these, you are in the midst of the high snowy world. The
_neves_ are within a stone's throw, and the final peaks may be gained by
a morning's walk. The Concordia Hut (now Hotel, I believe) is similarly
situated; whilst the hut on the top of the Signal Kuppe of Monte Rosa is
yet more highly elevated. It is easy to spend a day or two in any of
these huts, and so to pass before the eyes the whole daily drama as it
is played upon the heights. So easy is it, that one wonders why more
mountain-lovers do not avail themselves of the opportunity. The
drawback, of course, is that such a hut is a centre of human activity.
You forsake the hordes of men below, only to join a colony above.
Solitude in these places is not to be had except in bad weather.
There is one way, and one only, by which fully to experience the long
emotion of a dweller in the heights: it is to camp out. Few, indeed, are
they who have tried it in the Alps. Some have slept in a tent on the
mountain-side before a great climb; but they are fewer now than a score
of years ago. It is not, however, to such brief lodging I refer; but to
a settlement made and victualled for several days. Mr. Whymper, I
believe, is one of the few English climbers who has spent many days
together with a tent at high altitudes in the Alps, and he has not
published any notice of his experiences. It is a thing I have long
wished to do, knowing so well the charms of such life in other mountain
regions.
From a high-planted camp you can climb if you must, but you can also
enjoy yourself without climbing. To awake on a fine morning in the midst
of the snow-fields and see the coming of day at leisure, with no
preparations to be made for immediate departure; then to watch the sun
climb aloft and flood the depths of the valleys with its glory; to spend
the whole day at leisure in the vicinity of your tent, strolling now to
look into some bergschrund, now to scramble on to some neighbouring
point of rock, returning at intervals to dine, or read some pleasant
book, or to sketch in the shadow of the tent;--that is the way to let
the mountain-glory sink in. My climbing days on the heights have left me
pleasant memories enough, but the high-level days of idleness have been
more delightful, even when they were days of storm and driving snow.
[Illustration: 51. THE TRUGBERG. Looking up the Aletsch glacier from
corner of Maerjelen See.]
To be in the midst of a storm at a high altitude is a wonderful
experience, which all climbers pass through sooner or later; but it is
an uncomfortable experience. When you are camping-out high up you can
enjoy a storm far more easily. I have sat warmly in my sleeping-bag and
looked out for hours through a chink of the tent-door, fascinated to
watch the whirling of the snow and to listen to the wild music of the
gale. It is not the fine weather alone that is fair. There is a yet
grander glory in the storms. What can be more superb than to watch the
oncoming of such a visitant, to see the white valleys and dark
precipices swallowed up in the night of its embrace, to feel the power
of its might and the volume of its onrush, and to see and feel all this
with the sense of security such as a limpet may be conceived to feel in
the presence of waves breaking upon it? Who would not wish to spend a
few hours in the Eddystone Lighthouse in the midst of a December gale?
That would surely be worth while; like standing beneath the Falls of
Niagara.
Equally wonderful is it when the winds are still and a white fog
envelops your little camp. Then you know what it is like to be alone.
Above, around, and below all is impalpable whiteness. You might be
floating in the air on a bit of snow-carpet for all the eye can tell you
to the contrary. Never is silence more emphatic, not even in the darkest
hour of the night. The ear strains with listening and hears only the
pulsations of the heart, till some distant falling stone or rumbling
avalanche, some crack of a new-forming crevasse, some slight shifting of
a near snow-bed, sends a shiver through the air. And then, perhaps,
there is a writhing in the mist and shortly forms emerge. You cannot
tell at first whether they are tiny objects near at hand or remote
masses. Under such circumstances I have mistaken a little fragment of
paper drifting along the snow for a polar bear! Presently avenues of
clearness open up to close again. Finally, the mist grows thin and
glittering, the sunshine penetrates it, there is a moment of scorching
heat, and lo! all is clear, and the great world around is perfectly
revealed.
[Illustration: 52. PALLANZA--SUNSET.]
What beauty there is in the great snow-fields that wearied waders
through their soft envelope are in no condition to appreciate! For to be
seen at their grandest they must be seen in the full glare of
mid-daylight, when details are swallowed up in radiant, all-enveloping
splendour. Every one knows the glory of overpowering sound. For that
orchestras are enlarged and choruses increased in number. Who that has
heard the full-throated music of ten thousand men, singing as one, will
forget the majesty of that voluminous sonorance? The thunder of great
guns is used, by common consent, to express the salutations of a people.
What is true of sound is also true of light. Great views are ennobled by
the splendour of full sunshine. There is an indescribable charm about
desert sunrises and sunsets, but the glory of the desert is greatest at
noon when the sunshine seems to swallow up the world and almost to hide
it in excess of brightness. As with the deserts so is it with the
snow-fields. When the eye can barely suffer to rest on them, they are
most impressive. If there be specks of dust upon the snow, they
disappear then from vision. With the brightness comes perfect purity,
and the very idea of possible contamination vanishes away.
Reference has been made above to the beauty of linear form presented by
many mountains projected against the sky. The great snow-fields have a
beauty of surface form, a delicacy and perfection of modelling, far more
remarkable. The graceful outline of a rock-peak, such as the Matterhorn,
is, after all, a conception based upon a fact. The actual outline is a
line elaborately jagged, which the eye converts into a continuous curve
by purposely neglecting to observe the small indentations. But the
curvature of a _neve_ is often apparently perfect. Its slight
imperfections are too small for the eye to see even when they are looked
for. Where it curves over, the outline of its edge is as delicate as any
line that can be fashioned by the most elaborate artifice. No razor's
edge is apparently more true. So also are the surfaces, in the
perfection of their rise and fall. Not more perfect are the heavings of
the last dying swell on a calming tropical ocean. But the swelling of
the snows is still, and can be watched from dawn to eve with the
incredibly delicate shades upon it that change with the hours yet never
grow coarse, only towards the day's end they become blue and bluer, till
the pink lights of sunset melt against them before the pallor of night
comes on.
[Illustration: 53. KRANZBERG--ROTTHALHORN--AND JUNGFRAU: SUNSET.]
The details of the snow-fields are few, except when the surface is
forced to break up by submerged inequalities of the glacier's bed. Then
_neve_ ice-falls are formed, which are far more majestic than the
ice-falls of the middle region (such as that of the Col du Geant). The
high ice-falls are always deeply covered with recent snow, and the
broken white mantle upon the tumbled chaos produces mysterious hollows
and gives rise to long fringes of glittering icicles not elsewhere in
summer to be seen. To gaze into a crevasse in such a situation is to
look into a veritable fairy's grotto, where the recesses are bluer and
the walls more white than the memory ever avails to recall, and where
the icicles seem to be hung for the very purpose of sublime decoration.
Glimpses of such sights are often granted to the mere climber as he
hastily scrambles over a bergschrund by an insecure snow-bridge; but he
has no time to stop for half an hour and let his fancy play truant in
the depths. To do that, one must be living aloft, with all the day to
spend as one pleases, no peak to attain and return from, within short
time-limits, and no companions to say "Hurry up."
Perhaps these pages may have the good fortune to inspire some
mountain-lover with the wish to camp out aloft. A suggestion may,
therefore, not be out of place. Let the intending high-level resident
choose the situation of his camp with care. It must be out of the way of
excursionists, or he will be invaded by continual visitors, who will
expect entertainment and will thus deplete his stores and spoil his
solitude. It ought not, however, to be difficult of access, or the
problem of revictualling will be complicated and expensive. Such a camp
should consist of two tents--one of them for guides or porters. The
traveller's tent should be solid, and should possess a double roof or
fly, so that it may be occupied with comfort in the hot hours of the
day. It should be so firmly planted that no gale can overthrow it. Its
furniture should be sufficient for comfort. Do not plan to move on from
day to day, but settle down for a week or more at one spot, where there
are rocks for a tent platform, and short scrambles that can be safely
undertaken alone. Let the snow-field be near also, a snow-field that can
be traversed on _ski_, and do not forget to take the _ski_ with you, nor
fear that you will not be able to use them on fairly level ground
without previous practice. Keep a man with you to fetch water and do the
rough cooking, so that all your time may be your own to enjoy to the
full a rare opportunity which may not come again.
The middle region of the glaciers is the region best known to the
votaries of the Alps, because it is the most accessible from the popular
hotels. This middle region may be defined as limited by the snow-line
above and the tree-level below. It is therefore larger towards the end
of the season as the snow-line is pushed up by the melting of the winter
snows. On the Aletsch glacier it roughly corresponds with the stretch
between the Belalp and the Concordia; on the Gorner glacier with the
corresponding stretch between the Riffelhorn and the foot of Monte Rosa.
Its characteristic features are the open crevasses and the flowing or
standing water on the surface of the ice. This is the place to come to
for glacier picnics. It is the paradise of the moderate walker or the
superannuated mountaineer. It is a safe region for the experienced to
wander over alone, and for the inexperienced to visit with experts. You
can start late and be back early. You need not venture forth before the
weather has declared its intentions. Hence it is the popular glacier
belt, and its beauties are best known and most widely appreciated.
If it lacks the aloofness and romance of the _neves_, 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 _neve_ 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 Maerjelen 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.
[Illustration: 54. MAeRJELEN 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.
The moraines and scattered stones that are frequently encountered on the
dry glacier are more interesting than beautiful. It is well to make the
acquaintance of the medial moraines and to scramble over them, first for
the wider view that one gets from the top, and next in order to realise
their dimensions, always larger than one expects. Seen from a distance
medial moraines look smaller than they are. The eye must be educated to
realise their true dimensions. When that has been accomplished, the
great scale of the glacier that carries them can be felt, but not
before.
There is generally a breeze blowing over a dry glacier, so that when
the pleasant luncheon-hour arrives, a sheltered spot must be sought out,
one open to the sun and protected against the breeze, with good water
near at hand, and stones of convenient dimensions for seats and tables.
Experienced wanderers will detect such spots far sooner than novices. It
is with them as with good camping grounds: they are not easy to identify
at a glance, but they are well worth hunting out.
So also is it with points suitable for photography. A dry glacier is
full of details for a camera, and yet how few good photographs does one
see taken at this level among the mountains, unless they be distant
views. Nowhere are there better foregrounds to be discovered; yet when
they are looked for, how hard it is to find them. The composition is
generally faulty in the inexperienced amateur's picture. But those who
are experienced in the art seem to find suitable foregrounds everywhere.
It is the result of much taking thought.
Generally it happens that the return from a day's glacier wandering
leads up the hillside along the margin, so that as we ascend, the area
of our adventures spreads itself out below, and the eye can range over
the whole of it at once. We look for the place where we lunched, for the
broad streams with difficulty crossed, for the large pools we looked
down into. They are not often discoverable. What looked so important
near at hand has shrunk to an insignificant unidentifiable detail. The
river is one of hundreds of the same kind. The pools are innumerable.
The moraine stretches along for miles, and one of its mounds seems like
another. We thus begin to realise the size of the great icy expanse. Our
track over it has revealed but little of the multitude of sights there
are to see. We have but glanced at a few samples out of countless
thousands. Were we to return on the morrow we could not retrace our
steps, nor find again the objects we saw to-day. For a moment the grand
scale of the glacier imposes itself upon us, but before night has gone
we shall have forgotten it. Only by coming again and yet again does it
gradually sink into our understandings and become a part of the habit of
thought with which we approach the Alps.