A Tramp Abroad
are not quite able to grasp so large a fact as an ice-river six hundred
feet deep.
The glacier's surface is not smooth and level, but has deep swales and
swelling elevations, and sometimes has the look of a tossing sea whose
turbulent billows were frozen hard in the instant of their most violent
motion; the glacier's surface is not a flawless mass, but is a river
with cracks or crevices, some narrow, some gaping wide. Many a man, the
victim of a slip or a misstep, has plunged down one of these and met his
death. Men have been fished out of them alive; but it was when they
did not go to a great depth; the cold of the great depths would quickly
stupefy a man, whether he was hurt or unhurt. These cracks do not go
straight down; one can seldom see more than twenty to forty feet down
them; consequently men who have disappeared in them have been sought
for, in the hope that they had stopped within helping distance, whereas
their case, in most instances, had really been hopeless from the
beginning.
In 1864 a party of tourists was descending Mont Blanc, and while picking
their way over one of the mighty glaciers of that lofty region, roped
together, as was proper, a young porter disengaged himself from the line
and started across an ice-bridge which spanned a crevice. It broke under
him with a crash, and he disappeared. The others could not see how deep
he had gone, so it might be worthwhile to try and rescue him. A brave
young guide named Michel Payot volunteered.
Two ropes were made fast to his leather belt and he bore the end of a
third one in his hand to tie to the victim in case he found him. He was
lowered into the crevice, he descended deeper and deeper between the
clear blue walls of solid ice, he approached a bend in the crack and
disappeared under it. Down, and still down, he went, into this profound
grave; when he had reached a depth of eighty feet he passed under
another bend in the crack, and thence descended eighty feet lower, as
between perpendicular precipices. Arrived at this stage of one hundred
and sixty feet below the surface of the glacier, he peered through the
twilight dimness and perceived that the chasm took another turn and
stretched away at a steep slant to unknown deeps, for its course was
lost in darkness. What a place that was to be in--especially if that
leather belt should break! The compression of the belt threatened to
suffocate the intrepid fellow; he called to his friends to draw him up,
but could not make them hear. They still lowered him, deeper and deeper.
Then he jerked his third cord as vigorously as he could; his friends
understood, and dragged him out of those icy jaws of death.
Then they attached a bottle to a cord and sent it down two hundred feet,
but it found no bottom. It came up covered with congelations--evidence
enough that even if the poor porter reached the bottom with unbroken
bones, a swift death from cold was sure, anyway.
A glacier is a stupendous, ever-progressing, resistless plow. It pushes
ahead of it masses of boulders which are packed together, and they
stretch across the gorge, right in front of it, like a long grave or a
long, sharp roof. This is called a moraine. It also shoves out a moraine
along each side of its course.
Imposing as the modern glaciers are, they are not so huge as were some
that once existed. For instance, Mr. Whymper says:
“At some very remote period the Valley of Aosta was occupied by a vast
glacier, which flowed down its entire length from Mont Blanc to the
plain of Piedmont, remained stationary, or nearly so, at its mouth
for many centuries, and deposited there enormous masses of debris. The
length of this glacier exceeded EIGHTY MILES, and it drained a basin
twenty-five to thirty-five miles across, bounded by the highest
mountains in the Alps.
“The great peaks rose several thousand feet above the glaciers, and
then, as now, shattered by sun and frost, poured down their showers of
rocks and stones, in witness of which there are the immense piles of
angular fragments that constitute the moraines of Ivrea.
“The moraines around Ivrea are of extraordinary dimensions. That which
was on the left bank of the glacier is about THIRTEEN MILES long, and
in some places rises to a height of TWO THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY
FEET above the floor of the valley! The terminal moraines (those which
are pushed in front of the glaciers) cover something like twenty square
miles of country. At the mouth of the Valley of Aosta, the thickness of
the glacier must have been at least TWO THOUSAND feet, and its width, at
that part, FIVE MILES AND A QUARTER.”
It is not easy to get at a comprehension of a mass of ice like that. If
one could cleave off the butt end of such a glacier--an oblong block
two or three miles wide by five and a quarter long and two thousand
feet thick--he could completely hide the city of New York under it,
and Trinity steeple would only stick up into it relatively as far as a
shingle-nail would stick up into the bottom of a Saratoga trunk.
“The boulders from Mont Blanc, upon the plain below Ivrea, assure us
that the glacier which transported them existed for a prodigious length
of time. Their present distance from the cliffs from which they were
derived is about 420,000 feet, and if we assume that they traveled at
the rate of 400 feet per annum, their journey must have occupied them no
less than 1,055 years! In all probability they did not travel so fast.”
Glaciers are sometimes hurried out of their characteristic snail-pace.
A marvelous spectacle is presented then. Mr. Whymper refers to a case
which occurred in Iceland in 1721:
“It seems that in the neighborhood of the mountain Kotlugja, large
bodies of water formed underneath, or within the glaciers (either on
account of the interior heat of the earth, or from other causes), and at
length acquired irresistible power, tore the glaciers from their mooring
on the land, and swept them over every obstacle into the sea. Prodigious
masses of ice were thus borne for a distance of about ten miles over
land in the space of a few hours; and their bulk was so enormous that
they covered the sea for seven miles from the shore, and remained
aground in six hundred feet of water! The denudation of the land was
upon a grand scale. All superficial accumulations were swept away, and
the bedrock was exposed. It was described, in graphic language, how all
irregularities and depressions were obliterated, and a smooth surface of
several miles' area laid bare, and that this area had the appearance of
having been PLANED BY A PLANE.”
The account translated from the Icelandic says that the mountainlike
ruins of this majestic glacier so covered the sea that as far as the eye
could reach no open water was discoverable, even from the highest peaks.
A monster wall or barrier of ice was built across a considerable stretch
of land, too, by this strange irruption:
“One can form some idea of the altitude of this barrier of ice when it
is mentioned that from Hofdabrekka farm, which lies high up on a fjeld,
one could not see Hjorleifshofdi opposite, which is a fell six hundred
and forty feet in height; but in order to do so had to clamber up a
mountain slope east of Hofdabrekka twelve hundred feet high.”
These things will help the reader to understand why it is that a man who
keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by
and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of
conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will
only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough
to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.
The Alpine glaciers move--that is granted, now, by everybody. But there
was a time when people scoffed at the idea; they said you might as well
expect leagues of solid rock to crawl along the ground as expect leagues
of ice to do it. But proof after proof was furnished, and the finally
the world had to believe.
The wise men not only said the glacier moved, but they timed its
movement. They ciphered out a glacier's gait, and then said confidently
that it would travel just so far in so many years. There is record of
a striking and curious example of the accuracy which may be attained in
these reckonings.
In 1820 the ascent of Mont Blanc was attempted by a Russian and two
Englishmen, with seven guides. They had reached a prodigious altitude,
and were approaching the summit, when an avalanche swept several of the
party down a sharp slope of two hundred feet and hurled five of them
(all guides) into one of the crevices of a glacier. The life of one
of the five was saved by a long barometer which was strapped to his
back--it bridged the crevice and suspended him until help came. The
alpenstock or baton of another saved its owner in a similar way. Three
men were lost--Pierre Balmat, Pierre Carrier, and Auguste Tairraz. They
had been hurled down into the fathomless great deeps of the crevice.
Dr. Forbes, the English geologist, had made frequent visits to the Mont
Blanc region, and had given much attention to the disputed question of
the movement of glaciers. During one of these visits he completed his
estimates of the rate of movement of the glacier which had swallowed
up the three guides, and uttered the prediction that the glacier would
deliver up its dead at the foot of the mountain thirty-five years from
the time of the accident, or possibly forty.
A dull, slow journey--a movement imperceptible to any eye--but it was
proceeding, nevertheless, and without cessation. It was a journey
which a rolling stone would make in a few seconds--the lofty point of
departure was visible from the village below in the valley.
The prediction cut curiously close to the truth; forty-one years after
the catastrophe, the remains were cast forth at the foot of the glacier.
I find an interesting account of the matter in the HISTOIRE DU MONT
BLANC, by Stephen d'Arve. I will condense this account, as follows:
On the 12th of August, 1861, at the hour of the close of mass, a guide
arrived out of breath at the mairie of Chamonix, and bearing on his
shoulders a very lugubrious burden. It was a sack filled with human
remains which he had gathered from the orifice of a crevice in the
Glacier des Bossons. He conjectured that these were remains of the
victims of the catastrophe of 1820, and a minute inquest, immediately
instituted by the local authorities, soon demonstrated the correctness
of his supposition. The contents of the sack were spread upon a long
table, and officially inventoried, as follows:
Portions of three human skulls. Several tufts of black and blonde hair.
A human jaw, furnished with fine white teeth. A forearm and hand, all
the fingers of the latter intact. The flesh was white and fresh,
and both the arm and hand preserved a degree of flexibility in the
articulations.
The ring-finger had suffered a slight abrasion, and the stain of the
blood was still visible and unchanged after forty-one years. A left
foot, the flesh white and fresh.
Along with these fragments were portions of waistcoats, hats, hobnailed
shoes, and other clothing; a wing of a pigeon, with black feathers; a
fragment of an alpenstock; a tin lantern; and lastly, a boiled leg of
mutton, the only flesh among all the remains that exhaled an unpleasant
odor. The guide said that the mutton had no odor when he took it from
the glacier; an hour's exposure to the sun had already begun the work of
decomposition upon it.
Persons were called for, to identify these poor pathetic relics, and a
touching scene ensued. Two men were still living who had witnessed the
grim catastrophe of nearly half a century before--Marie Couttet (saved
by his baton) and Julien Davouassoux (saved by the barometer). These