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 crevasses 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, titanic bomb-shell, 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 dashing and crashing and smashing 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.

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 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 repetition, 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 pass 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 RhÔne 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 passes ArgentiÈre over the Col des Montets to Chamonix. The chief feature is the TÊte 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 passed 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, Pococke 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 Pococke-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 fashion 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 Agassiz, 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 NeuchÂtel, 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-Pass. He spent a number of years in this work, assisted by Count de PourtalÈs 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 passage” when the snow on which they were climbing began to slide. All of them were swept down to the edge of the great crevasse 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 Jurassic 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.

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’ArgentiÈre, 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 crevasses and hear the rushing 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 Passage 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 pronounced it in two syllables, Shelley gives it one. So does Bryant:—

“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 RhÔne 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.”

Chamonix, which so short a time ago was almost a lost valley, is now the very centre of the mercenary traffic in Nature’s most marvellous mysteries. One may reach dizzy heights now by the railway, and there are restaurants a mile above the sea.

My nephew happened to be personally acquainted with M. FidÈle Eugster, whose fertile brain devised a scheme for building solid pylons over which should run an aerial line from Chamonix up to the Aiguille du Midi, three thousand eight hundred and forty-two meters—only a little less than nine hundred and sixty-five meters less than the monarch himself. He happened to be there himself and he invited Will and me to ride up as far as the construction-car went. Ruth contented herself with watching us and taking a walk about town. The car, seating twenty persons, starts from Chamonix and swings up two thousand meters over the twenty-seven of these immense pylons already constructed. They are from twenty-five to seventy-five meters apart. The power-station, where there are electric motors of seventy-five horse-power each, is near Pierre Pointue at a height of one thousand six hundred and seventy-nine meters. From there over twenty-four more pylons a cable one thousand four hundred meters long took us to the foot of the Aiguille. There we got into a smaller basket-car and were swung up to a protogen pinnacle directly opposite the Grands Mulets. From there we were taken to the first tension-pylon which breaks the enormous stretch to the Col du Midi, where the terminal station will be constructed. It is a tremendous swoop of between eight and nine hundred meters and the last stathmos will be nearly six hundred more. The car glissades down the curves; then the cable pulls it up the incline. It is like a series of gigantic scallops but there is no shock, no jar; only a clicking as you pass the pylons.

Next to my flight in the hydro-aeroplane this was the greatest experience of my life. What can I say of that swoop through the air? Words utterly fail. Below lay the valley with its thickly clustered hotels and houses and the ramifications of the rushing rivers and streams like veins in a dissected hand. Below us lay the glacier with its sÉracs diminished to etchings. All around rose the haughty Brotherhood scornfully watching the machinations of puny, mighty-minded man. They know that they can sometimes catch him napping, but only his body can they hurt. His soul is bigger and grander than their icy hearts. They can fling down avalanches and hurl enormous boulders or bullet-like stones at him, tearing themselves to pieces in their blind fury to do so, but here he is above them. They can’t shake off the shackles which his genius and his power fasten to their gigantic frames. Atlas must bear the Earth on his shoulders and there is no Perseus to relieve him of the weight.

Compared to the cost of some of the other Swiss roads this aerial line is comparatively inexpensive. It has been estimated that twenty-four million francs will build it and equip it. Its success will doubtless cause other “inaccessible peaks” to be harnessed in the same way. All the difficulty and most of the danger—I suppose one might be struck by lightning or die of heart-failure on the way up—and a vast amount of time, will be eliminated.

While we were in the valley we had a most glorious sunset. I will not attempt to describe the indescribable; there are no terms to differentiate the tints that glowed on the clouds and the shades of lavender and violet and royal purple. There is nothing more impressive than to see the outburst of cloud masses from a mountain-valley rising dark and stormy and then, as it were, putting on the panoply of their royal state—furnished them by their servant the sun. I recalled Moore’s poem on Mont Blanc at sunset:—

We went through the paces demanded of visitors to the valley. We made excursions to the Glacier des Bossons especially to see the little lake which so exquisitely mirrors Mont Blanc—so detestible the artificial ruins which insult its beauty!—we even paid our franc to penetrate the artificial grotto in the ice—and we went as far as the Cascade du Dard. We went also to FlegÈre for the sake of its extraordinary panoramic view; but I thought best of all was the BrÉvent which faces so closely the whole range.

We reluctantly left the wonderful valley and returned to Lausanne by the way of Cluses, where we had our watches set, thence across to Bonneville, down to Geneva and along the lake. We were warmly welcomed by the three children who, however, had been well looked after by the trustworthy French bonne.