Eiger

“ It was delightful there; the broad green meadow far above the clouds served for a stage. Straight in front the snow mountains lifted themselves in the sky, the mighty spire of the Eiger, with the Schreckhorn, the Wetterhorn and all the rest, away to the Blumlisalp. In the misty depth below lay the Lauterbrunnen valley looking quite small, and down there we could see all the route we had been the day before with its waterfalls marked like threads, the houses just little points, and the trees showing like tufts of grass. ”

“ Then mounting again, I passed up a long gentle slope by a few outlying châlets, and, having come out of the shadow of the Eiger, sat down to lunch. The air was utterly windless, the frost so keen that not a flake of snow clung to my clothes, yet through the glory of that pellucid air the sun struck so hot that a coat was altogether a superfluity. Eastwards the Wetterhorn rose in glacier and snowfield, and its superb and patient beauty, as of some noble woman waiting for the man she loves, struck me with a pang of delight. ”

“ The moon struggled through and upward at last into the open sky, and the clouds broke away enough so that great masses of the Eiger-Mönch-Jungfrau group came into sight, looking even more stupendously huge from being partly hidden. The valleys seemed bottomless abysses—their floors four thousand feet below being utterly lost in blackness. And on the other side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley the billowy snow peaks, quite free from clouds, rolled away, all silver in the moonlight. ”

“ The route is by way of Lauterbrunnen, Wengen, and the Scheidegg, and after skirting the Eiger Glacier going by tunnel into the very bowels of the mountain. At Eigerwand, Rotstock, and Eismeer are stations, great galleries blasted out of the rock, with corridors leading to openings from which one has marvelous views. [31] Eismeer looks directly upon the huge sea of snow and ice, with immense masses of dazzling white so close as to make one reel with awe and astonishment. ”

“ We watched the snow line creep up at the beginning of the season and down again at the end. We watched the mountains hide themselves in black lowering clouds, saw them lit up by flashes of lightning, heard them roll back the thunder, saw them repent and hang out a [30] rainbow from the Wetterhorn precipice across the white of the Upper Glacier and down in front of the Mettenberg, the upper peaks shake off their bad humor and emerge from the clouds all wet and shiny, rocks as well as snow, in the happy sunlight. Eiger is the same as ogre, etymologically, I suppose. ”

“ Then we start again, and on we are driven by the current generated away down there in Lauterbrünnen, through the spiral tunnel, mounting a thousand feet more till we are landed at an opening cut on the further side of the rocky Eiger, which admits us to an actual footing on the great glacier called the Eismeer, or Icelake. We lunch at a restaurant cut out as a cavern in the solid rock, and survey the wondrous scene. We are now at a height of 10,000 feet, and in the real frozen ice-world, hitherto accessible only to the young and vigorous. ”

“ Others rose like church spires, or like square towers, defended by trenches of unfathomable depths. Once beyond this barrier we should be safe upon the highest plateau of the glacier at the foot of the last snow-slope. But it was obviously necessary to turn them by some judicious strategical movement. One plan was to climb the lower rocks of the Eiger; but, after a moment's hesitation, we fortunately followed Lauener towards the other side of the glacier, where a small gap between the séracs and the lower slopes of the Mönch seemed to be the entrance to a ravine that might lead us upwards. ”

“ A great fold in the glacier produces a kind of diagonal pathway, stretching upwards from the point where we stood towards the rocks of the Eiger—not that it was exactly a carriage-road—but along the line which divides two different systems of crevasse, the glacier seemed to have been crushed into smaller fragments, producing, as it were, a kind of incipient macadamisation. ”

“ We don’t, however. Two hours of gazing at the Eiger, the Mönch, and the Schreckhorn produce an unpleasant stiffening of the joints; so shortly after discovering this we collect our baggage—scattered over about an acre of ground—and proceed across the level glacier towards the steep snow slopes coming down from the Mönchjoch. After an hour or two of threading our way amongst huge chasms, varied by passages in tight-rope style over knife-edges of ice, we reach our hut. ”

“ Before arriving at the Little Scheidegg, we turned up to the left towards the Eiger and, mounting steeply, gained the Eiger Glacier station where the tunnel of the Jungfrau railway begins. Active tunnelling operations on the railway were then in full progress, and it was our intention to travel by one of the workmen’s trains to the Eismeer Glacier station, in those days the most advanced station on the track. ”

“ As a proper child I was fascinated by the prospect of vicarious emotion, and the possibility of some fellow-creature roasting in the flames added interest to the drama. But it was not Grindelwald in flames, it was the ruthless indifference of the Eiger insolently preening its snows in the 203 blood-red haze of the catastrophe that really gripped me with fear. The mountains bind us by their very superiority to suffering. The unrelenting callousness that hurls the boulders down the gully in which we are pinned appeals to our primitive imaginations. ”

“ Next to this is the Mettenberg (perhaps 10,000 feet) ; and next, the great Eiger (giant, 12,220 feet) , presenting its long thin edge, like the blade of a hatchet turned up into the air; while back of the Mettenberg appears the pointed cone of the Schreckhorn (the peak of terror, 12,500 feet) . The vast space between these peaks is filled by an immense glacier, here and there interrupted, which under various names extends from Rosenlaui and Grindelwald{254} almost to the Grimsel, and to Brieg in the Valais. ”

“ THE JUNGFRAU A glance at the map of the Bernese Oberland will show that a straight line drawn in a north-easterly direction from the Breithorn to the Eiger will pass through, or close to, the Grosshorn, Mittaghorn, Ebnefluh, Jungfrau and Mönch. ”

“ This involved finding a passage right up through the icefall, but by keeping close to the wonderful precipices of the Eiger, so steep that they were almost free from snow, a feasible way was found. In spite of our skis, it was hard work, so deep and soft was the snow. As the presence of crevasses in winter is often so extremely difficult of detection, and a fall into one cannot be arrested so quickly when on skis as without them, we were roped at a distance of seventy feet from man to man. ”

“ At Lauterbrunnen we put the blue boy on horseback, and began the ascent of the Wengern Alp. People go up this mountain for the purpose of getting the most accessible, nearest, and best view of the Jungfrau, Mönch, and Eiger. As you turn to the left to ascend the mountain, you regret that you are not going up the valley, which you see would lead you up among glaciers and snowy peaks; or that you are not taking the path to the right, which you see would carry you over, and above the Staubbach, and you know would give you grand views of the snow-world. ”

“ Starting with a backward look [45] into the Grindelwald Valley and at our own Wetterhorn and Eiger, we uncovered the Mönch first and then the Jungfrau, with her beautiful shining sub-peaks, the Silberhorn and Schneehorn, and finally, when we got to the top of the ridge, there was that surprising hole in the ground, the Lauterbrunnen Valley, with all its waterfalls tumbling down the rock walls of the opposite side. Beyond were more snow mountains and to the westward Lake Thun and Lake Brienz, Interlaken and more snow mountains. ”

“ I lived about a fortnight in the region of the glaciers, ascending some new field of ice every day, and trying to scale the sides of our highest peaks. I thus examined in succession all the glaciers descending from the majestic summits of Monte Rosa and the Matterhorn, whose numerous crests form a most gigantic amphitheatre, which lifts itself above the everlasting snow. Afterward I visited the sea of ice which, under the name of the glacier of Aletsch, flows from the Jungfrau, the Monch, and the Eiger toward Brieg ”

“ There were tourists coming and going all the time, a place for tobogganing, a vender of postal cards, and all that sort of thing. But it is a fine glacier notwithstanding its pollutions.
After luncheon we boarded an ascending train and went through a long tunnel to what was then the terminus, the Eigerwand station (9405 feet high) . One finds oneself in an artificial cavern hewn out of the rock, and an opening in the side gives a fine bird’s-eye view (if one cares for that sort of thing) of the Grindelwald valley, Interlaken and Lake Thun. ”

“ After a steep ascent, we gained a point from which we could look down upon the frozen mass. At first the ice presented an appearance of utter confusion, but we soon reached a position where the mechanical conditions of the glacier revealed themselves, and where we might learn, had we not known it before, that confusion is merely the unknown intermixture of laws, and becomes order and beauty when we rise to their comprehension. We reached the so-called Eismeer—Ice Sea. In front of us was the range of the Viescherhörner, and a vast snow slope, from which one branch of the glacier was fed. ”

“ As looked down into from the top of the Eggischhorn, this little lake, with its green glass-smooth water, and white icebergs,—in part the cliffs from which they have fallen are of a tender blue,—and with the sober-coloured Alpine [Pg 246] pasture occupying the rest of the depression and reaching down to the Viescher glacier, and with the black mountain on the north of it, is a sight that must be quite unique, and is as charming and interesting as unique. ”

“ Switzerland’s grandest glaciers dwindle into insignificance beside the enormous ice-rivers of the frozen north. When the “Humboldt Glacier” of Greenland gets to the ocean it is about forty-five miles in width. A generous gift of water indeed, from land to ocean. Another monster glacier ends in a cliff of solid ice, rising in parts to four hundred feet of height. Greenland lies under one unbroken shield of snow and ice; and the weight of this tremendous “ice-cap” presses out numberless rivers of ice from its shores into the sea. ”

“ As we approached the promontory on the south of Crown-Prince Rudolf’s Land, we came upon innumerable icebergs, from one hundred to two hundred feet high, which made an incessant cracking and snapping sound in the sunshine. The Middendorf glacier, with an enormous sea-wall, ran towards the north to a great distance. Deep layers of snow and great rents in the sea-ice, the consequence of the falling-in of icebergs, filled the intervening spaces between them. Into these fissures we were continually falling, drenching our canvas boots and clothes with sea-water. ”

“ Hayes a lively description of the Sermiatsialik glacier, which he thinks must at some places be more than seven hundred and fifty feet in depth, overflowing the borders of the valley like a swollen torrent. For upwards of four leagues, the icebergs which throng the fiord, or gulf, are those of the glacier itself, and terminating in a wedge-like outline, disappear in the vast sea of ice expanding to right and left above the loftiest summits, and drawing irresistibly the eye to its rippled surface,—boundless, apparently, like that of ocean. ”

“ Some of the Swiss glaciers are between twenty and thirty miles long, in parts two or three miles wide, and often hundreds of feet deep. Starting above the snow-line they sometimes reach thousands of feet below it, the milder air failing to end their existence sooner. So enormous are the ice-masses, that not all the strength of the summer sun can make away with them. Of course, each square yard in turn does melt, and does help to feed the river of water which rushes away from the [p. 85] lower end of the glacier—sooner or later to reach the ocean. ”

“ Continuing our walk up the glacier, we hear, gradually becoming louder and louder as we approach, the roar of falling water, and soon we reach a point where a bright, dancing stream leaps down a shaft in the ice and is lost to sight. Be careful how you approach this deep hole (or, as it is called, moulin) , for one false step on your part would take you down far beyond all human aid. Various persons have endeavoured to gauge the thickness of a glacier at a given point by taking soundings down a moulin, and Agassiz found no bottom at 260 metres in one on the Unteraar glacier ”

“ In between the basalt range and the tuff hill there is, coming down the valley, what looks (in the photograph) like a fan-shaped glacier, with a vertical face at the end, but it is merely the alluvium resulting from the denudation of the hill; the clean-cut face is due to the river Hitá, which flows very rapidly at the foot of the range, and carries away the alluvial matter as it falls over the edge of the fan. The foreground is part of a broken-up lava-field, where the vegetation is typical: birch scrub, dwarf willow, coarse grass that grows all over Iceland, mosses, etc. ”

“ The Swiss glaciers bring down thousands of cubic yards of hard rock every season. Where the glacier ends in a plain or wide valley, the rocks are accumulated in a terminal moraine, but in numerous instances the water which pours from the ice-river has forces enough to carry down to larger streams the masses delivered by the glacier, and there they, with other stones washed out from the earth by the current, are ground down, so that few of the affluents of the Swiss lakes deliver into them anything but fine sand and slime. ”