Grampian Mountains

“ In the eastern Grampians, the mountains include broad tracts of undulating moorland, which, though lying along the summits of the chain, are level enough to be capable of conversion into racecourses. These hills are separated from the sea by a tract of lowland, and lie thus entirely inland. On the west side of the Highlands, however, the ground between the straths and glens mounts upward into narrow ridges, not infrequently sharpened into knife-edged crests, while the whole aspect of the landscape is rugged, rocky, and bare. Land and sea appear there to be inextricably intermingled. ”

“ It is not prettiness nor gentle beauty, nor antithetic effect of colour or outline, which reward the wanderer among the Grampian Hills; but a deep feeling of the grand and awful harmonies of nature is sure to steal into his mind, and linger there even after he has climbed the snowy Alps or sunny Pyrenees. ”

“ In the May sun the adder shot off from his damp sun-bath as one crushed through the scrub. The trees burst into leaf, first in the valleys and then on the hills. Each day one watched the climbing green and saw the fearful dark brow of a mountain soften away and pass from deep impenetrable black to soft laughing green. Snowy peaks lost their glory of white, and one knew them to be but little grey Grampians beside the huge mountains of Elbruz. The road-mud hardened and Persian stone-breakers were busy smashing their little heaps of boulders ”

“ This mountain rises abruptly from the river to a broad summit-plateau, from which a wide and brilliant prospect rewards the climber. The central portion of Gorham is getting to be much too busy for that rest and quietude which is so greatly desired by a large class of travellers to the mountains, but, on the other hand, its position with respect to the highest summits is more advantageous than that of any other town lying on the skirts of the mountains, and accessible by railway. In one hour the tourist can be at the Glen House, in three on the summit of Mount Washington. ”

“ To return, however, from the excellences of the cuisine at Bertolini's to those of the range [Pg 180] of Mont Blanc, should the jaded climber of 'degraded' mountains want more rock peaks, the ascent of the lesser Dru, in my opinion, can be repeated profitably. Not even amongst the Dolomites can one get the sensation of dizzy height and appalling depth to the same extent as on this mountain; moreover, there is a most sporting though small glacier to cross before one begins the rock ascent. Then the Charmoz and the Grépon are not to be despised. ”

“ The dark mountains rising purple to the snow, peak beyond peak of the Southern Alps soaring white against that wondrous blue—so close they seem, so attainable—it is hard to realize they are 10,000 feet above us. And between two mountain walls, filling a mighty gorge, winds down the Franz Josef glacier; an icy chaos of pinnacles and seracs, green-blue and glittering white against the purple-black crags of the gorge. But strangest of all is where the glacier and the forest meet, and the splendid scarlet of the ratas seems almost to touch the ice and snow. ”

“ The Cape to Cairo railway will have brought the various sources of the Nile within a few days' travel of England; the endless fields of barren ice that surround the poles will have yielded up their secrets; whilst the vast and trackless fastnesses of that stupendous range of mountains which eclipses all others, and which from time immemorial has served as a barrier to roll back the waves of barbaric invasion from the fertile plains of Hindustan—these Himalaya will have been mapped, and the highest points in the world above sea-level will have been visited by man. ”

“ The evidence of the ancient presence of glaciers is no less striking in other parts of the Scotch Highlands. Between the southeastern range of the Grampian Hills, in Forfarshire and Perthshire, and the opposite ridge of Sidlaw Hills, stretches the broad valley of Strathmore. At the time when Glen Spean received the masses of ice from the slopes of the western Grampian range, the glaciers descended from the valleys on the southern slope of the southeastern range and from those on the northern slope of Sidlaw Hills into the capacious bed of the valley which divides them. ”

“ Till then there will be plenty of space for the enthusiast who likes to wander amidst the snow-and ice-covered mountains. The ledges of rock high up, with the grey lichen on them, will still afford a resting-place from which the long glaciers far down below can be seen as they descend to the green-hued woods and the hazy valleys filled with sunshine. The overhanging cornices high above, for ever on the point of breaking off, will still hang poised in unstable equilibrium. The storms will sweep as frequently as of old across that mountain land, hiding for a brief space all in gloom ”

“ From above the rains and snows and winds are chiselling away its rocks and bearing them to the plains. In time the process of pushing up ceases; the process of grinding down goes on remorselessly, never pausing for a moment.
So the mountains are eternal only in the figurative sense. Actually their term of existence is strictly finite. Once the Australian Alps had their tremendous peaks, and hills of unmelting ice. To-day they have been ground down to below the line of perpetual snow, and along the gentle grades of the chief peak it is possible to drive a carriage to the very summit. ”

“ Cliffs and precipices there are, of course; witness the terrible fall from the Matterhorn to the glacier below—thousands of feet with one tremendous leap from the rock to the ice underneath; but mountain slopes are not precipices. As a rule, we find that one side of a mountain chain is steeper than the opposite one. It is harder to climb up from Italy to Switzerland than to ascend in the opposite direction. The Pyrenees are also steeper on the south side. The Scandinavian mountains likewise are steeper in the west. The Himalaya are steepest towards the sea, so are the Ghauts. ”

“ Hampshire, the steep slopes are often seamed by the paths of these great landslides. Their movement, indeed, is often begun by sliding snow, which gives an impulse to the rocks and earth which it encounters in its descent. At a place known as the Wylie Notch, in the White Mountains, in the early part of this century, a family of that name was buried beneath a mass of glacial waste which had hung on the mountain slope from the ancient days until a heavy rain, following on a period of thaw, impelled the mass down the slope. ”

“ To explain the phenomena of the Yangma valley, it may be necessary to demand larger lakes and deeper accumulations of débris than are now familiar to us, but the proofs of glaciers having once descended to from 8000 to 10,000 feet in every Sikkim and east Nepal valley communicating with mountains above 16,000 feet elevation, are overwhelming, and the glaciers must, in some cases, have been fully forty miles long, and 500 feet in depth. ”

“ It has frequently been noticed that all mountains appear doomed to pass through the three stages: An inaccessible peak—The most difficult ascent in the Alps—An easy day for a lady.
I must confess that the Grépon has not yet reached this final stage, and the heading of the last few pages must be regarded as prophetic rather than as a statement of actual fact. Indeed, owing to the great accumulation of ice and snow on the mountain, the ascent last described will always rank as amongst the hardest I have made. ”

“ It thus appears that the whole range of the Grampians formed a great centre for the distribution of glaciers, and that a colossal ice-field spread itself over the whole country, extending in every direction toward the lower lands and the sea-shore. ”

“ It has also, singularly enough, long been the custom to look upon the Himalaya as a tropical range of mountains, in which it was, as a matter 476 of course, regarded as impossible that glaciers could exist [38] .
The upper end or origin of a glacier seems commonly to be in an enormous snow-bed, occupying the whole space included by an amphitheatre of snowy peaks. The snow-slips and accumulations by which the snow-bed is added to during winter, must to a great extent remain concealed from human eyes ”

“ Glacier remains largely unexploited, bearing still the aspect of the Earth the Indians knew for 500 generations—a land where it is yet possible to feel a sense of discovery, sense that a single man matters. On too many mountains, man has tarnished whatever he has touched; but here the land has shed, as a fir sloughs snow, a long succession of traders, trappers, explorers, hunters, surveyors, prospectors, loggers, settlers, and tourists. ”

“ The low sandy or sandstone hills, which form the outskirts of the Himalaya, are not, on the road from Firozpur to Simla, anywhere of greater elevation than a few hundred feet. A few miles beyond the entrance, the valley, which has a considerable slope, widens as it approaches the more lofty mountains, and the sandstone cliffs are replaced by rounded hills, probably of a more ancient rock, covered with soil and vegetation. ”

“ Some geological investigators affirm that the table-land inclosed between the northern slopes of the Himalayas, the Kuenlun, the desert of Gobi—which is said to be older than the formation of the Himalayas—the Heavenly or Blue mountains, and the Altaï, was the first land which rose from the waters, and that therefore it was the first, and perhaps the only place in the north, where man appeared. ”

“ So long a time, however, has elapsed since the elevation of even the youngest mountain-chains of the globe that the sub-aërial agents of erosion—rain, frost, rivers, glaciers, etc.—have been enabled greatly to modify their primeval features. For these mountains, therefore, it is only partially true that their present slopes coincide with those of the underlying strata. Such being the case with so young a chain as the Alps, we need not be surprised to meet with modifications on a still grander scale in mountain-regions of much greater antiquity. ”

“ When the cloud of dust is cleared away, nothing but heaps of stones and rubbish are to be seen where pastures once grew, or the peasant ploughed his acres in peace. The stream flowing down the valley is obstructed in its course, and changed into a muddy lake; the rampart of rocks from which some débris still comes crumbling down has lost its old form; the sharpened edges point out the denuded cliff from which a large part of the mountain has broken away. In the Pyrenees, Alps, and other important ranges there are but few valleys where one cannot see the confused heaps of fallen rocks. ”

“ I described also one remarkable transverse mound, evidently the terminal moraine of a retreating glacier, which crosses the valley of the South Esk, a few miles above the point where it issues from the Grampians, and about six miles below the town of Clova. It is situated at a place called Glenairn (perhaps 700 feet above the level of the sea) , where the valley is half a mile broad and is bounded by steep and lofty mountains. The valley immediately above this transverse barrier expands into a wide alluvial plain, which has evidently once been a lake. ”

“ Though some of these rise to the region of perpetual snows, and are upwards of eleven thousand feet in real altitude, yet their height from their immediate basis is not so great as might be imagined, as they swell up from elevated plains, several thousand feet above the level of the ocean. These plains are often of a desolate sterility; mere sandy wastes, formed of the detritus of the granite heights, destitute of trees and herbage, scorched by the ardent and reflected rays of the summer’s sun, and in winter swept by chilling blasts from the snow-clad mountains. ”

“ The structure of the mountains, their form, and the nature of their soil, suffice, even without these meteorological conditions I have just indicated, to render them impracticable as the dwelling-place of man and of most animals. To ascend them is almost always an enterprise of the most hazardous, frequently of the most perilous character. To climb the lofty peaks of the Himalaya, to scale the majestic brow of Chimborazo, to ascend the frozen sides of the Jungfrau or Mont Blanc, is an achievement of which the boldest boast, as if they had won a Waterloo or an Inkermann! ”

“ Glaciers from each valley, meeting at the fork, where their depth would be 700 feet of ice, would both deposit the necessary accumulation along the flanks of the great valley, and also throw a barrier across it. The melting waters of such glaciers would accumulate in lakes, confined by the frozen earth, between the moraines and mountains. Such lakes, though on a small scale, are found at the terminations and sides of existing glaciers, and are surrounded by terraces of shingle and debris ”

“ Our course is up and to the back of the glacier. These cliffs are sedimentary; they lie on the eruptive crystallines of the mountains; the river runs west; the glacier has dammed its course eastward, where it should flow, following the dip of the slates and sandstones. It cuts the dip, and the glacier has crossed its path and filled up this singular crevice, which is a fault rift.”
He looked triumphant; Goritz seized the suggestion.
“That’s right,” he shouted, “up the glacier and then—we can use the dogs!”
We were soon back to the abandoned sledge ”

“ Throughout the millions of years during which the folding, faulting, and overthrusting have been taking place, the process of erosion has continued; a thousand meters of stratified rocks have been worn away, so that only a remnant of the overthrust layers can be seen today. Because Glacier’s eastern slope represents the eroded face of the overthrust block, the mountain range rises precipitously from the prairie, with no foothills breaking the abrupt transition from open prairie to mountain valley. ”