Part 6 (1/2)
On the Italian side similar conditions obtained, but it was not till I reached Isella that the greatest fall took place, or rather was taking place, for it had begun before I arrived, and it continued after I had pa.s.sed. There, a narrow gorge, with vertical cliff-sides facing one another, debouches on the main valley. It leads upwards to a great cirque in the hills, a cirque that is a gra.s.s-covered alpine pasture in the summer.
The avalanche was pouring out through this gorge and piling itself up upon the main valley-floor. How the ma.s.s of it was being renewed from behind I could not see. Doubtless all the hillsides above were shedding their snow, and it was flowing down and crowding into and through the gorge with a continuous flow. As the pressure was relieved below by the outpouring of the avalanche on to the valley floor, more snow came down--snow mixed with slush, and semi-liquid under the great pressure that must have been developed....
It is not easy to suggest to the reader the grandeur of effect that was produced. The volume of noise was terrific--a noise more ma.s.sive and continuous than thunder, and no less deep toned.... The avalanche, pouring through the ma.s.sive gateway of the hills and polis.h.i.+ng its sides, came forth with an aspect of weight and resistless force that was extraordinarily impressive. Yet Nature did not seem to be acting violently, though her might was plain to see. She appeared to act with deliberation: one looked for an end of the snow-stream to come, but it flowed on and on, pulsating but not failing. The pressures that must be developed were easily conceived; correspondingly evident became the strength of the hills that could sustain them as if they had been but the stroking of a hand.
Later in the season the traveller often encounters, in deep-lying valleys, the black and shrunken remnants of these mighty avalanches, melted down by summer heats. Little idea can they give him of the splendour of their birth and the white curdled beauty of their surface when they first come to rest.
In the nature of things they travel far and fall low, well into the tree-belt, and even down to the chestnut-level on the Italian side. It is a strange sight to see these vast, new-fallen ma.s.ses lying in their accustomed beds, but surrounded by trees all freshly verdant with the gifts of spring. Yearly each one falls in the same place, falls harmlessly and duly expected. Its coming is welcomed. Its voice is the triumphant shout of the coming season of summer exuberance and fertility. Nature, newly awakened, cries aloud with a great and solemnly joyous cry, and the people dwelling around hear her and arise to their work upon the land.
The avalanche, then, is one of the great natural forces of the mountains, which is not necessarily or even ordinarily destructive.
But, like other natural forces--the fresh in the river or the gale at sea,--it can be very terrible, and, again like other natural forces, the wisdom and precaution of man can do much to minimise the danger of the avalanche and to avert any serious destruction by its agency. The Swiss people, so practical, so economical, so courageous, carry on a persistent scientific campaign against the unruly element in these torrents of ice, setting up lines of defence everywhere. The first and most important line of defence is the forest; and for this reason the forest laws of Switzerland are very severe. A man is not allowed to fell a tree in his own wood without the forester's consent. Everything is done to preserve the natural rampart afforded by a ma.s.s of pines.
In the second place, where avalanches descend regularly every year, stone galleries are built, or tunnels are mined out of the solid rock to protect roads. There are many examples of these galleries and tunnels in the Zuge, near Davos.
Scientific engineers are eager to add to these plans of defence. They believe that the root of the mischief ought to be attacked. In places where avalanches are expected, they recommend the building of terraces and dwarf-walls, so as to arrest the earliest snow-slip. Lower down, in the forest zone, piles should be driven into the ground, and fenced with wattling. These precautions, and others on similar lines, are now being taken, and most of the well-known avalanche tracks are being surrounded by various defensive works designed to arrest any tendency to mischief that they show. Destruction from avalanches there will continue to be in exceptional cases, for Nature insists, now and again, on displaying some unwonted, abnormal display of her power which sets at nought all precautions of man. A _t.i.tanic_ goes to the bottom of the sea to show that the s.h.i.+pbuilder can claim only a human and therefore limited surety against disaster. An avalanche may one day shock Europe by rus.h.i.+ng unexpectedly down to overwhelm a whole Swiss village. But the danger from them has been diminished largely, and continues to be diminished. It is necessary to go back to the past to obtain the record of any great number of avalanche disasters.
The Swiss cla.s.sify avalanches into several sorts. The first of these, in order of maturity, is the _Staub-Lawine_ or Dust-Snow Avalanche.
This is a collection of loose snow, freshly fallen, which has been caught up in one of those sectional tornadoes which spring up on the mountain slopes, and is driven down on the wings of the wind to the valley below. This form of avalanche is, because of its suddenness, the most dangerous to human life, and is also the most difficult to provide against. Measures to prevent the acc.u.mulation of drift snow in dangerous pockets or wind-swept slopes are in some degree efficacious. Mr. Symonds records the experience of a Swiss who was caught in a Dust-Avalanche:
[Ill.u.s.tration: DAVOS IN WINTER. The home of John Addington Symonds.]
A human victim of the dreadful thing, who was so lucky as to be saved from its clutch, once described to me the sensations he experienced. He was caught at the edge of the avalanche just when it was settling down to rest, carried off his feet, and rendered helpless by the swathing snow, which tied his legs, pinned his arms to his ribs, and crawled upward to his throat.
There it stopped. His head emerged, and he could breathe; but as the ma.s.s set, he felt the impossibility of expanding his lungs, and knew that he must die of suffocation. At the point of losing consciousness, he became aware of comrades running to his rescue. They hacked the snow away around his thorax, and then rushed on to dig for another man who had been buried in the same disaster, leaving him able to breathe, but wholly powerless to stir hand or foot.
The usual spring avalanche is called the _Schlag-Lawine_ or Stroke-Avalanche. These, as already described, push down a slope of the mountains like a swiftly flowing river. Danger from the _Schlag-Lawine_, which is just as usual and inevitable a process of Nature as the growing of the trees or the splitting of rocks by frost, has been very largely reduced. This form of avalanche can be traced to its sources and its course and flow regulated by channels and break-ices. It has a secondary form called the _Grund-Lawine_ or ground avalanche. This is the avalanche which aroused the poetic anger of Mr. Symonds:
The peculiarity of a _Grund-Lawine_ consists in the amount of earth and rubbish carried down by it. This kind is filthy and disreputable. It is coloured brown or slaty-grey by the rock and soil with which it is involved. Blocks of stone emerge in horrid bareness from the dreary waste of dirty snow and slush of water which compose it; and the trees which have been so unlucky as to stand upon its path are splintered, bruised, rough-handled in a hideous fas.h.i.+on. The _Staub-Lawine_ is fury-laden like a fiend in its first swirling onset, flat and stiff like a corpse in its ultimate repose of death, containing men and beasts and trees entombed beneath its stern unwrinkled taciturnity of marble. The _Schlag-Lawine_ is picturesque, rising into romantic spires and turrets, with erratic pine-plumed firths protruding upon sleepy meadows. It may even lie pure and beautiful, heaving in pallid billows at the foot of majestic mountain slopes where it has injured nothing. But the _Grund-Lawine_ is ugly, spiteful like an asp, tatterdemalion like a street Arab; it is the worst, the most wicked of the sisterhood. To be killed by it would mean a ghastly death by scrunching and throttling, as in some grinding machine, with nothing of n.o.ble or impressive in the winding-sheet of foul snow and debris heaved above the mangled corpse.
But the _Grund-Lawine_ is really the most beneficial avalanche of the Alps, doing quickly the work, which a glacier does slowly, of carrying down soil from the heights to the plains. It is rare in the Swiss Alps, more common in mountains of younger age going through earlier processes of disintegration. Perhaps, if one is to look at an avalanche chiefly as an instrument of death, the _Grund-Lawine_ has a greater objectionableness than the _Staub-Lawine_. But any form of death by avalanche is best avoided: and the difference between death by the _Grund-Lawine_ and death by the _Staub-Lawine_ is purely aesthetic. And the _Grund_ usually kills quickly whilst the _Staub_ may take a freakish turn and bury you alive in a cranny or cavern which the avalanche has sealed by pa.s.sing over it. Men have slowly died of hunger in such circ.u.mstances. Yet, so long as life lasts, there is hope; no pains are spared in ransacking the snow after an avalanche; and cases of almost miraculous deliverance occasionally occur. One February (records Mr. Symonds) a young man called Domiziano Roberti, in the neighbourhood of Giornico, saw an avalanche descending on him.
He crept under a great stone, above which there fell a large tree in such a position that it and the stone together roofed him from the snow, which soon swept over him and shut him up. There he remained 103 hours in a kind of semi-somnolence, and was eventually dug out, speechless and frightfully frost-bitten, but alive.
The avalanche record of a single village (Fetan) of Switzerland--a village which is characterised as a very unlucky one--will give some idea of the real extent of the toll of the avalanche. In the year 1682 a great avalanche swept over it. Six persons were killed, but the rest of the villagers, expecting some such catastrophe, had abandoned their houses. In one dwelling nothing was left standing but the living-room and one bedroom. These, however, contained the mother of the family and all her children, who escaped unhurt. In 1720 an avalanche demolished fifteen houses. In one of them a party of twenty-six young men and women were a.s.sembled. They were all buried in the snow, and only three survived. Altogether thirty-six persons perished at that time. In 1812 a similar catastrophe occurred, destroying houses and stables. But on this occasion the inhabitants had been forewarned and left the village. A curious story is told about the avalanche of 1812. One of the folk of Fetan, after abandoning his home to its fate, remembered that he had forgotten to bring away his Bible. In the teeth of the impending danger, through the dark night, he waded back across the snowdrifts, and saved the book. In 1888 there was further destruction at this village by avalanche, but with no loss of life.
That is a particularly unlucky village, evidently badly situated. But since 1720 the snow-falls have caused no loss of life there.
The down-coming of an avalanche, if it be sudden and swift, is often accompanied by a great blast of wind, which gives it an additional danger. This wind may in some cases be partly caused by the displacement of the air from the fall; in most cases, it is probable, the wind was in chief part the original cause of the snow-fall. The blast of the avalanche is known as the _Lawinen-Dunst_, and many thrilling stories are told of hairbreadth escapes from its blast. A carter driving with a sledge and two horses across the Albula Pa.s.s was hurled--horses, sledge, and all--across a gully by the wind. A woman was lifted into the air and carried to the top of a lofty pine-tree, to which she clung and was saved. Of more tragic tone is the record of the man lifted by an avalanche blast and smashed to pieces against a stone, of a house lifted up in the air and dashed down, killing most of its inhabitants.
The avalanche is snow in quick movement towards the valleys. The glacier is snow--pressed into ice--in slow movement. A river of ice, its flow to be measured by the records of months, not of moments--that is the glacier of Alps and Polar lands. Its mission in nature is the same as that of a river, to grind down mountain rocks and to carry the detritus for the enrichment of the plains below. The glaciers of the Polar lands, coming down as they do to the edge of the ocean, are responsible for the icebergs of those seas. Compared with Polar glaciers the Alpine ones are puny, no larger, as a rule, than a large iceberg--which represents just a fragment broken off an Arctic or Antarctic glacier. But the Alpine examples of glaciers, small though they be, are grandly impressive in their natural surroundings. Such a one as the Silvretta, for instance, stretching its length for nearly twenty miles across the mountains, looks magnificently vast. From a distance a glacier seems to be white, with bands of grey, or of black from the moraines (strips of earth and stones showing on the surface).
Studied at close hand it is a pageant of varied colours due to the variations of light and shade on its surface, and to the manner in which the refraction of the light is affected by the partial melting of the topmost layer of the snow. From this melting come little trickles of water which combine to form streams and then torrents. The beds of these torrents are blue in colour and like transparent gla.s.s--a lovely contrast with the general surface of the glacier. For that is made white by the innumerable fissures that penetrate its surface, fissures which are caused by the heat of the sun, from which the beds of the streams are protected. Yet more beautiful than the streams are the pools occasionally found on the surface of a glacier, when they have clean floors unsoiled by a moraine. They, too, have blue basins with white edges. Looked down upon from a distance, they appear like great sapphires. 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 Marjelen See by the Great Aletsch, and the lake at the west foot of Monte Rosa. On these one may see floating ma.s.ses of ice. Now and again will be found creva.s.ses filled with water, whose depth gives a yet bluer tone.
Sir Martin Conway (from whose expert study of glaciers I have freely quoted) gives the palm for glacier colouring to what is called the dry glacier.
”Note,” he writes, ”the brilliance of its surface and the peculiarity of its texture. It consists of an infinite mult.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+mmering 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 creva.s.ses 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 creva.s.se 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 suns.h.i.+ne very soon.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: MaRJELEN SEE AND GREAT ALETSCH GLACIER.]
Ordinarily a glacier surface is not diversified by any large features.
But sometimes peaks of rock rise as islands out of a sea of ice.
Sometimes, too, inequalities in the bed of the glacier acting with the pressure of the ice ma.s.s cause great wrinklings on the surface (the Col du Geant is an instance), and from the ridges thus formed hang very beautiful ice-falls.