Part 17

It was at the end of this ridge, where it abuts against the last precipice of the Matterhorn, that my second flagstaff was left in 1862. I think there must have been something in the light falling upon this precipice that gave it an aspect of greater verticality when I first saw it than it seemed to possess on the present occasion. We had, however, been struggling for many hours previously, and may have been dazed by our exertion. I cannot otherwise account for three of my party declining flatly to make any attempt upon the precipice. It looks very bad, but no real climber with his strength unimpaired would pronounce it, without trial, insuperable. Fears of this rock-wall, however, had been excited long before we reached it. It was probably the addition of the psychological element to the physical--the reluctance to encounter new dangers on a mountain which had hitherto inspired a superstitious fear--that quelled further exertion.

Seven hundred feet, if the barometric measurement can be trusted, of very difficult rock-work now lay above us. In 1862 this height had been underestimated by both Bennen and myself. Of the 14,800 feet of the Matterhorn, we then thought we had accomplished 14,600. If the barometer speaks truly, we had only cleared 14,200.

Descending the end of the ridge, we crossed a narrow cleft, and grappled with the rocks at the other side of it. Our ascent was oblique, bearing to the right. The obliquity at one place fell to horizontality, and we had to work on the level round a difficult protuberance of rock. We cleared the difficulty without haste, and then rose straight against the precipice. Above us a rope hung down the cliff, left there by Maquignaz on the occasion of his first ascent. We reached the end of this rope, and some time was lost by my guide in assuring himself that it was not too much frayed by friction. Care in testing it was doubly necessary, for the rocks, bad in themselves, were here crusted with ice. The rope was in some places a mere hempen core surrounded by a casing of ice, over which the hands slid helplessly. Even with the aid of the rope in this condition it required an effort to get to the top of the precipice, and we willingly halted there to take a minute’s breath. The ascent was virtually accomplished, and a few minutes more of rapid climbing placed us on the lightning-smitten top. Thus ended the long contest between me and the Matterhorn.

The day thus far had swung through alternations of fog and sunshine. While we were on the ridge below, the air at times was blank and chill with mist; then with rapid solution the cloud would vanish, and open up the abysses right and left of us. On our attaining the summit a fog from Italy rolled over us, and for some minutes we were clasped by a cold and clammy atmosphere. But this passed rapidly away, leaving above us a blue heaven, and far below us the sunny meadows of Zermatt. The mountains were almost wholly unclouded, and such clouds as lingered amongst them only added to their magnificence. The Dent d’Érin, the Dent Blanche, the Gabelhorn, the Mischabel, the range of heights between it and Monte Rosa, the Lyskamm, and the Breithorn were all at hand, and clear; while the Weisshorn, noblest and most beautiful of all, shook out a banner towards the north, formed by the humid southern air as it grazed the crest of the mountain.

The world of peaks and glaciers surrounding this immediate circlet of giants was also open to us up to the horizon. Our glance over it was brief, for it was eleven o’clock, and the work before us soon claimed all our attention. I found the _débris_ of my former expedition everywhere--below, the fragments of my tents, and on the top a piece of my ladder fixed in the snow as a flagstaff. The summit of the Matterhorn is a sharp horizontal _arête_, and along this we now moved eastward. On our left was the roof-like slope of snow seen from the Riffel and Zermatt; on our right were the savage precipices which fall into Italy. Looking to the further end of the ridge, the snow there seemed to be trodden down, and I drew my companions’ attention to the apparent footmarks. As we approached the place it became evident that human feet had been there two or three days previously. I think it was Mr. Elliot of Brighton[24] who had made this ascent--the first accomplished from Zermatt since 1865. On the eastern end of the ridge we halted to take a little food--not that I seemed to need it: it was the remonstrance of reason rather than the consciousness of physical want that caused me to do so.

[24] Killed in 1869 upon the Schreckhorn.

We took our ounce of nutriment and gulp of wine (my only sustenance during the entire day), and stood for a moment silently and earnestly looking down towards Zermatt. There was a certain official formality in the manner in which the guides turned to me and asked, ‘Êtes-vous content d’essayer?’ A sharp responsive ‘Oui!’ set us immediately in motion. It was nearly half-past eleven when we quitted the summit. The descent of the roof-like slope already referred to offered no difficulty; but the gradient very soon became more formidable.

One of the two faces of the Matterhorn pyramid, seen from Zermatt, falls towards the Zmutt glacier, and has a well-known snow-plateau at its base. The other face falls towards the Furgge glacier. We were on the former. For some time, however, we kept close to the _arête_ formed by the intersection of the two faces of the pyramid, because nodules of rock jutted from it which offered a kind of footing. These rock protuberances helped us in another way: round them an extra rope which we carried was frequently doubled, and we let ourselves down by the rope as far as it could reach, liberating it afterwards (sometimes with difficulty) by a succession of jerks. In the choice and use of these protuberances the guides showed both judgment and skill. The rocks became gradually larger and more precipitous, a good deal of time being consumed in dropping down and doubling round them. Still we preferred them to the snow-slope at our left as long as they continued practicable.

This they at length ceased to be, and we had to commit ourselves to the slope. It was in the worst possible condition. When snow first falls at these great heights it is usually dry, and has no coherence. It resembles, to some extent, flour, or sand, or sawdust. Shone upon by a strong sun it partly melts, shrinks, and becomes more consolidated, and when subsequently frozen it may be safely trusted. Even though the melting of the snow and its subsequent freezing may be only very partial, the cementing of the granules adds immensely to the safety of the footing. Hence the advantage of descending such a slope before the sun has had time to unlock the rigidity of the night’s frost. But we were on the steepest Matterhorn slope during the two hottest hours of the day, and the sun had done his work effectually. The layer of snow was about fifteen inches thick. In treading it we came immediately upon the rock, which in most cases was too smooth to furnish either prop or purchase. It was on this slope that the Matterhorn catastrophe occurred: it is on this slope that other catastrophes will occur, if this mountain should ever become fashionable.

Joseph Maquignaz was the leader of our little party, and a brave, cool, and competent leader he proved himself to be. He was silent, save when he answered his brother’s anxious and oft-repeated question, ‘Es-tu bien placé, Joseph?’ Along with being perfectly cool and brave, he seemed to be perfectly truthful. He did not pretend to be ‘bien placé’ when he was not, nor avow a power of holding which he knew he did not possess. Pierre Maquignaz is, I believe, under ordinary circumstances, an excellent guide, and he enjoys the reputation of being never tired. But in such circumstances as we encountered on the Matterhorn he is not the equal of his brother. Joseph, if I may use the term, is a man of high boiling point, his constitutional _sangfroid_ resisting the ebullition of fear. Pierre, on the contrary, shows a strong tendency to boil over in perilous places.

Our progress was exceedingly slow, but it was steady and continued. At every step our leader trod the snow cautiously, seeking some rugosity on the rock beneath it. This however was rarely found, and in most cases he had to establish a mechanical attachment between the snow and the slope which bore it. No semblance of a slip occurred in the case of any one of us, and had it occurred I do not think the worst consequences could have been avoided. I wish to stamp this slope of the Matterhorn with the character that really belonged to it when I descended it, and I do not hesitate to say that the giving way of any one of our party would have carried the whole of us to ruin. Why, then, it may be asked employ the rope? The rope, I reply, notwithstanding all its possible drawbacks under such circumstances, is the safeguard of the climber. Not to speak of the moral effect of its presence, an amount of help upon a dangerous slope that might be measured by the gravity of a few pounds is often of incalculable importance; and thus, though the rope may be not only useless but disastrous if the footing be clearly lost, and the glissade fairly begun, it lessens immensely the chance of this occurrence.

With steady perseverance, difficulties upon a mountain, as elsewhere, come to an end. We were finally able to pass from the face of the pyramid to its rugged edge, where it was a great relief to feel that honest strength and fair skill, which might have gone for little on the slope, were masters of the situation.

Standing on the _arête_, at the foot of a remarkable cliff-gable seen from Zermatt, and permitting the vision to range over the Matterhorn, its appearance is exceedingly wild and impressive. Hardly two things can be more different than the two aspects of the mountain from above and below. Seen from the Riffel, or Zermatt, it presents itself as a compact pyramid, smooth and steep, and defiant of the weathering air. From above, it seems torn to pieces by the frosts of ages, while its vast facettes are so foreshortened as to stretch out into the distance like plains. But this underestimate of the steepness of the mountain is checked by the deportment of its stones. Their discharge along the side of the pyramid to-day was incessant, and at any moment, by detaching a single boulder, we could let loose a cataract of them, which flew with wild rapidity and with a thunderous clatter down the mountain. We once wandered too far from the _arête_, and were warned back to it by a train of these missiles sweeping past us.

As long as our planet yields less heat to space than she receives from the bodies of space, so long will the forms upon her surface undergo mutation, and as soon as equilibrium, in regard to heat, has been established we shall have, as Thomson has pointed out, not peace, but death. Life is the product and accompaniment of change, and the self-same power that tears the flanks of the hills to pieces is the mainspring of the animal and vegetable worlds. Still, there is something chilling in the contemplation of the irresistible and remorseless character of those infinitesimal forces, whose integration through the ages pulls down even the Matterhorn. Hacked and hurt by time, the aspect of the mountain from its higher crags saddened me. Hitherto the impression that it made was that of savage strength, but here we had inexorable decay.

This notion of decay, however, implied a reference to a period when the Matterhorn was in the full strength of mountainhood. My thoughts naturally ran back to its possible growth and origin. Nor did they halt there, but wandered on through molten worlds to that nebulous haze which philosophers have regarded, and with good reason, as the proximate source of all material things. I tried to look at this universal cloud, containing within itself the prediction of all that has since occurred; I tried to imagine it as the seat of those forces whose action was to issue in solar and stellar systems, and all that they involve. Did that formless fog contain potentially the _sadness_ with which I regarded the Matterhorn? Did the _thought_ which now ran back to it simply return to its primeval home? If so, had we not better recast our definitions of matter and force? for if life and thought be the very flower of both, any definition which omits life and thought must be inadequate, if not untrue.

Questions like these, useless as they seem, may still have a practical outcome. For if the final goal of man has not been yet attained, if his development has not been yet arrested, who can say that such yearnings and questionings are not necessary to the opening of a finer vision, to the budding and the growth of diviner powers? Without this upward force could man have risen to his present height? When I look at the heavens and the earth, at my own body, at my strength and weakness of mind, even at these ponderings, and ask myself, Is there no being or thing in the universe that knows more about these matters than I do?--what is my answer? Supposing our theologic schemes of creation, condemnation, and redemption to be dissipated; and the warmth of denial which they excite, and which, as a motive force, can match the warmth of affirmation, dissipated at the same time; would the undeflected human mind return to the meridian of absolute neutrality as regards these ultra-physical questions? Is such a position one of stable equilibrium? Such are the questions, without replies, which could run through consciousness during a ten minutes’ halt upon the weathered spire of the Matterhorn.

We shook the rope away from us, and went rapidly down the rocks. The day was well advanced when we reached the cabin, and between it and the base of the pyramid we missed our way. It was late when we regained it, and by the time we reached the ridge of the Hörnli we were unable to distinguish rock from ice. We should have fared better than we did if we had kept along the ridge and felt our way to the Schwarz See, whence there would have been no difficulty in reaching Zermatt, but we left the Hörnli to our right, and found ourselves incessantly checked in the darkness by ledges and precipices, possible and actual. We were afterwards entangled in the woods of Zmutt, carving our way wearily through bush and bramble, and creeping at times along dry and precipitous stream-beds. But we finally struck the path and followed it to Zermatt, which we reached between one and two o’clock in the morning.

Having work to do for the Norwich meeting of the British Association, I remained several days at the Riffel, taking occasional breathings with pleasant companions upon the Riffelhorn. I subsequently crossed the Weissthor with Mr. Paris to Mattmark, and immediately afterwards returned to England.

On the 4th of September, Signor Giordano, to whom we are indebted for a very complete geological section of the Matterhorn, with Joseph Maquignaz and Carrel as guides, followed my route over the mountain. In a letter dated Florence, December 31, 1868, he writes to me thus:

‘Quant à moi, je dirai que vraiment, j’ai trouvé cette fois le pic assez difficile.... J’ai surtout trouvé difficile la traversée de l’arête qui suit le pic Tyndall du côté de l’Italie. Quant au versant suisse, je l’ai trouvé moins difficile que je ne croyais, parce que la neige y était un peu consolidée par la chaleur. En descendant le pic du côté de Zermatt j’ai encouru un véritable danger par les avalanches de pierres.... Un de mes deux guides a eu le havresac coupé en deux par un bloc, et moi-même j’ai été un peu contusionné.’

XXV.

_ASCENT OF THE ALETSCHHORN._

The failure through bad weather of a former attempt upon the Aletschhorn has been already recorded; but a succession of cloudless days at the Bel Alp in August 1869 stirred up the desire to try again. This was strengthened by the wish to make a series of observations from the greatest accessible elevation on the colour and polarisation of the sky. I had no guide of my own, but the Knecht at the hotel had been up the mountain, and I thought that we two might accomplish the ascent without any other assistance. It was the first time the mountain had been attempted by a single guide, and I was therefore careful to learn whether he was embarrassed by either doubt or fear. There was no doubt or fear in the matter: he really wished to go with me. His master (the proprietor of the hotel) had asked him whether he was not undertaking too much. ‘I am undertaking no more than my companion,’ was his reply.

At twenty minutes past two we quitted the Bel Alp. The moon, which seven hours previously had cleared the eastern mountain-tops with a visible motion, was now sloping to the west. The light was white and brilliant, and shadows of corresponding darkness were cast upon the earth. The larger stars were out, those near the horizon especially sparkling with many-coloured fires. The Pleiades were near the zenith, while Orion hung his sword a few degrees above the eastern horizon. Our path lay along the slope of the mountain, parallel to the Oberaletsch glacier, the lateral moraine of which was close to us on our right. After climbing sundry grass acclivities we mounted this moraine, and made it our pathway for a time. At a certain point the shingly ridge became depressed, opening a natural passage to the glacier. We found the ice ‘hummocky,’ and therefore crossed it to a medial moraine composed of granite _débris_ and loaded here and there with clean granite blocks of enormous size. Beyond this moraine we found smoother ice and better light, for we had previously journeyed in the shadow of the mountains.

We marched upwards along the glacier chatting sociably at times, but at times stilled into silence by the stillness of the night. ‘Es tagt!’ at length exclaimed my companion. It dawns! Orion had moved upwards, leaving space between him and the horizon for the morning star. All the east was belted by that ‘daffodil sky’ which in some states of the atmosphere announces the approach of day in the Alps. We spun towards the east. It brightened and deepened, but deeper than the orange of the spectrum it did not fall. Amid this the mountains rose. Silently and solemnly their dark and dented outlines rested against the dawn.

The mass of light thus thrown over the shaded earth long before the sun appeared above the horizon came not from illuminated _clouds_, but from matter far more attenuated than clouds--matter which maintains comparative permanence in the atmosphere, while clouds are formed and dissipated. It is not light reflected from concentric shells of air of varying density, of which our atmosphere may be rightly assumed to be made up; for the light reflected from these convex layers is thrown, not upon the earth at all, but into space. The ‘rose of dawn’ is usually ascribed, and with sufficient correctness, to _transmitted_ light, the blue of the sky to _reflected_ light; but in each case there is both transmission and reflection. No doubt the daffodil and orange of the east this morning must have been transmitted through long reaches of atmospheric air, and no doubt it was during this passage of the rays that the selective winnowing of the light occurred which gave the sky its tint and splendour. But if the distance of the sun below the horizon when the dawn first appeared betaken into account, it will become evident that the solar rays must have been caused to swerve from their rectilineal course by _reflection_. The _refraction_ of the atmosphere would be wholly incompetent to bend the rays round the convex earth to the extent now under contemplation.

Thus the light which is reflected must be first transmitted to the reflecting particles, while the transmitted light, except in the direct line of the sun, must be reflected to reach the eyes. What mainly holds the light in our atmosphere after the sun has retired behind the earth is, I imagine, the suspended matter which produces the blue of the sky and the morning and the evening red. Through the reverberation of the rays from particle to particle, there must be at the very noon of night a certain amount of illumination. Twilight must continue with varying degrees of intensity all night long, and the visibility of the nocturnal firmament itself may be due, not, as my excellent friend Dove seems to assume, to the light of the stars, but in great part to the light of the sun, scattered in all directions through the atmosphere by the almost infinitely attenuated matter held there in suspension.

We had every prospect of a glorious day. To our left was the almost full moon, now close to the ridge of the Sparrenhorn. The firmament was as blue as ever I have seen it--deep and dark, and to all appearance _pure_; that is to say, unmixed with any colour of a lower grade of refrangibility than the blue. The lunar shadows had already become weak, and were finally washed away by the light of the east. But while the shadows were at their greatest depth, and therefore least invaded by the dawn, I examined the firmament with a Nicol’s prism.[25] The moonlight, as I have said, came from the left, and right in front of me was a mountain of dark brown rock, behind which spread a heaven of the most impressive depth and purity. I looked over the mountain-crest through the prism. In one position of the instrument the blue was not sensibly affected; in the rectangular position it was so far quenched as to reduce the sky and the dark mountain beneath it to the same uniform hue. The outline of the mountain could hardly be detached from the sky above it. This was the direction in which the prism showed its maximum quenching power; in no other direction was the extinction of the light of the sky so perfect. And it was at right angles to the lunar rays: so that, as regards the polarisation of the sky, the beams of the moon behave exactly like those of the sun.

[25] Art. X. of ‘Fragments of Science’ is devoted to the sky.

The glacier along which we first marched was a trunk of many tributaries, and consequently of many ‘medial moraines,’ such moraines being always _one_ less in number than the tributaries.[26] But two principal branches absorbed all the others as constituents. One of these descended from the Great and Little Nesthorn and their spurs; the other from the Aletschhorn. Up this latter branch we steered from the junction. Hitherto the surface of the glacier, disintegrated by the previous day’s sun, and again hardened by the night’s frost, had crackled under our feet; but on the Aletschhorn branch the ice was coated by a kind of fur, resembling the nap of velvet: it was as soft as a carpet, but at the same time perfectly firm to the grip of the boot. The sun was hidden behind the mountain; and, thus steeped in shade, we could enjoy, with spirits unblunted by the heat, the loveliness and grandeur of the scene.

[26] ‘Glaciers of the Alps,’ p. 264.