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1859.]

Tour round Monte Rosa.

Rosa is the Schwarz Thor, crossing the ridge between the Breithorn and Lyskamm, and descending by the glacier of Ayas to the village of the same name; and on the other side of Monte Rosa is the Weiss Thor, leading to Macugnaga at the head of the Val Anzasca. For ladies the two last are wholly impracticable. The latter has indeed been once crossed by a lady; but as that lady was Miss Forman, who has triumphantly proved that no Alpine difficulty was too great for her, the ease can hardly be considered a precedent, and we rather suspect that in this instance few of her sex would relish following her example. As to the Schwarz Thor, it is an expedition to be attempted by first-rate mountaineers alone. Indeed, since its discovery by Mr. Ball in 1845, it has not, as far as we are aware, been successfully attempted by any one except Mr. Davies, a gentleman who has reached more than one of the 'inaccessible' peaks of the Alps. There remains, therefore, only one pass, the St. Theodule, by which the south side of Monte Rosa can be reached directly from Zermatt by ladies or persons who are not prepared to encounter what the guides call a 'grande course.' In the route recommended by the authoress of the Lady's Tour, the St. Theodule pass is reserved for the return into Switzerland, and the passage into Italy effected by the Monte Moro from Saas to Macugnaga. This route has several advantages. In the first place, there is no near view of Monte Rosa comparable to that obtained from the heights above the last named village; indeed there is scarcely any other spot where you can come to such close quarters with one of the giants of the Alps,

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or where the grim splendour of the snow mountain and the green and gold of an Italian valley are seen in such close contact. From the col of the Monte Moro you look, as it were, into the heart of Monte Rosa. Far down beneath you, on the one hand, are the chesnuts and walnuts of the Val Anzasca, and, higher than these are low, upon the other hand, rises an amphitheatre of glittering ice precipices. Elsewhere Monte Rosa, with a royal carelessness, lets her robe of snow flow where it will: here she seems to draw herself up and gather it about her feet, lest the chilly hem of her garment should check the warmth of that glorious valley over which she presides with such a stern satisfaction. For Monte Rosa is, as the name suggests, more properly an Italian than a Swiss mountain. In scorn of her northern rivals, she turns her back upon Switzerland, and looks to Lombardy and Piedmont for homage to her diadem of peaks.

Another advantage is, that the Monte Moro being a pass which necessarily enters into a tour of Monte Rosa, it is much less fatiguing to ascend from Saas and descend to Macugnaga than to do the contrary, owing to the greater steepness of the Italian side. Once in Italy, the route to be adopted becomes in a measure a matter of taste. Some will go southward by Varallo, or even as far as the Lago d'Orta. Others, clinging to the Alps, will turn westward by the Turlo and Col d'Ollen, in either case making ultimately for Chatillon and the Val Tournanche so as to reach Zermatt by the St. Theodule. This of course is merely the main plan of a tour of Monte Rosa. It may be easily varied and extended, and

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ranked with the St. Gothard and Simplon as one of the 'itinera per Alpes celebriora,' in a little book, which is perhaps the earliest work extant exclusively devoted to the Alps and their topography and inhabitants. 'Per juga Montis Sylvii,' says this Vallesia et Alpium Descriptio, quem nostri Gletscher vocant, duo sunt itinera, unum ad Salassos, alterum in vallem Sessitis fluvii ad Varallum oppidum ducit, à quo deinde Novariam descenditur : hujus itineris Jovius meminit et Merula, atque hic quidem à Sessite incipere ait Alpes summas, quarum finis sit ad Verbanum.-Josia Simleri Vallesiæ et Alpium Descriptio. Elzevir. 1633. The Mons Sylvius is of course the Matterhorn, still Monte Sylvio in Italian; and the duo itinera are the two routes between which the traveller may decide on reaching the Val Tournanche: that to the east being most likely over the Co! d'Ollen into the Val Sesia ('in vallem Sessitis fluvii'), a route no doubt once much used by pilgrims to the Monte Sacro, at Varallo; that to the west leading into the Val d'Aosta, formerly the stronghold of the Salassi.

for judicious variations and exten

sions the reader must be left in the hands of the pleasant guide to whom we have introduced him.

Mr. King's Italian Valleys of the Pennine Alps is a book somewhat similar in purpose to the preceding. The hints given apply to the same class of tourists, for all through the excursions described the author was accompanied by a lady; but they refer to a much greater extent of country, and to districts even less known than those traversed in the Lady's Tour. Altogether it is a much more pretentious work, being even erudite upon occasion, especially where the author enters at length into the vexata quæstio of Hannibal's passage of the Alpswhether it was by the Little St. Bernard, the Mont Genevre, or any of the other passes that claim the honour. Mr. King, with the majority of those who have considered the matter, gives his voice in favour of the Little St. Bernard, and on the whole the arguments on his side are more likely to prove convincing than those brought forward by Signor Antonio Gallenga to support the Mont Genevre theory. The route here described extends from the southern side of Mont Blanc to the Lago Maggiore, and includes an exploration of the Val de Cogne, a digression to Turin, and a return into Switzerland by the Gries pass.

The remaining books of our collection are addressed rather to the pedestrian, the explorer, and the man of science; and the fact that they are two to one of the former class is very suggestive of the number of Swiss tourists who are to be included under one or all of the above descriptions. By right of seniority and valuable services the post of honour among these is due to Professor Forbes's Tour of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa. This is perhaps the only book of the whole set which is really suitable for the knapsack. Its chief qualifications are that it is of the most modest dimensions, being smaller than even

Murray's Handbook; that it refers for the most part to regions about which little or no information can be found in other works; that it contains by far the best map extant of that maze of glaciers which forms the main attraction of Chamouni, and that it is a compact mine of curious observation touching the physical phenomena of the Alps. It would be scarcely too much to say that no one should go upon a glacier until he has read Professor Forbes's preliminary chapter on • Glaciers and their Scenery.' Looked at carelessly, a glacier seems to answer more exactly than anything else in the world the description of a freak of Nature. It seems as if she had started with the intention of doing something with that mass of ice-of moulding it into some graceful form, or letting it hang like a motionless cascade down the mountain side, but that, failing in the attempt, she madly tore up her materials, and dashing them down in a fury, relapsed into a grim tranquillity. Beyond this chaos are things less insane but quite as eccentric. There are slender pillars of ice supporting broad slabs of rock; colossal ant-hills of gravel; crevasses with blue and white stripes upon their ghostly walls; weird cups and rivulets of preternaturally bright water; long ridges of stone and rubbish branching in different directions or stretching away into the distance, as if they were the preliminary embankments of a mad railway projected by a board of directors composed of lunatic gnomes. But all this apparently random and purposeless profusion of phenomena may be traced to the simplest and most every-day causes; and the alphabet, so to speak, once acquired, you may read the glacier as easily as the fairest Aldine or Elzevir print. The first thing to be learned and remembered 18 that that cold, solid mass which seems to lie sleeping upon its rocky bed is in reality a restless body, ever crawling slowly and steadily from the snowfields

* The Italian Valleys of the Pennine Alps. By the Rev. S. W: King. London: Murray. 1859.

+ The Tour of Mont Blanc and of Monte Rosa. Abridged from the Author's Travels in the Alps of Savoy. By James D. Forbes, D.C.L., F.R.S. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. 1855.

1859.]

I

Glacier Theories.

above down to the pastures below. If you want a proof of this you have only to look at those ridges of stone and gravel, and if they do not explain the matter sufficiently clearly, you may demonstrate it to your own satisfaction by a homely but persuasive experiment. Take a pinch of snuff and a lump of putty, and while you draw the latter out slowly, suffer the former to fall grain by grain upon it. The result will be an elongated piece of putty and a line of snuff extending along its upper surface, which may be taken as convenient representatives of the glacier and its moraine. While the glacier moves slowly onwards the rocks above it keep up a perpetual discharge of fragments upon its surface. But fragment No. 1 has moved on by the time that fragment No. 2 has come down to meet it, and as this process is repeated pretty regularly at every spot, the consequence is a chain of fragments running parallel with the boundary of the glacier. Before long, however, glacier No. 2, coming down from some other snow-field, joins glacier No. 1, upon which the two club their resources and in a manner carry on between them a joint-stock moraine composed of the contributions each has received in its downward course. There is yet another puzzle. That vast elongated mound running down the middle of the united glacier cannot be the mere result of the débris of the mountain side. It is almost a mountain in itself. settle this question you have only to turn over one of the stones composing it, when you find that the moraine, instead of being internally a mass of stones or gravel, is simply a ridge of ice coated with stones, which hints at another feature in glacier economy-viz., that it suffers a perpetual waste of its surface under the rays of the sun, and nowhere, as you find to your cost, does the sun beat down more fiercely than upon a glacier. The fact is, the height of the moraine represents the level the glacier in general would have preserved had it not been for the sun, and is due to the protection from his beams which its stony covering afforded to the ice beneath. The pillars of ice supporting tables of stone before alluded to are illusVOL. LX. NO. CCCLVI.

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trations of the same action on a smaller scale. A slab of rock, either falling from a height greater than ordinary, or rebounding from some crag with unusual violence, alights on the glacier beyond the limits of the lateral moraine. But for this hard luck it would have enjoyed the company of its kin all the way down to the valley below. But see the compensating kindness of Nature. While the ice all around it perspires away daily in countless streamlets, that portion which lies immediately beneath it is sheltered and does not waste, so that in time this protected ice forms a column, on the top of which the accommodating slab is borne along in solitary but imposing state. Of course, if it overweighs the amount of protection it gives, the ice cannot be expected to act in a disinterested manner; and if it should be so small as to afford no protection at all, but on the contrary to transmit instead of absorbing the heat of the sun, it has only to take the consequences, which are, that it sinks gradually beneath the surface, and leaves a crystal cup filled with water so clear and cold that your thirsty soul blesses the kindly pebble that produced it. As to the veined structure of the ice, all we know about it is, that in fact we know nothing about it, for none of the theories as yet proposed can be said to be satisfactory. Whether it be the result of a species of stratification of the ice, or the consequence of cleavage or partial liquefaction by extreme pressure, are still unsettled questions, and we suspect that if ever a solution is obtained it will be by careful examination of the relative properties of the blue and white ice, and ascertaining by the microscope, and by comparison of their specific gravities and refracting power, to what extent they are to be considered as different conditions of the same body.

With respect to the viscous and plastic theories the controversy may be considered to be at an end, and to have produced mainly this result, that the difference between plasticity and viscosity is now once and for all established. The difference between the two theories is now merely one of words, and indeed it was little more at any

time. Professor Forbes appears to have been inexact in his language, and to have treated viscous' and 'plastic' as synonymous, preferring perhaps the former because it served to illustrate his view more forcibly than the latter. Professor Tyndall's objection was, in essence, dialectical rather than scientific, but once put could not fail to be allowed, and Professor Forbes himself seems disposed to recognise the distinction, and to admit that viscous is not the proper term to apply to a body undergoing the combined action of fracture and regelation, while plastic is. In fact the issue may be summed up in the language of the Irish advocate of universal equality: the one word is as good as the other and better.

The books of Messrs. Wills and Hinchliff* are written more with a view to giving information on the topography than on the natural philosophy of the High Alps; but though indefatigable climbers and clearly partial to the regions of ice and perpetual snow, the authors are not unmindful of their weaker brethren, and suggest many excursions which do not require any of the preparations or qualifications of a regular mountaineer. Mr. Wills, for instance, deserves the thanks of visitors to Interlaken for having called their attention to the view from the Harder, the mountain immediately behind that nest of boarding houses, and also to that from the Gumihorn on the opposide side of the valley, both of which may be enjoyed by any tourist who has triumphed over the ascent of the Rigi; and Mr. Hinchliff may fairly claim the title of the discoverer of the Ober Simmenthal, a happy valley with a jovial innkeeper instead of Rasselas in it, and easily reached from Thun or from the valley of the Rhone. But the greater part of these two books is occupied with accounts of expeditions of greater magnitude. In Mr. Wills's the most notable are his description of the Col du Géant, and of the passage from Saas to Zermatt by the Findelen Glacier, which, in honour of the famous curé of Saas, he proposes

to call the Col Imseng.' But his grandest achievement was the ascent of the Wetterhorn, a feat which he and his party were the first to accomplish. His account of the last steps of that ascent, of their finding themselves at length beneath a cornice of ice that curled over towards us like a wave,' and of their bursting through this obstruction into a new world, reads almost like a bit out of Sindbad's adventures. Perhaps the reader is curious to know what the top of one of the High Alps is like, and what you see when you get there:

It was a saddle, or more properly, a kind of knife-edge, of ice; for I never sat on so narrow-backed a horse. We worked ourselves along this ridge, seated ourselves in a long row upon it, and untied the ropes. After a few minutes, when we had become more accustomed to the situation, I ventured to stand upright on that narrow edgenot four inches wide-and then, at length, I became fully aware of the extent and magnificence of the panorama. To the east and south lay a boundless sea of mighty peaks, stretching from the great Örtler Spitz, and his giant companions of the Tyrol, in the solemn distance, past the fine group of the Monte Leone, the many summits of Monte Rosa, and the sharp peak of the Weisshorn, towards the Western extremity of the Pennine chain.

Mont

Blanc was hidden behind the mountains of the Oberland, whose stupendous masses looked but a stone's throw from us. Between us and the far off snows of the Ortler Spitz, lay group behind group of the mountains of the Grisons and of Uri, green at the base, dark and craggy above, and capped by broken patches of glacier and snow, intersected by numerous deep and narrow valleys, at the foot of which tortuous mountain torrents and glacier streams glittered like silver threads.

Mr. Hinchliff's crowning exploit was an ascent of Monte Rosa, of which he gives a quiet, unexaggerated, but uncommonly graphic account. What a vision that must have been when Sardinia and Lombardy lay spread out like a map beneath the feet-when the Lago Maggiore showed as a long narrow pond in the foreground, with, just

* Wanderings among the High Alps. By Alfred Wills. London: Bentley. Summer Months among the Alps, with the Ascent of Monte Rosa. By Thomas W. Hinchliff. London: Longman and Co. 1857.

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beyond it, a city, in the centre of which a shining white mound represented the marble Duomo of Milan.

We meet both of these gentlemen again among the contributors to that collection of papers by members of the Alpine Club, which has just been published under the title of Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers.* This is by far the most sumptuous and luxurious book of the set, and it is almost a pity that it is so, for were it not for its size, and a feeling that it is too handsome to be knocked about, the temptation to make a travelling companion of it would be almost irresistible. In the first place, it contains a series of nine maps-all admirably executed, and under the superintendence of persons thoroughly familiar with the localities which embraces just those portions of the Alps where the want of an accurate and convenient map is most likely to be felt; and then it is full of a kind of information which is not to be found in ordinary tourists' books, and gives a number of valuable hints as to what ought to be observed, and what is the best way of observing it. Besides all this, it is well calculated to be a grand resource against the tedium of a wet day in Switzerland. Without particularizing invidiously, we would especially call the attention of those who contemplate a tour in the High Alps this season, to the chapter in which the editor, Mr. Ball, offers certain 'Suggestions for Alpine Travellers, founded on his own experience, and also to the papers of Professor Tyndall and Mr. Ramsay, on the 'Séracs of the Glacier du Géant,' and 'The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and Wales.' The idea of glaciers in Britain will no doubt be a novel one to persons who have never considered the matterseriously, and will perhaps seem inconsistent with the traditional rightness and tightness of that island. They should recollect, however, that glaciers do not absolutely require mountains of Alpine magnitude for their support. The conditions necessary to their ex

istence are merely fields or plateaux of perpetual snow, and steep, descending ravines, in which, in its attempt to reach the valley below, the snow is squeezed, jammed, and compacted into ice. The latter we have still, the former happily we have not; but we know that our predecessors, man or beast, once enjoyed a climate under which such things could be. Our glaciers have gone the way of all ice (at a temperature exceeding 32 Fahrenheit), but their traces remain; and as in the case of the idle boys of modern times, you can always know that they have descended a certain staircase by the characteristic handwriting on the wall.

Before we conclude, it may be as well to say a word about the nature and objects of the Alpine Club. To any one undertaking an important Alpine expedition, companionship is always desirable, and in most cases absolutely necessary. A party of four or five will be more likely to succeed in a difficult enterprise than two or three, from the more effectual assistance they will be able to give each other. The expenses, too, are much less to each individual. Men who undertake excursions out of the common routes. are more dependent upon each other for information and assistance, than those who can trust to the guidebook for all they want; besides which, a similarity of taste and object is of course a strong bond of union. A tendency to fraternize, therefore, naturally sprang up among those tourists whose summer and autumn rambles were devoted to the portions of Switzerland lying beyond the beaten tracks, and who were consequently more thrown into each other's society than ordinary Swiss travellers. Year by year fresh members were introduced, so that at last, in the spring of 1858, it was proposed to enrol the fraternity formally, under the title of the Alpine Club. It was thought,' to quote the words of the preface, that many of those who have been engaged in similar undertakings, would willingly avail themselves of

Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers: a Series of Excursions by Members of the Alpine Club. Edited by John Ball, M.R.I.A., F.L.S., President of the Alpine Club. London: Longman and Co. 1859.

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