On a Glacial Highway

IT is four in the morning; overhead, a faintly violet dusk full of paling stars, and a promise that the coming day will be wonderfully fresh and sweet. Very delicately out of the broad chasm at our feet rises an odor of pine woods. Just opposite, shelf above shelf, the back of the Jungfrau looms darkly. To our right, beyond the ice-cap of the Breithorn, low down, hangs the crescent moon.

The ledge on which we stand is one of those secret places of which there are still a few in Switzerland outside the world of the tourist, where globetrotters do not come. And yet it is no inaccessible place; it is within sight of the near boundary of the tourist world. Last night, — many a night, — looking diagonally across the great valley at our feet, past the flank of the Jungfrau, we marked a bunch of twinkling lights, high in the airy distance — a nest of fireflies, as it were, which we knew to be Wengern, Wengern of the grand hotels, perched on its noble terrace, eastward of the Lauterbrünnen Valley, with Lauterbrünnen village directly beneath it, hidden from us on the heights of the Ober Steinberg by the valley’s depth.

From Wengern, if you only know how, it is an easy half day’s journey to Ober Steinberg. What a simple thing for the idling tourist to drop down from Wengern to Lauterbrünnen by the cogged railway, or to come up to Lauterbrünnen by the ordinary railway from Interlaken, thence along the highway, past the foot of the Jungfrau, to the head of the valley, — not three hours’ walk for the laziest, — and then up the steep bridlepath on the valley’s western slope to Ober Steinberg. What an easy jaunt, but how seldom taken! As yet the boundary between conventionalized Switzerland and the Switzerland that is still itself crosses the Lauterbrünnen Valley just where the road ends.

From Ober Steinberg, at four in the morning, no trace of conventional Switzerland is to be seen. Wengern, with all its lights, has vanished, lost in a wondrous dusk compounded equally of the distance and the starshine. We turn from its direction, from northeast to southeast, toward the icy Breithorn, toward the golden crescent. Just on the edge of the Tschingel Pass hangs the moon; square above, the little mountain known as the Mutthorn. We are up at four because we mean to breakfast — our real breakfast, after hours of steady tramping — on a shoulder of the Mutthorn. We have swallowed hasty cups of coffee, swung our light packs on our shoulders, and now we are off.

Our start in the meadows that are Ober Steinberg — to be exact, at the solitary little chalet on which is painted ‘Hotel Tschingelhorn’ — is at 5805 feet above the sea. After four hours we shall take our second breakfast in a refuge hut of the Swiss Alpine Club, on the Mutthorn, at an altitude of 9534 feet. Thence, an hour and a half across a glorious snowfield will take us to our journey’s end, the grand snow-ridge of the Petersgraat, 1500 feet above the hut. It is doubtful whether there is another excursion in all Switzerland which will give you such magnificent results for so little effort. Come with us and we will take you into one of the most spectacular solitudes of the ice-world; and from the first step to the last there will be not twelve paces — literally — which will cause a tremor in the faintest degree.

The footpath from Ober Steinberg — broad, easy, fit to ride on — holds approximately level until it meets the utter end of the valley at the foot of the Tschingel Glacier, whence comes that little river, the Lutschine, which so many travelers have crossed far below, at Lauterbrünnen. The valley, which is at its narrowest opposite the Jungfrau south of Laüterbrunnen, begins to open again at the Hotel Tschingelhorn, and, as we proceed southward, rapidly broadens. Very soon it is a great amphitheatre, the open side behind us toward the north, the eastern quadrant composed entirely of ice-peaks. A marvelous phalanx of peaks they are, towering above the broad basin with its sea of pines, glittering in their hoods of eternal ice. In the half-light of the dawn, — when heaven is neither blue nor violet, nor even lilac, but all in one, mysterious as an opal, the sleeping trees not yet waked by the dawn wind, — the strange and contorted precipices, the mighty bastions, the vast ice-helmets, are as worthy to be thought of as Jotunheim.

Our path holds its comfortable way, along safe terraces, opposite these monsters, the connecting links between the Jungfrau group and the glacial fortress surrounding Petersgraat. As we swing along in an easy, steady walk, the sunrise comes — a rosy miracle with the Breithorn square against it, with the sea of pines on this side the mountain still in a neutral dusk, with the glaciers on its slope gleaming faintly, of a green hue, and as cold as shadowed steel. And then, suddenly, the rose is gone out of the sky, the sun is up; a golden radiance turns the glaciers into falls of jewels; the sky is a sapphire’s heart.

Six o’clock has come, and we are halfway to the hut. That means that we have crossed the brook which begins the Lutschine; struck leftward, up the steep path which climbs a rocky slope toward the moraine dividing the glaciers of the Tschingelhorn and Breithorn; passed a wonderful little lake, the Oberhorn See, nestled right under the moraine — a glowing turquoise in this ethereal loveliness of the first hour of the day; bent to the right again, and set foot on the lowest slope of the Tschingel Glacier.

And so we are on the ice. Not a step, thus far, that the most nervous person might not have taken without a tremor. Nor will there be any for nearly two hours more, while we follow the easy slopes of the glacier, turning this way and that on its backbone of solid ice, avoiding the fissures, ascending gradually almost to its head, and never once crossing a chasm. Slowly, almost lazily, the guide leads us on the serpentine path, — the highroad of the glacier, — as plain to him as a railway track to an engine-driver. Up and up, along the easy slopes of the ice, — an hour — a half hour — something more, perhaps, — and then, for a moment one must keep one’s head steady. We have worked our way diagonally up the glacier, to a point where it coasts the east part of the Mutthorn. Here, — making a landing as it were from the ice-stream to the rock shore of the mountain, — for a space of about thirty feet, the path leaves the broad ice and, in passing to the rock, threads the narrow ridge of a serac. The ice-flow, creeping round a spur of the Mutthorn, forms an eddy, so to speak, splits its edges into tentacles, makes of its margin a fringe of bent ridges, — the seracs, — ice knife-blades between clefts, where the under ice glitters blue-green, below the white, at the bottoms of the narrow cañons. It is along one of these seracs that we take the dozen steps, faintly hazardous, by which a landing is effected from the glacier to the rock. Think of this short passage as a section of a glacial highway, try to make it unaided, and you may get fidgety; but, if this experience is new to you, have your guide give you his hand, think of the serac as the top of a garden wall, and in two minutes you are at the end of it, undisturbed.

Now, we are really over the border, well within the limits of the ice-world. All about us there are snowfields, above which rise the ice-peaks. On this clear day, the snow is a white blaze of reflection beneath an intense sun. The sky has a blue that dazzles. Soon we are to learn that on clear days, among these eternal snows, the sun can be burning hot.

To-day, as generally, there is a motley group at the Mutthorn hut. Several ice-roads meet at this point. Besides the one we have ascended and the one we are to follow, there is a grand route on which, to-day, we shall turn our backs — a route that dips westward through the Tschingel Pass, that magical avenue of the frozen world, where, daily, the afternoon sun builds Aladdin’s Palace, turning the snow-floors and the ice-walls to pearl, sapphire and silver. There is a way over the snowflelds just in front of us, to Reid and the valley of the Rhone; others more tortuous, twisting round the Breithorn, over the heads of its glaciers and away to that largest ice-flow in Europe, the Aletch, past the highest peak of central Switzerland, the Finsteraärhorn, down the Aletch to that famed wayside of the ice-roads where stands the Concordia hut, whence ramify many ways, among them the great road down the ice toward the Upper Rhone Valley, the Simplon, and Italy.

On any or all these roads wanderers will have paused, any lovely morning, at the Mutthorn hut — a mere cabin, lined with tiers of bunks, with a keeper, a few necessaries, a stove. For a trifle we have the privilege of a rough table, seats, and hot water for brewing tea. And now, breakfast. We have brought it with us: bread and cheese and eggs, which would tempt no one in the lowlands; but here, after the four hours we have been going from Ober Steinberg, it is thrillingly delicious. What do the pampered people of the autos, and the graded roads, and the hotels with French cooks know about eating! You have never had a breakfast worth talking about unless you had climbed four thousand feet to it and breathed the glacial air while you ate — that peculiar air, so indescribable, so strangely unlike any other.

While you sip your tea, look about you. Probably you have pulled off your boots, which are toasting by the stove, and your feet are encased temporarily in huge wooden shoes, lined with felt, of which the hut keeps a supply to lend. In the little crowd congregated here, what variety of face and speech! English and German you are sure to hear; very likely French; possibly Italian. Some, at least, will show by their accoutrements that they are bound for arduous climbs: they carry ice-axes, their boots are shod with ice-clamps; others, like us, are but stout walkers of the snow, needing few safeguards except the inevitable rope, which we need to-day only during the two minutes on the serac, and sharp nails in our heavy boots.

And these wayfarers of the snow are not always men. In our party one is a woman. It will be a long time before any of us forgets a girl, seen once upon a time, at this Mutthorn hut. She was the slimmest, most graceful creature, eighteen or twenty, with a lovely face, lithe movements, dressed exactly like a boy, in a party equipped for difficult climbing. Whither went she into that labyrinth of the inscrutable ice? We have never seen her since.

Though every foot of the excursion to Petersgraat is a joy to the healthy senses, the finest part of it is beyond the Mutthorn hut. We are taking our time, luxuriously, among these magical effects of the glacial air and the steadily heightening sun; it will be nine or after before we shed our wooden shoes, resume our boots, and set forth into the snow. But before doing so, let us understand clearly just what Petersgraat is. The snub-nosed mountain, the Mutthorn, stands at the head of the Tschingel Glacier, and gives onto a great snowfield that slopes up into the sky. As you set forth on what we may call the land side of the mountain, — considering the glacier we have diagonaled as the stream side, — you have on your extreme left, and well in advance of you, the Tschingelhorn with its massive icehood; from this, a rocky spur projects along the sky-line toward the centre of your angle of vision. Continuing the spur, past your eyes, extending far to the right, the top of the snow-slope draws a sharp, even line against the sky. When we top this slope, another will fall away before us, downward toward an enormous chasm, beyond which stand some of the grandest of mountains. That lofty snow-ridge, the summit hereabout of the divide between the valley of the Rhone and the Oberland, is Petersgraat (10,515 feet), with a view justly celebrated among the true lovers of Switzerland.

From the hut to the sky-line, though we rise fifteen hundred feet, the ascent is so gradual that we hardly notice it. Every footfall is on firm snow, as easily traveled as a paved walk. On a day like this, it is fairly dry snow, though the sun is getting hot on our shoulders, and presently all the surface of the snow will have its tiny beads of moisture, and will twinkle, literally, like a field of diamonds. Here about ten o’clock you will want, very probably, to unloose your wraps, and it will occur to you that goggles, or blue glass, in snowfields, at least for the uninitiated, have their use.

You have now been across the border of the snow for several hours, and something — a new sense of things — is growing within you. What it is begins to be plain. You thought, when you set out, that you would do no more than make a quick transit from summer into winter and return; but it is coming over you that this experience is quite a different thing. The world of the snowfields is not the winter of the lowlands made perpetual. What is the difference ? Why is Petersgraat, in August, with its snows that have never faltered, a different thing from a ridge of the low country mailed white in December? It is hard to say. You must have seen both to understand the difference. But once seen, once felt, what a thrilling novelty this snow-world becomes. Perhaps you are one of those who have scoffed hitherto at the lure of the ice. You will never scoff again. Here, above the glaciers, at the backs of those dragons of the ice, in the secrecy of their remote places, a presence rises out of the snow, descends out of this blue that is unlike all other blues, — so terribly, burningly clear it is, — gathers silently, flashingly, the very soul of radiance, pulsating everywhere in the strange gold of these high solitudes.

Shall we drop from imagery to rationality, try to explain the miracle by theories of the all but unbelievable marriage of summer and winter in this brilliant desolation, the burn of the sun, the glitter of the freezing, the sparkle of the drops upon the snow, the peculiar breath — which all people who have inhaled it admit to be peculiar — of the glacial ice?

Science helps us little. It is as well to let rationalism go by and give up the attempt at explanation. The fact abides: somewhere, coming up the glacier, we crossed the limit of the world we used to know; we entered another, brilliant, indescribable, utterly new, a world unstained by living breath except our own, a pure, passionless world, where man, Nature’s master in the plains, is become her mere toy; where the glittering day becomes to our heightened imagination the smile of the elder gods, of the heartless old powers, to whom humanity is an incident.

It is this world, now fully realized, that you traverse easily up the long gradual slope that at the summit will be Petersgraat. If your guide is a man of imagination, — not the best quality in a guide, by the way, — or if any of your party have been here before, you may have the good luck to be directed how to make of the last ten minutes of ascent a coup de théâtre of the first magnitude. Simply drop your eyes upon the path and walk half that time without looking up. When you raise your eyes, you will stop short, your breath gone. Because, when you looked down, there was nothing visible in front of you but that long smooth slope, that field of white diamonds, glittering upward into the sky; sharp at the edge of the white began the blue — so pale, so keen, so dazzling, harmonized with the white only through the translucent gold of the hot sunshine. But as you lift your eyes, that sky-line is gone; no longer does the sharp white meet the keen blue; beyond the white, as if by magic, has risen, towering against the blue, a jagged, toothed, tremendous wall, of a color that defies naming — something pearly in tone, dovelike in quality, opalescent, irridescent, a-reek with the golden sparkle, whelmed in a radiance that is shot with lilac glimmers, with a violet undertone, but on the surface, where it meets the sunshine, almost flushed. And at the superb apparition you stare aghast. No host of the archangels ever rose upon the spiritual vision more appallingly. You are looking over the skyline of Petersgraat to that monstrous group of mountains — higher in the main than the Jungfrau — which wall the Aletsch Glacier, their central giant the colossal Finsteraärhorn.

And now you are at Petersgraat, on the crest of the snowfields which slope in opposite ways before and behind you. Here you are to spend the acme of the day — the hour or two of the high sun. A marvelous moment of your life that should be made the most of. My advice is to turn leftward along the back of the ridge, even to that rocky spur of the Tschingelhorn; there, on the warm dry rock which makes a peninsula in the snow, stretch out, take a bite of chocolate, — for of course you have chocolate with you, — and surrender yourself, body and soul, — literally, body and soul! — to the spell of this wonderful place.

Whosoever you are, I think you will want to be silent. The ice-world is not a talkative one. The silence that Kipling heard at Mandalay may compare with the silence of the snowfields, but I doubt it. In the heaviness of that other silence, you were conscious of living things holding their breath. Of what are you conscious here? What is it, invisible, inaudible, but all-pervasive, of an utterance in the spiritual ear as distinct as those mountains opposite you? What is it that you meet here that you never have met before? And how does it affect you? What singular new emotions steal over you — quiet, deliberate, like the calm procession of the hours, like the trance indescribable of the lonely sunshine on the eternal snow? It is useless to try to forecast for you this experience. You would jeer. You would swear you never could feel that way. You would imitate Romeo’s flippant acquaintance, who, never having felt a wound, jested at scars. Words are powerless to convince you. If one were to tell you how strange, how enticing, how unforgettable, is the lure of this mighty silence, this trance of the only changelessness which earth contains, this something which is like the breathing of the old gods in their sleep — but it is useless! The moment one attempts it, words head toward paradox, toward metaphor, toward the most reckless imagery. And they would not convince. The spell of the ice-world, the visions that are its tenants, are not to be known at second-hand. If you want to know them, the gods of the ice have permitted you a single easy road — the road to Petersgraat.