Part,
so to speak - was not due in Zermatt till the summer
of 2378, and that the baggage, coming along the slow edge,
would not arrive until some generations later, he burst
out with:
"That is European management, all over! An inch a day - think
of that! Five hundred years to go a trifle over three miles!
But I am not a bit surprised. It's a Catholic glacier.
You can tell by the look of it. And the management."
I said, no, I believed nothing but the extreme end of it
was in a Catholic canton.
"Well, then, it's a government glacier," said Harris.
"It's all the same. Over here the government runs
everything - so everything's slow; slow, and ill-managed. But
with us, everything's done by private enterprise - and then
there ain't much lolling around, you can depend on it.
I wish Tom Scott could get his hands on this torpid old
slab once - you'd see it take a different gait from this."
I said I was sure he would increase the speed, if there
was trade enough to justify it.
"He'd MAKE trade," said Harris. "That's the difference
between governments and individuals. Governments don't care,
individuals do. Tom Scott would take all the trade;
in two years Gorner stock would go to two hundred,
and inside of two more you would see all the other glaciers
under the hammer for taxes." After a reflective pause,
Harris added, "A little less than an inch a day; a little
less than an INCH, mind you. Well, I'm losing my reverence
for glaciers."
I was feeling much the same way myself. I have traveled
by canal-boat, ox-wagon, raft, and by the Ephesus and
Smyrna railway; but when it comes down to good solid
honest slow motion, I bet my money on the glacier.
As a means of passenger transportation, I consider
the glacier a failure; but as a vehicle of slow freight,
I think she fills the bill. In the matter of putting
the fine shades on that line of business, I judge she
could teach the Germans something.
I ordered the men to break camp and prepare for the land
journey to Zermatt. At this moment a most interesting
find was made; a dark object, bedded in the glacial ice,
was cut out with the ice-axes, and it proved to be a piece
of the undressed skin of some animal - a hair trunk, perhaps;
but a close inspection disabled the hair-trunk theory,
and further discussion and examination exploded it
entirely - that is, in the opinion of all the scientists
except the one who had advanced it. This one clung
to his theory with affectionate fidelity characteristic
of originators of scientific theories, and afterward won
many of the first scientists of the age to his view,
by a very able pamphlet which he wrote, entitled, "Evidences
going to show that the hair trunk, in a wild state,
belonged to the early glacial period, and roamed the wastes
of chaos in the company with the cave-bear, primeval man,
and the other Ooelitics of the Old Silurian family."
Each of our scientists had a theory of his own, and put
forward an animal of his own as a candidate for the skin.
I sided with the geologist of the Expedition in the
belief that this patch of skin had once helped to cover
a Siberian elephant, in some old forgotten age - but we
divided there, the geologist believing that this discovery
proved that Siberia had formerly been located where
Switzerland is now, whereas I held the opinion that it
merely proved that the primeval Swiss was not the dull
savage he is represented to have been, but was a being
of high intellectual development, who liked to go to the
menagerie.
We arrived that evening, after many hardships and adventures,
in some fields close to the great ice-arch where the mad
Visp boils and surges out from under the foot of the
great Gorner Glacier, and here we camped, our perils over
and our magnificent undertaking successfully completed.
We marched into Zermatt the next day, and were received
with the most lavish honors and applause. A document,
signed and sealed by the authorities, was given to me
which established and endorsed the fact that I had made
the ascent of the Riffelberg. This I wear around my neck,
and it will be buried with me when I am no more.
CHAPTER XL
[Piteous Relics at Chamonix]
I am not so ignorant about glacial movement, now, as I
was when I took passage on the Gorner Glacier.
I have "read up" since. I am aware that these vast
bodies of ice do not travel at the same rate of speed;
while the Gorner Glacier makes less than an inch a day,
the Unter-Aar Glacier makes as much as eight; and still
other glaciers are said to go twelve, sixteen, and even
twenty inches a day. One writer says that the slowest
glacier travels twenty-give feet a year, and the fastest
four hundred.
What is a glacier? It is easy to say it looks like a
frozen river which occupies the bed of a winding gorge
or gully between mountains. But that gives no notion
of its vastness. For it is sometimes six hundred
feet thick, and we are not accustomed to rivers six hundred
feet deep; no, our rivers are six feet, twenty feet,
and sometimes fifty feet deep; we are not quite able
to grasp so large a fact as an ice-river six hundred feet deep.
The glacier's surface is not smooth and level, but has
deep swales and swelling elevations, and sometimes has
the look of a tossing sea whose turbulent billows were
frozen hard in the instant of their most violent motion;
the glacier's surface is not a flawless mass, but is a river
with cracks or crevices, some narrow, some gaping wide.
Many a man, the victim of a slip or a misstep, has plunged
down on of these and met his death.
