Chapter 40

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. Men have been fished out of them alive; but it was when they
did not go to a great depth; the cold of the great depths would quickly
stupefy a man, whether he was hurt or unhurt. These cracks do not go
straight down; one can seldom see more than twenty to forty feet down
them; consequently men who have disappeared in them have been sought
for, in the hope that they had stopped within helping distance, whereas
their case, in most instances, had really been hopeless from the
beginning.

In 1864 a party of tourists was descending Mont Blanc, and while picking
their way over one of the mighty glaciers of that lofty region, roped
together, as was proper, a young porter disengaged himself from the line
and started across an ice-bridge which spanned a crevice. It broke under
him with a crash, and he disappeared. The others could not see how deep
he had gone, so it might be worthwhile to try and rescue him. A brave
young guide named Michel Payot volunteered.

Two ropes were made fast to his leather belt and he bore the end of a
third one in his hand to tie to the victim in case he found him. He was
lowered into the crevice, he descended deeper and deeper between the
clear blue walls of solid ice, he approached a bend in the crack and
disappeared under it. Down, and still down, he went, into this