Chapter 40 - Page 2

profound
grave; when he had reached a depth of eighty feet he passed under
another bend in the crack, and thence descended eighty feet lower, as
between perpendicular precipices. Arrived at this stage of one hundred
and sixty feet below the surface of the glacier, he peered through the
twilight dimness and perceived that the chasm took another turn and
stretched away at a steep slant to unknown deeps, for its course was
lost in darkness. What a place that was to be in--especially if that
leather belt should break! The compression of the belt threatened to
suffocate the intrepid fellow; he called to his friends to draw him up,
but could not make them hear. They still lowered him, deeper and deeper.
Then he jerked his third cord as vigorously as he could; his friends
understood, and dragged him out of those icy jaws of death.

Then they attached a bottle to a cord and sent it down two hundred feet,
but it found no bottom. It came up covered with congelations--evidence
enough that even if the poor porter reached the bottom with unbroken
bones, a swift death from cold was sure, anyway.

A glacier is a stupendous, ever-progressing, resistless plow. It pushes
ahead of its masses of boulders which are packed together, and they
stretch across the gorge, right in front of it, like a long grave or a
long, sharp roof. This is called a moraine. It also shoves out a moraine
along each side of its course.

Imposing as the modern glaciers are, they are not so huge as were some
that once existed. For instance, Mr. Whymper says:

"At some very remote period the Valley of Aosta was occupied by a vast
glacier, which flowed down its entire length from Mont Blanc to the
plain of Piedmont, remained stationary, or nearly so, at its mouth
for many centuries, and deposited there enormous masses of debris. The
length of this glacier exceeded EIGHTY MILES, and it drained a basin
twenty-five to thirty-five miles across, bounded by the highest
mountains in the Alps. The great peaks rose several thousand feet above
the glaciers, and then, as now, shattered by sun and frost, poured down
their showers of rocks and stones, in witness of which there are the
immense piles of angular fragments that constitute the moraines of
Ivrea.

"The moraines around Ivrea are of extraordinary dimensions. That which
was on the left bank of the glacier is about THIRTEEN MILES long, and
in some places rises to a height of TWO THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY
FEET above the floor of the valley! The terminal moraines (those which
are pushed in front of the glaciers) cover something like twenty square
miles of country. At the mouth of the Valley of Aosta, the thickness of
the glacier must have been at least TWO THOUSAND feet, and