. The fascination of Switzerland. ice in all67 ABOVE THE SNOWLINE THE FASCINATION their fantastic shapes, and then we reach an ice-wall. It is so steep that it appears to be vertical;so there are real steps to be cut, handholds aswell as footholds, and we have to exercise careand caution. While Christian cuts steps andmoves up we hold fast and keep still; when hehas made himself firm so that he could hold us ifwe slipped, we move ; but we dont slip, andbefore long we are up the wall, over the snow,and at the top of the pass—a huge snowfieldgently sloping down toward Grindelwald in onedirection
. The fascination of Switzerland. ice in all67 ABOVE THE SNOWLINE THE FASCINATION their fantastic shapes, and then we reach an ice-wall. It is so steep that it appears to be vertical;so there are real steps to be cut, handholds aswell as footholds, and we have to exercise careand caution. While Christian cuts steps andmoves up we hold fast and keep still; when hehas made himself firm so that he could hold us ifwe slipped, we move ; but we dont slip, andbefore long we are up the wall, over the snow,and at the top of the pass—a huge snowfieldgently sloping down toward Grindelwald in onedirection, towards the Grimsel in another. The dazzling beauty of the scene is beyonddescription; nothing like it can be seen from thevalley ; it is an experience gained only after it is worth all the toil and labour and discom-fort, the sleepless night, and the parched indeed do we get a glimpse of the regionnot for men, but for fairies . . the rose-clad topsof the mountains where dance the spirits of thedawn. 68. OF SWITZERLAND concerning glaciers CHAPTER IX CONCERNING GLACIERS This is, as it were, a great snow-lake feedingtwo wide rivers of ice. The snow is very deep,and the weight of the top layers has pressed thepart btlow into solid ice, which glides imper-ceptibly down on its rocky bed. Tyndall was the man who examined the habitsand customs of glaciers, and found out how theymoved. One of his experiments was to put a rowof stakes in a straight line across the glacier fromside to side. He tried this on the Aletsch Glacier,upon which he looked from the Bel Alp, and thebehaviour of the stakes showed that the middlepart of the glacier moved forward faster than thesides. The ice therefore which starts as onecompact mass becomes terrifically strained, themiddle stretching forward, the sides holding back,the obvious result being that it is torn asunderand crevasses appear. When the ice has to descendover a steep and irregular bed it suffers still morestrain, and t
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