The Geologist/Volume 5/Reviews, The Alps
REVIEWS.
A charmingly written and entertaining book ought a book about the Alps to be; and so is M. Berlepsch's 'Sketches of Life and Nature in the Mountains.'
The Alps are amongst the sublimest results of terrestrial physical power, and there are but few men who know them in their real and full majesty. That unveils itself least of all where the broad military roads stretch over passes and anticlinal "saddles," or where the scenes of daily life are busy at the footstool of the giant mountain edifice, that towers to the skies above. You must, as M. Berlepsch says you must, penetrate into the secrets of the hidden world of mountains, into the solitude of closed gorges and valleys, where man's power of cultivation sinks powerless as he comprehends the weakness of his efforts against the majesty of Nature in the Alps. "You must climb above the ruins of a primeval world, and press through labyrinths of glacier and wastes of ice into the temple sanctuary, where it strikes up freely and boldly into the sky before your wearied eyes. Then you will encounter the indescribable splendour of the Alpine world in all its vastness, till you are ready to sink under the thought of its awfulness; and when you have recovered from your first impression, when in sight of the gigantic masses, you have opened your heart, and prepared it to receive still nobler revelations, then question boldly those mausoleums of immemorial time: ask them what hand raised them from the depths of eternal darkness into the kingdom of light; consult the rocky leaves of this stone-chronicle, for the history of their creation and the end of their existence. The vast dead masses will become alive for you, and a view w ill open for you into the endless cycle of eternity." With the eye and understanding of a geologist look upon those enormous rock-masses. See the strata upheaved and contorted, bearing the relics of primeval seas, buried in the fine dust of earth, and the ground-down waste of former lands; and ponder on the hundreds of thousands of years that those old silts and muds lay beneath the waters of the cold transparent sea.
"Who could have witnessed those convulsions and outbursts, when in the central Alps, the very inmost kernel of the gigantic mountain fabric, the granite, gneiss, and crystalline schists were forced up from the depths of the earth's crust, pierced by the sharp masses of the hornblende rocks, and spread out like a fan? How powerless would be the wildest natural convulsions we know, how insignificant the earthquakes, storms, volcanos, and landslips of the present time, by the side of that catastrophe, when the Alps took their present shape! Our understanding has absolutely no standing-point from whence to form a conception, even faintly answering to those moments when a world was shattered. . . . Those majestically aspiring masses which run free and bold into the clouds, like gigantic obelisk spikes, as the lone and inaccessible Matterhorn, 17,405 feet in height, the dazzling snow pyramid of the Dent Blanche, 14,322 feet, or the nine-pointed diadem of the Monte Rosa, 15,217 feet, which never can have been protruded through the earth's crust in their present shape, and can be nothing but isolated ruins of the primeval mountain fabric. What fearful ages of destruction must there have been, to allow the intervening masses now vanished, to be torn away, and to sink, probably, into the depths whence they rose? For a number of proofs show that no influence of weather on these towers of rock can ever have so modelled and gnawed them down. . . .
"Most of what is called granite in the central Alps is granitic gneiss, called in the people's language 'Gaisberger,' because the highest mountains climbed by the goats (Gaisen) are formed of it. It is the substance from which the atmospheric influences carve those strange towers of rock and picturesque ornaments, which in Chamouny are significantly called Aiguilles, from their sharp points. From this so-called 'primeval mateterial' are formed the wondrous spikes of stone which ornament the summits of different mountains, or strike up here and there like outposts through the far-stretching wastes of névé. We should see many more of these slender rock 'needles' if many of them were not engulfed in the perpetual snow. Here the Achilles-heel of the apparently indestructible 'urgestein' betrays itself. Gneiss is, as already stated, of stratified tabular structure. In the elevation of the Alps, the strata of gneiss were raised, and often placed vertically on the edges of the fracture, as the immediate envelope of the granite. The mass must have been of various hardness at different places. At any rate, whilst particular parts have withstood the action of the weather without injury, others have been over- thrown, gnawed into, and destroyed by the atmosphere to such an extent as quite to have disappeared, and left only isolated points behind. Examples on a large scale are the Aiguille Verte, the Aiguille du Moine, the strangely shattered Aiguilles de Charmoz, the Aiguilles Rouges, all the mountains on both sides of the Valley of Chamouny, the Schreckhörner, and Grindelwald Viescherhörner in the Bernese Alps, the whole southern wall of the Bergell in the Grisons, etc., etc.
"But a different kind of atmospheric action attracts our attention in the Alps, and that in the most singular manner, and in places where the explanation is not at once obvious. This appears in the so-called 'Devil's Mills' or 'Seas of Rock' on the highest points of many isolated mountains. The Sidelhorn, close to the Grimsel, is one of the most visited points of view in the Bernese Alps. It is easily reached from the Hospice in two or two and a half hours. The nearer one approaches to the summit, the more do the vast rock ruins accumulate, piled wondrously over each other, till at length the highest point is covered with a perfect chaos of such loosely massed granitic blocks of gneiss. At times a certain disturbed stratification may be observed, something like plates laid upon each other; then again, in other places, a tolerably regular step-like formation, but in general they lie without recognizable order. This phenomenon, which frequently occurs on summits, is the result of a weathering of the granite, but of that kind in which more or less the scaly structure was once predominant. The brothers Schlagintweit represent in their atlas[1] such disorganized scales of gneiss. As the fanciful Jean Paul employs the beautiful picture 'graves are the mountain-tops of a far new world,' here in reality the mountain tops are graves of a past world. The grandest and most imposing masses of granitic rock are only to be found in the central Alps. There they often tower in such fearful sublimity, like vertical walls of rock palaces above the deep valley-hollows, that one is startled at their greatness. He who has never seen the dusky pyramid of the Finster Aarhorn from the 'Abschwung' on the Aar Glacier, as it rises in naked sublimity from the snow-beds to the clouds; he who has not journeyed round the south-east of Mont Blanc, and seen its central mass from the Cramont or the giant rocky brows of the Grand Cornier, Dent Blanche, and Weisshorn, from the depths of the Einfischthal, will hardly be able to construct for his imagination a right measure of their colossal relations; and yet all these granite giants are far exceeded as to the impression which they make upon the eye by that steep abyss unto which the Monte Rosa sinks at the head of the valley of Macugnaga. It is the greatest vertical magnitude of the European continent. The limestone Alps, the Diablerets, Dolden and Gespaltenhorn, and Blumlis Alps show mighty rock-fronts, but they shrink in presence of these granite walls to masses of the second order.
"We called granite the historic stone of the earth. It is so in the Alps in more than one respect. Its solemn rock-walls were often memorials of great deeds, which may be compared to the sublimest moments of classical antiquity. The undaunted Russian SuwarofF, a modern Epaminondas, who would rather have been buried in the clefts of the rocks than have given up his post, when his columns had repulsed the French under Gaudin in the narrow valley of Tremolu, left the heroic words 'Suwarovv Victor' carved on the granite wall for an everlasting remembrance. Next day the cliffs of gneiss were witnesses of equally heroic deeds, where the Devil's Bridge spans the stormy waters of the Reuss with its bold arch. Over the granitic deserts of the St. Bernard, Bonaparte led his army to the victory of Marengo, in May, 1800; and when the Simplon Pass, the first great Alpine road, had been pierced by his orders, he had carved in the opening of the gallery of Gondo the words 'Aere Italo, MDCCCV., Nap. Imp.' Andreas Hofer, the host of Passeyr, was born in the granite country, and between granite rocks he fought his glorious fights for the freedom of the Tyrol. . . . Benedict Fontana breathed out his hero-soul upon the gneiss crystals of the Malser-haide. . . . And then the mighty December fight of 1478, in the Livinenthal, when a handful of herdsmen destroyed ten times their number of Milanese under Count Borelli, till the snows of Bellinzona were red with their blood. Then the hero-graves of the three thousand Confederates at Arbeno, who sank in a despairing fight before twenty-four thousand Lombards in 1422. The double blood-baptism of the Valaisans at Ulrichen and on the Grimsel in 1422, and many other proofs of manly courage and bold deeds—are they not remembrances which have carved their memorial in letters of flame for men's hearts on the rock-tablets of these granite colossi?
"But the dull stone tells us of still more, of times lying further back, of an epoch when the Alps stood as they stand to-day, but when the human race was not. These memorial stones are the 'erratic blocks.'"
The quotations we have given will show the eloquent turn of the author's mind; but from them it will be readily seen that while admitting that we like the boldness of his speculations, and admire the truthfulness of some of his remarks, we cannot always assure the soundness of his geological statements.
Erratic blocks, the Nagelfluh, landslips, ban-forests, the Wettertanne, prostrate firs, and Alpine roses, chestnut-woods, cloud pictures, waterfalls and mountain snow-storms, avalanches, glaciers and Alpine summits, mountain passes and Alpine roads, hospices, chalet-life, the goat-boy, the wieldheuer, the Alpine feast, timber-fellers and floaters, mountaineers and village-life in the Alps, all form topics equally delightful, treated in language as fanciful or as wild as the subjects themselves, and containing a great amount of facts and observations, to be read with interest by geologists. To the general reader this must prove a charming book; but dealing as we do with a speciality, we can nevertheless recommend it to the votaries of our science as an admirable description of Alpine scenery and conditions, from the perusal of which they will rise with new thoughts and ideas for deep reflection.
- ↑ To the 'Neue Untersuchungen über die Physicalische Geographie und Geologie der Alpen.'