of which hes the shrunken ice-stream, bordered by its great
wall-hke moraines. As each glacier normally has its border-
ing moraine, the junction of two glaciers gives rise to the
phenomenon of a median moraine, admirably seen, for example,
on the Gorner glacier at Zermatt or on the Aletsch glacier —
the typical text-book example. The other more obvious
characteristics of a glacier, such as the crevasses and ice falls ;
the great crevasse or hergschrund which marks the spot where
the stationary iirn passes into the moving glacier ; the
glacier ' mills,' down which water carrying stones whirls
ceaselessly ; the frequent occurrence of streams of water or
of tiny lakes on the surface of the ice ; the glacier tables and
the small stones which, instead of standing on an ice pedestal
like the 'tables,' are sunk into the ice — all these are described
so fully in all the ordinary text-books, and can be so readily
seen during the ordinary easy glacier expeditions, that we
need not discuss them here. The distribution of the glaciated



DISTRIBUTION OF ALPINE GLACIERS 183

surfaces in the Alps, on the other hand, is a less famiUar
subject, and is worth special note, for it has a bearing on the
question of the part of the Alps which it is most profitable
for those interested in glacial phenomena to visit.

The glaciated area is more extensive in the Swiss than in
the Austro-Italian Alps. According to calculations which are
only approximate, some 800 square miles are covered by ice
within the boundary of Switzerland. In the Eastern Alps,
excluding, however, the Bernina region, which is included
in the above figures, only some 635 square miles of ice occur.

As the Calcareous Alps occupy so large a part of the surface
in the Eastern Alps generally, it is interesting to compare the
glaciation of the CrystaUine and Calcareous belts. In the
Eastern Alps in the wider sense [i.e. including the Bernina
region) the total glaciated area reaches about 703 square
miles. Of this total no less than 682 square miles fall within
the CrystaUine Alps, while the remaining area of 21 square
miles is almost equally divided between the north and south
Calcareous Alps. Thus the general conclusion is that to see
glacial phenomena at their fullest development we must go
to the Swiss rather than to the Eastern Alps, and further
that it is, as we should expect, the central rather than the
marginal belts of the mountains which are most fully glaciated.

Coming more to details, we may notice that in Switzerland
two areas stand out predominately as regions of intense
glaciation. These are the part of the Pennine Alps between
the Col de Fenetre and the Monte Moro Pass, and the region
of which the Finsteraarhorn forms the centre. In the former
region about 220 square miles of surface bear glacier ice, in
the latter some 190 square miles. To reach the Pennine
glaciers one has a choice of resorts ranging from Fionnay
below the Col de Fenetre to Saas Fee below the Monte Moro,
but the predominating village, which for some people over-
shadows all others in this belt, is Zermatt. The preference
is so far justified that within easy reach of this township



184 THE EEALM OF SNOW AND ICE

one may enjoy probably a finer glacial panorama than any-
where else in the Alps, and two of the glaciers, the Corner
glacier and the much smaller Findelen glacier are, in certain
parts, ' safe ' for guideless parties whose members have com-
mon prudence and some sUght experience of ice — no glacier
is safe for persons without these quahfications.

The Finsteraarhorn region is most easily reached from
Grindelwald, though its largest glacier, the Aletsch, which
is also the largest in the Alps, is best visited from the south,
from Belalp, the Eggishorn or the Eieder Alp, the hotels
of the first two being great favourites with EngUsh people.

In the Eastern Alps the most highly glaciated regions are
the mountains of the Oetztal and of the Ortler group, though
the largest glacier is to be found much further east in the
Hohe Tauern group, at the foot of the Gross Glockner. The
Oetztal mountains can be visited from a number of villages
in the long valley, e.g. from Solden or Vent. For the Ortler
one has a choice of the north-west side, with Sulden and Traf oi,
or of the south-east side with Santa Caterina, charmingly
described in LesUe Stephen's Playground of Europe. In the
above short hst we have omitted the glaciers of Mont Blanc,
which, though relatively small, are of easy access. Chamonix
is here the most popular centre.

The existing glaciers, as already explained, though they
still cover a considerable area, are pigmies as compared with
those of the Ice Age, in regard to which we must say some-
thing. Before doing this, however, a word about present
shrinkage may be advisable. Glaciers are now subjected,
in almost all parts of the Alps, to very careful and exact
measurement, but this is due to a comparatively recent
interest in the subject of glaciation in general, and exact
figures are available for short periods only. It is, however,
quite certain that for a period of unknown length, which
seems to have ended in about 1855, the glaciers of the Alps
advanced notably. Between that date and certainly the



ICE AGE GLACIERS 185

year 1909 they displayed a very marked and continuous
retreat, which left bare tracts of ground that had previously
been ice-covered. Since 1909 there has been some, but not
very definite or satisfactory, evidence of a shght advance,
in the case of a few glaciers, and of a cessation of retreat in
the case of some others. It is possible that a period of notable
advance may be approaching, but as to this nothing definite
can be said meantime. What it is, however, important to
realise is that one must not conceive of the glacier ice of the
Alps as having steadily and uniformly diminished since the
Ice Age ; there have certainly been minor fluctuations, possibly
due to the existence of minor chmatic cycles. Further, one
must not hastily assume that an exposed glaciated surface
has been bare of ice since the passing away of the Ice Age,
its exposure may be quite a recent phenomenon.

Turning now to the conditions which existed in the Ice
Age, we have to remember that whereas Scotland and the
greater part of England were at that time drowned beneath
an ice-cap. Central Europe was only glaciated to the extent
that the enlarged glaciers of the Alps streamed far further
out upon the plains than they do to-day — there was no
ice-cap. Laborious research seems to have estabhshed that
the snow-Une lay some 4000 to 4250 feet lower than at present,
bringing the mean down from about 9000 feet to some 5000
feet, while in special places it lay even under 4000 feet.
This was apparently due not to a great increase in precipita-
tion but to a lowering of the mean temperature by from
9° to 5'5° F. Its effect on the forces of erosion was the same
as adding some 4000 feet to the present height of the moun-
tains, i.e. was equivalent to an upHft. The consequence was
that the valleys were piled high with ice, which rose over
their walls in many localities and streamed down valleys
on the opposite side of the mountains, so that the ice-parting
came to he to the north of the present water-parting. Fur-
ther, the valley glaciers extended far out on the plains, and



186 THE REALM OF SNOW AND ICE

left there a load of coarse and fine debris. As they descended
from the north slope of the Alps the great glaciers could no
longer be contained in their own valleys, but united together
to form expanded tongues of ice such as are to-day to be found
in Alaska (see Fig. 14). These great ice tongues spread out
upon the plains, and within them were included the present sites
of Salzburg and Kufstein, of Schaffhausen, Zurich and Berne.
On the south slopes, on the other hand, the glaciers remained
separate from one another, but the individual glaciers ex-
tended far out on the plain so that, for example, the Etsch
glacier filled up the present Lake Garda and, broadening out
into a fan beyond the southern extremity of this lake, left
in front of it that mass of morainic hills and mounds among
which the battle of Solferino was fought.

These old glaciers have modified greatly the surface of
the Alps and the adjacent country, and some of the modifica-
tions produced can be readily observed by the ordinary
tourist. An important point to realise is that the valleys
of the Alps are, in technical language, preglacial, or, in other
words, that before the Ice Age they existed in the position
in which they are now found. But the great glaciers which
flowed down them during the period of greatest glaciation,
combined with the roaring torrents of the interglacial periods,
greatly modified their form. The chief changes thus pro-
duced, some of which are of much human importance,
are — the modification of the heads of many valleys to
form ' kare ' or cirques ; the deepening of the main valleys,
which causes numerous waterfalls to arise where the side
valleys join the deepened main valleys, which again gives
rise to abundant water power ; the smoothing of watersheds
due to the way in which arms of the great glaciers overrode
the sides of valleys, this smoothing having been of great
importance in the formation of the Alpine passes, large and
small ; the marked accentuation of the basin and gorge
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CIRQUES IN THE ALPS 187

junction of tributary glaciers with the main one, which
renders the valleys much more suitable for human habitation
and thus makes their exploration easy ; the excavation of
rock basins or the blocking of valleys with morainic matter,
which leads in turn to the great development of marginal
lakes, often of great beauty ; finally, a minor but striking
feature, due to the accentuation of the basin and gorge arrange-
ment, is the occurrence of rocky bars across the Alpine
valleys, the bars being often dissected so that isolated rocks
arise, which have been in the past of strategic importance,
and are often crowned with ruined castles (Plate XVIII.). Of
these the first only has no apparent human importance and
may be discussed here ; the others will be considered in the
next chapter when we treat of some typical regions.

Cirques in the Alps are armchair-shaped notches lying
below the summit ridges of mountains, which are sometimes
empty of ice, or contain small cirque glaciers, or form the
gathering ground and point of origin of valley glaciers. The
last was their condition during the Ice Age, so that function-
ally a cirque is the head of a glacier-containing valley. But
not all glaciers in the Alps now head in cirques. They are
far commoner in the Eastern than in the Western Alps, and
in the former are recognised in local speech (' kare '), just as
the equivalent structure is recognised by the inhabitants of
the Highlands of Scotland both in its English form of corrie
and in the Gaelic form of coire (Plate XXV.). Into the
numerous interesting points connected with cirques we can-
not enter here — something more must be said in the chapter
on the Highlands ^but the cause of the difference between
the Eastern and Western Alps is interesting.

A cirque is in origin a modification of the funnel-shaped de-
pression in which streams tend to rise in mountains of smoothed
and rounded form. According to the views of many, perhaps
most, geographers, the effect of glaciation is to convert these
wide open depressions into the steep-sided cirque, whose side



188 THE REALM OF SNOW AND ICE

and back walls are continually eaten away by the action of
frost, owing to the way in which the moving ice carries off frost-
riven debris and thus leaves new suiiaces for attack. The ice
itself owes its origin to the way in which snow tends to collect
in these valley heads, into which it slips from the slopes above.
If we suppose, therefore, that a glaciated mountain region dur-
ing the Ice Age had, before the onset of cold, such a rounded
or, as it is called, a ' subdued ' form, the tendency would be for
the heads of the glaciers to eat out deep notches in its sides,
generally more prominent on the shaded (north) side than on
others. If a number of such notches developed they would
gradually approach one another as they increased in size,
and lateral erosion would give rise to steep ridges between
the successive notches, while erosion at the back of each
cirque would tend to turn the original rounded summit into
a ridge or grat. If, on the other hand, a mountain region
prior to severe glaciation had already sharp ridges and aretes
with no wide depressions in which snow could accumulate,
the characteristic cirque would not appear. It is beheved
that the Western Alps, before the period of great glaciation,
had generally peaked and ridged forms. The effect of glacia-
tion was to accentuate this, but, in the general case, it made
the development of cirques impossible. In the Eastern Alps
the forces of erosion had, before the Ice Age, worn down the
peaks and ridges and aretes, and their activity was slackening,
for the mountains were largely protected by a covering of
their own waste. The ice gave to the eroding forces a new
tool, with which new and deeper etching has been done, the
kare being a stage in the graving process. In the Highlands,
as we shall see later, the smoothing, and rounding of forms,
and the formation of a protective covering of rock waste, had
proceeded far further, and when the ice came it could for the
most part only dig out corries in the smooth mountain sides,
giving one the curious present combination of sudden preci-
pice and smooth grassy slope.



CHAPTER XV

THEN AND NOW IN THE ALPS

' Consider how this habitable earth, with all its rock-built mountains
and flowery plains, is for ever growing and perisliing in eternal birth
and death — consider how the winds and lightnings, and storms of rain
and hail, and flooded rivers and lashing seas are for ever cutting,
mining, gnawing awa}^ confringing, coUiding and comminuting the
hills and the shores, yea, and the sites of high-domed cities — until
every mountain shall be brought low and every capital city shall lie
deep " at the bottom of the monstrous world." '

A GREAT part of the charm of the Alpine valleys of the Central
Chain, as we have said in various forms, is due to the effect
of glaciation, old and new. Here we see the splendid blue
ice of to-day hanging high above the valley, there the effect
of past ice in smoothing, in wearing away, in transporting —
in all its manifold activities. The existing glaciers help us
to interpret the work of the magnificent glaciers of the past ;
the effects produced by the past ice-rivers enable us to realise
what the present ones are doing, unseen by us, to their rocky
beds, to appreciate the work of thefirn far up on the mountain
side. Past and present act and react ; the nmrmites of the
Gletschergarten at Lucerne are for the novice a call to the
Alps ; to the sun-burnt returning tourist on his homeward
journey they are no less absorbing, for they complete the
picture he formed when he stood at the edge of a great
crevasse and heard the water roaring in a spiral down into
the heart of the ice, saw the stones which it carried down to
the depths. Let us try to elaborate the lesson afforded by

IfrU



190 THEN AND NOW IN THE ALPS

glacier garden and glacier by taking an imaginary journey
in the Ice Age, followed by one over the same ground to-day.

According to one estimate, which is Httle more than a
vague approximation, some 20,000 years have elapsed since
the last series of Ice Age glaciers began to retreat up their
valleys. How long the preceding glacial period, which
according to one widely accepted view was the last of four
separate periods, endured we have no means of ascertaining.
Let us imagine ourselves, however, some 25,000 to 30,000
years back in time, with a zeal for glacier exploration. It
is perhaps needless to remark that there is no evidence that
human beings with such tastes existed in this period. Out-
side the glaciated area early man at this time was hunting
the reindeer, mammoth or rhinoceros with the help of stone
javeHns which, after long ages of striving, he had learnt to
make with much skill and some dehcacy. On the shores of
the Mediterranean, as at Mentone, he was devoting his hours
of leisure to carving in bone and ivory and to the making of
shell amulets and so forth, with, we may reasonably suppose,
no thought of the man of the future who was to spend life
and wealth in toilsome exploration of Arctic glacier and
polar ice-cap.

Let us suppose, however, that some strayed reindeer
hunter, of roving propensities, found himself, some 30,000
years ago, near where the town of Olten now stands. What
would he see if he stood here, facing up the valley ? A
quotation from a modern explorer probably fits the case
with some accuracy : — ' Hoping to see the pass close at hand,
I beheld instead only the interminable valley slowly bending
round and stretching away. If it had been desolate before,
it now became of a yet more dreadful desolation, surpassing
anything I ever saw or imagined. No view could be more
simple. In the midst was a river flowing between banks
of ice ; on either hand long slopes of naked debris stretched
up in unbroken sweep to a straight hill crest just edged with



A VISION OF THE ICE AGE 191

snow. There were no buttresses, hardly any gulhes, no
precipices, or emerging rocks, and no peaks above. The
whole thing bent round in a slow curve. " Here indeed," I
thought " Nature ends." The worst feature in the view
remains to be mentioned ; it was a wall of ice that blocked
the valley's head, presumably some great glacier we should
have to surmount.*

The quotation is from Sir W. Martin Conway's The First
Crossing of Spitsbergen, and the party were in the act of
crossing from one side of Spitsbergen to the other. They
hoped to find a low pass at the top of the long valley up which
they had come, and instead found the appearances described,
due, as they soon found, to the fact that a lateral glacier had
crept across the pass, and was discharging water down both
sides of what should have been the watershed.

All the elements in the view of our Stone Age man were
much larger ; let us try to analyse them in a Httle detail.
If, however, the details seem fewer than some would hke, we
must remember that our far-off ancestor's forehead was low,
and his powers of observation and deduction probably small !

Standing at Olten we are looking over his shoulder up the
Aare valley, which runs here from south-west to north-east
between the Jura on the one hand and the foothills of the
Alps on the other. Here then we stand on a part of the
Swiss high plain, which, even to-day, is in winter often
drowned in mist for days together while the sun shines brightly
on the heights. In the far-o2 days of which we are speaking
we cannot doubt that the mist was denser and more per-
sistent, so that our reindeer hunter would be fortunate if he
caught occasional glimpses of his surroundings, as the wind
chanced to di'ift the mist curtain this way or that. Around
him certainly was a dreary waste of stones and mud, mingled
with ice and snow, traversed by swift turbid streams, carrying
great loads of debris as they roared down all the surrounding
slopes. If some more stable heap enabled him to rise above



192 THEN AND NOW IN THE ALPS

the general surface, he would see in front of him, some twelve
miles away, a great wall of ice, such as Sir Martin Conway
saw, but infinitely greater, from which many streams
arose. This, could he have foreseen the terminology of future
geographers, he would have recognised as a mighty arm of
the huge Rhone glacier, turned north-east out of its proper
com'se, and sending water via the Rhine to the North Sea,
instead of draining, like the present insignificant Rhone
glacier, only to the Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 14).

If, in disgust at this great mass of ice, he turned to his own
left he would see there, even nearer to him, the manifold
lobes of another great glacier, formed by the union of the
ice of the Linth and Reuss valleys, and concealing the future
sites of Zurich, Zug and Lucerne. It likewise would be
sending many streams to the Aare. Suppose he decide to
advance up the valley to the south-west, in the hope of finding
there some means of exit to the shores of the Inland Sea.

Some twelve miles of a weary struggle over the moraine-
encumbered plain brings him, as we have seen, to the snout
of the great valley glacier, which on the one side is jammed
against the Jura, so that it rises high up the slopes of these
mountains, and on the other Hes against the lower slopes of
the hill called the Napf. The snout of the glacier slopes
steeply upwards to a height of some hundreds of feet, and
our hunter will have something of a tussle before he is able
to scramble up this to the glacier surface proper. He will be
wise indeed to keep well round to his own left, for here the
slope of the snout is gentler. Once he has reached the surface
he will find the slope comparatively easy, and he will probably
be able to see far across the glacier, which some seven miles
from its extremity reaches a width of fourteen miles — a width
which is enormous when compared with the existing Aletsch
glacier (rather over one mile at a similar point) but small
compared with the Beardmore in the Antarctic, which is
some twenty miles wide at its exit from the mountains. The



THE ANCIENT RHONE GLACIER



193



surface of the glacier is arched, the higher part of the arch
lying towards the Jura, for here the ice is thickest.




Fio. 14.— Sketch-map of a part of the Swiss plateau or plain, to show
ita probable appearance during the last glacial period, as deduced from
the existing terminal moraines. To the right is seen a part of the
Reuss glacier with which the Linth glacier united, to the left the
eastern arm of the Rhone glacier which was joined by the Aare glacier.
During the last glacial period, as explained in the text, there was
" apparently an ice-free area between the ends of the two great glaciers.
(In part after Penck and Briickntr.)

Suppose our hunter toils bravely onward up the slope of
the glacier, what will he see ? South-westward stretches the

N



194 THEN AND NOW IN THE ALPS

upper part of the huge ice-river, which becomes increasingly
wide as he loses it in the mist, till it attains in the far distance
a maximum width of some twenty-five miles, and this, be
it remembered, is but one arm of the great Rhone glacier.
Further, since we know that the ice was thicker than the
highest of the hills of the plain {e.g. higher than Mt. Gibloux,
which reaches nearly 4000 feet), we know that no nunatak,
such as those which occur at the margin of the Greenland
ice-cap, pierced the crystal covering, no rock peak broke
the swelhng dome of blue ice. Nothing but ice then stretches
away infinitely from our hunter in the south-west.

But as he plods up the great ice slope a new feature draws
his attention to the left. Here, at a point which marks the
future site of the town of Berne there enters a tributary glacier,
great indeed by our standards, but not by his, for it is only
some eight miles wide where it spreads out at its exit from
the side valley. This is the Aare glacier, dammed back
and rendered insignificant by the greater arm of the Rhone
glacier, but nevertheless an ice-stream of much import-
ance.

Unhke the main glacier, which spreads out over a compara-
tively wide surface, the Aare glacier runs in a somewhat
narrow valley, at whose side ice-free areas appear. Here,
therefore, our hunter could leave the ice without great diffi-
culty for uncovered land. Let us suppose, however, that,
bent upon solving the problem of ice-stream relations, he
resolves to follow the Aare glacier up its valley, in order to
penetrate to the heart of the Alpine chain. His adventures
there we may summarise very briefly.

We cannot be quite sure what he would see as he ascended
the Aare glacier above Berne, for this would depend upon the
era of his visit. If it was towards the end of the last glacial
period, it seems certain that the not inconsiderable hill of
the Belpberg (nearly 3000 feet high) protruded through the
ice as an island of rock, and divided the glacier into a right