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 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