"The Cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,- And now we pass on, and enter a silent sea of pines, how beautiful! silent, still, solemn, religious; dark against the enor mous snowy masses and peaks before us. How near their glittering glaciers seem upon us! How clear the atmosphere! How our voices ring out upon it, and the very hum of the insects in the air is distinctly sonorous. We have now ascended to such a height, that we can look across the vales and mountains, down into Unterseen and Interlachen. And now before us rises the Jungfrau Alp, how sublimely! But at this moment of the view the Silberhorn is far more lovely with its fields of dazzling snow, than the Jungfrau, which here presents a savage perpendicular steep, a wall of rock, scarred and seamed indeed, but so steep, that the snow and ice cannot cling to its jagged points. Higher up commence the tremendous glaciers, presenting a chaos of enormous ravines of snow and ice, just ready to topple down the ridge of the mountain. CHAPTER XVII. The Jungfrau Alp and its Avalanches. WHEN We come to the inn upon the Wengern Alp, we are near 5500 feet above the level of the sea. We are directly in face of the JUNGFRAU upon whose masses of perpetual snow we have been gazing with so much interest. They seem close to us, so great is the deception in clear air, but a deep, vast ravine (I know not but a league across from where we are) separates the Wengern Alp from the Jungfrau, which rises in an abrupt sheer precipice, of many thousand feet, somewhat broken into terraces, down which the Avalanches, from the higher beds of untrodden everlasting snow, plunge thundering into the uninhabitable abyss. Perhaps there is not another mountain so high in all Switzerland, which you can look at so near and so full in the face. Out of this ravine the Jungfrau rises eleven thousand feet, down which vast height the Avalanches sometimes sweep with their incalculable masses of ice from the very topmost summit. The idea of a mass of ice so gigantic that it might overwhelm whole hamlets, or sweep away a forest in its course, being shot down, with only one or two interruptions, a distance of eleven thousand feet, is astounding. But it is those very interruptions that go to produce the overpowering sublimity of the scene. Were there no concussion intervening between the loosening of the mountain ridge of ice and snow, and its fall into the valley, if it shot sheer off into the air, and came down in one solid mass unbroken, it would be as if a mountain had fallen at noon-day out of heaven. And this would certainly be sublime in the highest degree, but it would not have the awful slowness and deep prolonged roar of the Jungfrau avalanche in mid air, nor the repetition of sublimity with each interval of thousands of feet, in which it strikes and thunders. I think that without any exception it was the grandest sight I ever beheld, not even the cataract of Niagara having impressed me with such thrilling sublimity. Ordinarily, in a sunny day at noon, the avalanches are falling on the Jungfrau about every ten minutes, with the roar of thunder, but they are much more seldom visible, and sometimes the traveller crosses the Wengern Alp without witnessing them at all. But we were so very highly favored as to see two of the grandest avalanches possible in the course of about an hour, between twelve o'clock and two. One cannot command any language to convey an adequate idea of their magnificence. You are standing far below, gazing up to where the great disc of the glittering Alp cuts the heavens, and drinking in the influence of the silent scene around. Suddenly an enormous mass of snow and ice, in itself a mountain, seems to move; it breaks from the toppling outmost mountain ridge of snow, where it is hundreds of feet in depth, and in its first fall of perhaps two thousand feet, is broken into millions of fragments. As you first see the flash of distant artillery by night, then hear the roar, so here you may see the white flashing mass majestically bowing, then hear the astounding din. A cloud of dusty, misty, dry snow rises into the air from the concussion, forming a white volume of fleecy smoke, or misty light, from the bosom of which thunders forth the icy torrent in its second prodigious fall over the rocky battlements. The eye follows it delighted, as it ploughs through the path which preceding avalanches have worn, till it comes to the brink of a vast ridge of bare rock, perhaps more. than two thousand feet perpendicular. Then pours the whole cataract over the gulf, with a still louder roar of echoing thunder, to which nothing but the noise of Niagara in its sublimity is comparable. Nevertheless, you may think of the tramp of an army of elephants, of the roar of multitudinous cavalry marching to battle, of the whirlwind tread of ten thousand bisons sweeping across the prairie, of the tempest surf of ocean beating and shaking the continent, of the sound of torrent floods or of a numerous host, or of the voice of the Trumpet on Sinai, exceeding loud, and waxing louder and louder, so that all the people in the camp trembled, or of the rolling orbs of that fierce Chariot described by Milton, "Under whose burning wheels The steadfast empyrean shook throughout." It is with such a mighty shaking tramp that the Avalanche down thunders. Another fall of still greater depth ensues, over a second similar castellated ridge or reef in the face of the mountain, with an awful, majestic slowness, and a tremendous crash in its concus sion, awakening again the reverberating peals of thunder. Then the torrent roars on to another smaller fall, till at length it reaches a mighty groove of snow and ice, like the slide down the Pilatus, of which Playfair has given so powerfully graphic a description. Here its progress is slower, and last of all you listen to the roar of the falling fragments, as they drop, out of sight, with a dead weight into the bottom of the gulf, to rest there for ever. Now figure to yourself a cataract like that of Niagara (for I should judge the volume of one of these avalanches to be probably every way superior in bulk to the whole of the Horseshoe fall), poured in foaming grandeur, not merely over one great precipice of 200 feet, but over the successive ridgy precipices of two or three thousand, in the face of a mountain eleven thousand feet high, and tumbling, crashing, thundering down, with a continuous din of far greater sublimity than the sound of the grandest cataract. Placed on the slope of the Wengern Alp, right opposite the whole visible side of the Jungfrau, we have enjoyed two of these mighty spectacles, at about half an hour's interval between them. The first was the most sublime, the second the most beautiful. The roar of the falling mass begins to be heard the moment it is loosened from the mountain; it pours on with the sound of a vast body of rushing water; then comes the first great concussion, a booming crash of thunders, breaking on the still air in mid heaven; your breath is suspended, as you listen and look; the mighty glittering mass shoots headlong over the main precipice, and the fall is so great, that it produces to the eye that impression of dread majestic slowness, of which I have spoken, though it is doubtless more rapid than Niagara. But if you should see the cataract of Niagara itself coming down five thousand feet above you in the air, there would be the same impression. The image remains in the mind, and can never fade from it; it is as if you had seen an alabaster cataract from heaven. The sound is far more sublime than that of Niagara, because of the preceding stillness in those awful Alpine solitudes. In the midst of such silence and solemnity, from out the bosom of those glorious glittering forms of nature, comes that rushing, crashing thunder-burst of sound! If it were not that your soul, through the eye, is as filled and fixed with the sublimity of the vision, as through the sense of hearing with that of the audible report, methinks you would wish to bury your face in your hands, and fall prostrate, as at the voice of the Eternal! But it is impossible to convey any adequate idea of the combined impression made by these rushing masses and rolling thunders upon the soul. When you see the smaller avalanches, they are of the very extreme of beauty, like jets of white powder, or heavy white mist or smoke, poured from crag to crag, like as if the Staubach itself were shot from the top of the Jungfrau. Travellers do more frequently see only these smaller cataracts, in which the beautiful predominates over the sublime; and at the inn they told us it was very rare to witness so mighty an avalanche as that of which we had enjoyed the spectacle. Lord Byron must have seen something like it, when he and Hobhouse were on the mountain together. His powerful descriptions in Manfred could have been drawn from nothing but the reality. "Ye toppling crags of ice, Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down, In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me! I hear ye momently, above, beneath, Crush with a frequent conflict: but ye pass, The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds |