Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  I sat down on the rocks to take, not a sketch, — for who can sketch a mountain torrent? — but to note down on paper a kind of diagram, from which afterwards I might reconstruct an image of this feathery, frisky son of Kuhleborn.

  And while I was doing this, little G. seemed to be possessed by the spirit of the brook to caper down into the ravine, with a series of leaps far safer for a waterfall than a boy. I was thankful when I saw him safely at the bottom.

  After sketching a little while, I rambled off to a point where I looked over towards Mont Blanc, and got a most beautiful view of the Glacier de Boisson. Imagine the sky flushed with a rosy light, a background of purple mountains, with darts of sunlight streaming among them, touching point and cliff with gold. Against this background rises the outline of the glacier like a mountain of the clearest white crystals, tinged with blue; and against their snowy whiteness in the foreground tall forms of pines. I rejoiced in the picture with exceeding joy as long as the guide would let me; but in all these places you have to cut short your raptures at the proper season, or else what becomes of your supper?

  I went back to the cottage. A rosy-cheeked girl had held our mules, and set a chair for us to get off, and now brings them up with “Au plaisir, messieurs” to the bearers of our purse. Half a dozen children had been waiting with the rose des Alps, which they wanted to sell us “au plaisir” but which we did not buy.

  These continual demands on the purse look very alarming, only the coin you pay in is of such infinitesimal value that it takes about a pocket full to make a cent. Such a currency is always a sign of poverty.

  We had a charming ride down the mountain side, in the glow of the twilight. We passed through a whole flock of goats which the children were driving home. One dear little sturdy Savoyard looked so like a certain little Charley at home that I felt quite a going forth of soul to him. As we rode on, I thought I would willingly live and die in such a place; but I shall see a hundred such before we leave the Alps.

  JOURNAL — (CONTINUED.)

  Thursday, July 7. Weather still celestial, as yesterday. But lo, these frail tabernacles betray their earthliness. H. remarked at breakfast that all the “tired” of yesterday was piled up into to-day. And S. actually pleaded inability, and determined to remain at the hotel.

  However, the Mer de Glâce must be seen; so, at seven William, Georgy, H., and I, set off. When about half way or more up the mountain we crossed the track of the avalanches, a strip or trail, which looks from beneath like a mower’s swath through a field of tall grass. It is a clean path, about fifty rods wide, without trees, with few rocks, smooth and steep, and with a bottom of ice covered with gravel.

  “Hurrah, William,” said I, “let’s have an avalanche!”

  “Agreed,” said he; “there’s a big rock.”

  “Monsieur le Guide, Monsieur le Guide!” I shouted, “stop a moment. H., stop; we want you to see our avalanche.”

  “No,” cried H., “I will not. Here you ask me to stop, right on the edge of this precipice, to see you roll down a stone!”

  So, on she ambled. Meanwhile William and I were already on foot, and our mules were led on by the guide’s daughter, a pretty little lass of ten or twelve, who accompanied us in the capacity of mule driver.

  We found several stones of inferior size, and sent them plunging down. At last, however, we found one that weighed some two tons, which happened to lie so that, by loosening the earth before and under it with our alpenstocks, we were able to dislodge it. Slowly, reluctantly, as if conscious of the awful race it was about to take, the huge mass trembled, slid, poised, and, with a crunch and a groan, went over. At the first plunge it acquired a heavy revolving motion, and was soon whirling and dashing down, bounding into the air with prodigious leaps, and cutting a white and flashing path into the icy way. Then first I began to realize the awful height at which we stood above the plain. Tracts, which looked as though we could almost step across them, were reached by this terrible stone, moving with frightful velocity; and bound after bound, plunge after plunge it made, and we held our breath to see each tract lengthen out, as if seconds grew into minutes, inches into rods; and still the mass moved on, and the microscopic way lengthened out, till at last a curve hid its further progress from our view.

  What other cliffs we might have toppled over the muse refuses to tell; for our faithful guide returned to say that it was not quite safe; that there were always shepherds and flocks in the valley, and that they might be injured. So we remounted, and soon overtook H. at a fountain, sketching a pine tree of special physiognomy.

  “Ah,” said I, “H., how foolish you were! You don’t know what a sight you have lost.”

  “Yes,” said she, “all C. thinks mountains are made for is to roll stones down.”

  “And all H. thinks trees made for,” said I, “is to have ugly pictures made of them.”

  “Ay,” she replied, “you wanted me to stand on the very verge of the precipice, and see two foolish boys roll down stones, and perhaps make an avalanche of themselves! Now, you know, C., I could not spare you; first, because I have not learned French enough yet; and next, because I don’t know how to make change.”

  “Add to that,” said I, “the damages to the bergers and flocks.”

  “Yes,” she added; “no doubt when we get back to the inn we shall have a bill sent in, ‘H. B. S. to A. B., Dr., to one shepherd and six cows, — fr.’”

  And so we chatted along until we reached the auberge, and, after resting a few moments, descended into the frozen sea.

  Here a scene opened upon us never to be forgotten. From the distant gorge of the everlasting Alpine ranges issued forth an ocean tide, in wild and dashing commotion, just as we have seen the waves upon the broad Atlantic, but all motionless as chaos when smitten by the mace of Death; and yet, not motionless! This denser medium, this motionless mass, is never at rest. This flood moves as it seems to move; these waves are actually uplifting out of the abyss as they seem to lift; the only difference is in the time of motion, the rate of change.

  These prodigious blocks of granite, thirty or forty feet long and twenty feet thick, which float on this grim sea of ice, do float, and are drifting, drifting down to the valley below, where, in a few days, they must arrive.

  We walked these valleys, ascended these hills, leaped across chasms, threw stones down the crevasses, plunged our alpenstocks into the deep baths of green water, and philosophized and poetized till we were tired. Then we returned to the auberge, and rode down the zigzag to our hotel.

  LETTER XXXIV.

  MY DEAR: —

  The Mer de Glâce is exactly opposite to La Flégère, where we were yesterday, and is reached by the ascent of what is called Montanvert, or Green Mountain. The path is much worse than the other, and in some places makes one’s nerves twinge, especially that from which C. projected his avalanche. Just think of his wanting to stop me on the edge of a little shelf over that frightful chasm, and take away the guide from the head of my mule to help him get up avalanches!

  I warn you, if ever you visit the Alps, that a travelling companion who has not the slightest idea what fear is will give you many a commotion. For instance, this Mer de Glâce is traversed every where by crevasses in the ice, which go to — nobody knows where, down into the under world — great, gaping, blue-green mouths of Hades; and C. must needs jump across them, and climb down into them, to the mingled delight and apprehension of the guide, who, after conscientiously shouting out a reproof, would say to me, in a lower tone, “Ah, he’s the man to climb Mont Blanc; he would do well for that!”

  The fact is, nothing would suit our guides better, this clear, bright weather, than to make up a party for the top of Mont Blanc. They look longingly and lovingly up to its clear, white fields; they show us the stages and resting-places, and seem really to think that it is a waste of this beautiful weather not to be putting it to that most sublime purpose.

  Why, then, do not we go up? you say. As to us ladies, it is a t
hing that has been done by only two women since the world stood, and those very different in their physique from any we are likely to raise in America, unless we mend our manners very much. These two were a peasant woman of Chamouni, called Marie de Mont Blanc, and Mademoiselle Henriette d’Angeville, a lady whose acquaintance I made in Geneva. Then, as to the gentlemen, it is a serious consideration, in the first place, that the affair costs about one hundred and fifty dollars apiece, takes two days of time, uses up a week’s strength, all to get an experience of some very disagreeable sensations, which could not afflict a man in any other case. It is no wonder, then, that gentlemen look up to the mountain, lay their hands on their pockets, and say, No.

  Our guide, by the way, is the son, or grandson, of the very first man that ascended Mont Blanc, and of course feels a sort of hereditary property and pride in it.

  C. spoke about throwing our poles down the pools of water in the ice.

  There is something rather curious about these pools. Our guide saw us measuring the depth of one of them, which was full of greenish-blue water, colored only by the refraction of the light. He took our long alpenstock, and poising it, sent it down into the water, as a man might throw a javelin. It disappeared, but in a few seconds leaped up at us out of the water, as if thrown back again by an invisible hand.

  A poet would say that a water spirit hurled it back; perhaps some old under-ground gnome, just going to dinner, had his windows smashed by it, and sent it back with a becoming spirit, as a gnome should.

  It was a sultry day, and the sun was exercising his power over the whole ice field. I sat down by a great ice block, about fifty feet long, to interrogate it, and see what I could make of it, by a cool, confidential proximity and examination. The ice was porous and spongy, as I have seen it on the shores of the Connecticut, when beginning to thaw out under the influence of a spring sun. I could see the little drops of water percolating in a thousand tiny streams through it, and dropping down on every side. Putting my ear to it, I could hear a fine musical trill and trickle, and that still small click and stir, as of melting ice, which showed that it was surely and gradually giving way, and flowing back again.

  Drop by drop the cold iceberg was changing into a stream, to flow down the sides of the valley, no longer an image of coldness and death, but bearing fertility and beauty on its tide. And as I looked abroad over all the rifted field of ice, I could see that the same change was gradually going on throughout. In every blue ravine you can hear the clink of dropping water, and those great defiant blocks of ice, which seem frozen with uplifted warlike hands, are all softening in that beneficent light, and destined to pass away in that benignant change. So let us hope that those institutions of pride and cruelty, which are colder than the glacier, and equally vast and hopeless in their apparent magnitude, may yet, like that, be slowly and surely passing away. Like the silent warfare of the sun on the glacier, is that overshadowing presence of Jesus, whose power, so still, yet so resistless, is now being felt through all the moving earth.

  Those defiant waves of death-cold ice might as well hope to conquer the calm, silent sun, as the old, frozen institutions of human selfishness to resist the influence which he is now breathing through the human heart, to liberate the captive, to free the slave, and to turn the ice of long winters into rivers of life for the new heaven and the new earth.

  All this we know is coming, but we long to see it now, and breathe forth our desires with the Hebrew prophet, “O that thou wouldst rend the heavens, that thou wouldst come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence.”

  I had, while upon this field of ice, that strange feeling which often comes over one, at the sight of a thing unusually beautiful and sublime, of wanting, in some way, to appropriate and make it a part of myself. I looked up the gorge, and saw this frozen river, lying cradled, as it were, in the arms of needle-peaked giants of amethystine rock, their tops laced with flying silvery clouds. The whole air seemed to be surcharged with tints, ranging between the palest rose and the deepest violet — tints never without blue, and never without red, but varying in the degrees of the two. It is this prismatic hue diffused over every object which gives one of the most noticeable characteristics of the Alpine landscape.

  This sea of ice lies on an inclined plane, and all the blocks have a general downward curve.

  I told you yesterday that the lower part of the glacier, as seen from La Flégère, appeared covered with dirt. I saw to-day the reason for this. Although it was a sultry day in July, yet around the glacier a continual high wind was blowing, whirling the dust and débris of the sides upon it. Some of the great masses of ice were so completely coated with sand as to appear at a distance like granite rocks. The effect of some of these immense brown masses was very peculiar. They seemed like an army of giants, bending forward, driven, as by an invisible power, down into the valley.

  It reminds one of such expressions as these in Job: —

  “Have the gates of death been open to thee, or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?” One should read that sublime poem in such scenes as these. I remained on the ice as long as I could persuade the guides and party to remain.

  Then we went back to the house, where, of course, we looked at some wood work, agates, and all the et cetera.

  Then we turned our steps downward. We went along the side of the glacier, and I desired to climb over as near as possible, in order to see the source of the Arveiron, which is formed by the melting of this glacier. Its cradle is a ribbed and rocky cavern of blue ice, and like a creature born full of vigor and immortality, it begins life with an impetuous leap. The cold arms of the glaciers cannot retain it; it must go to the warm, flowery, velvet meadows below.

  The guide was quite anxious about me; he seemed to consider a lady as something that must necessarily break in two, or come apart, like a German doll, if not managed with extremest care; and therefore to see one bounding through bushes, leaping, and springing, and climbing over rocks at such a rate, appeared to him the height of desperation.

  The good, faithful soul wanted to keep me within orthodox limits, and felt conscientiously bound to follow me wherever I went, and to offer me his hand at every turn. I considered, on the whole, that I ought not to blame him, since guides hold themselves responsible for life and limb; and any accident to those under their charge is fatal to their professional honor.

  Going down, I held some conversation with him on matters and things in general, and life in Chamouni in particular. He inquired with great interest about America; which, throughout Europe, I find the working classes regard as a kind of star in the west, portending something of good to themselves. He had a son, he said, settled in America, near St. Louis.

  “And don’t you want to go to America?” said I, after hearing him praise the good land.

  “Ah, no,” he said, with a smile.

  “Why not?” said I; “it is a much easier country to live in.”

  He gave a look at the circle of mountains around, and said, “I love Chamouni.” The good soul! I was much of his opinion. If I had been born within sight of glorious Mont Blanc, with its apocalyptic clouds, and store of visions, not all the fat pork and flat prairies of Indiana and Ohio could tempt me. No wonder the Swiss die for their native valleys! I would if I were they. I asked him about education. He said his children went to a school kept by Catholic sisters, who taught reading, writing, and Latin. The dialect of Chamouni is a patois, composed of French and Latin. He said that provision was very scarce in the winter. I asked how they made their living when there were no travellers to be guided up Mont Blanc. He had a trade at which he wrought in winter months, and his wife did tailoring.

  I must not forget to say that the day before there had been some confidential passages between us, which began by his expressing, interrogatively, the opinion that “mademoiselle was a young lady, he supposed.” When mademoiselle had assured him, on the contrary, that she was a venerable matron, mother of a thriving family, then follow
ed a little comparison of notes as to numbers. Madame he ascertained to have six, and he had four, if my memory serves me, as it generally does not in matters of figures. So you see it is not merely among us New Englanders that the unsophisticated spirit of curiosity exists as to one’s neighbors. Indeed, I take it to be a wholesome development of human nature in general. For my part, I could not think highly of any body who could be brought long into connection with another human being and feel no interest to inquire into his history and surroundings.

  As we stopped, going down the descent, to rest the mules, I looked up above my head into the crags, and saw a flock of goats browsing. One goat, in particular, I remember, had gained the top of a kind of table rock, which stood apart from the rest, and which was carpeted with lichens and green moss. There he stood, looking as unconscious and contemplative as possible, the wicked fellow, with his long beard! He knew he looked picturesque, and that is what he stood there for. But, as they say in New England, he did it “as nat’ral as a pictur!”

  By the by, the girls with strawberries, milk, and knitting work were on hand on the way down, and met us just where a cool spring gushed out at the roots of a pine tree; and of course I bought some more milk and strawberries.

  How dreadfully hot it was when we got down to the bottom! for there we had the long, shadeless ride home, with the burning lenses of the glaciers concentrated upon our defenceless heads. I was past admiring any thing, and glad enough for the shelter of a roof, and a place to lie down.