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Yet the eye lingers longer in the direction of the Aletsch Glacier than anywhere else, this frozen river running for miles and turning to the right at the little green basin of water full of pieces of floating ice, called the Marjelen Lake, or See, at the foot of the Eggishorn, which is unique and lovely.
Bound me fluttered a multitude of butterflies and brilliant green-backed flies; but nothing grew except a few lichens. The deadness and emptiness of the upper Aletsch glacier, like some vast white street, called up the image of an icy Pompeii. All around boundless silence.
The great Aletsch glacier was turned into a river that swept down into the valley of the Rhone, carrying everything before it. The glaciers at the head of the Rhone added their contribution.
The near representative of the group is the Aletschhorn, whence diverge like so many ribbons the different Aletsch glaciers which wind about the peak from which I saw them.
The largest of Alpine glaciers, the Aletsch, is nearly ten miles long and has an average width of about a mile. The thickness of some of the glaciers of the Alps is as much as a thousand feet. Giant glaciers more than twice the length of the longest in the Alps occur on the south slope of the Himalaya Mountains, which receive frequent precipitations of snow from moist winds from the Indian Ocean.
In Greenland and in Norway there are enormous ice-rivers or glaciers, and even in Switzerland some of them are very large. The Aletsch glacier, in the Alps, is fifteen miles long, and some are even longer than this. They move very slowly on an average about 20 to 27 inches in the centre, and 13 to 19 inches at the sides every twenty-four hours, in the summer and autumn.
To my question as to how a transient passer like myself could best see a great ice river, he replied, "Climb to-morrow the Aeggisch-horn, and look down from there upon the Aletsch glacier. You will have under your eye all the more interesting and important phenomena relating to the matter." We parted next morning.
There is a strangeness in taking a train which leaves a garden of green in the early morning and in a few hours later, after valley and pass and tunnel, puts one out on snow fields over 11,000 feet above the sea, where are seen vast stretches of white, almost level with the summit of the Jungfrau close at hand, and below, stretching for miles, on the one side the great Aletsch Glacier, and on the other side the green valleys enclosed by the everlasting hills!
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