United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But in contemplating the condition of the glaciers of the world, we must bear in mind while trying to account for the changes going on that the same sunshine that wastes them builds them. Every glacier records the expenditure of an enormous amount of sun-heat in lifting the vapor for the snow of which it is made from the ocean to the mountains, as Tyndall strikingly shows.
Soon handsome façades, pierced with hundreds of windows, show themselves in the grand and severe setting of mountains and glaciers. It is St. Moritz-les-Bains. Here every house is a hotel, and, as every hotel is a little palace, we do not alight from the diligence; we go a little farther and a little higher, to St. Moritz-le-Village, which has a much more beautiful situation.
A circle of lofty firs, some three hundred feet high, threw a slanting shadow over the open grave, the tops gleaming with sunset fire. Afar, Mount Hood, the dead volcano, lifted its roof of glaciers twelve thousand feet high. Silver ice and black carbon it was now, although in the long ages gone it had had a history written in flame and smoke and thunder.
We were on the moraine of an old glacier, and saw nothing in front of us but frightful precipices and glaciers. There was a saddle, however, not above a couple of thousand feet higher. This saddle was covered with snow, and, as we had neither provisions nor blankets, we were obliged to give up going to the top of it.
The land is extraordinary gigantic snow drifts like huge waves breaking against a stone pier beset the lower cliff faces and steeper slopes, then dark red-brown rock carved by glaciers long since vanished, and above this rocky bands of limestone, sandstone; and dolerite. Some rocky talus showing through the big snow drifts, and in some cases talus alone.
It is a mountain-range of roofs, with ridges crossing, interlacing, and piled on one another, and upon which tall chimneys raise their peaks. It was but yesterday that they had an Alpine aspect to me, and I waited for the first snowstorm to see glaciers among them; to-day, I only see tiles and stone flues.
The traveller passes from one desert valley into another; he is always surrounded by high mountains and still higher glaciers, and wherever he turns his eyes, nature seems torpid and dead.
She answered the few remarks which he found it possible to direct to her, but the responses took no hold upon his memory. He fancied that she was bored, or unhappy, or both. Finally, in the midst of commonplaces which, to his apprehension, were verging upon flatness, a bold inspiration disclosed itself as splendid as the Dent du Midi revealing its glaciers above the mounting sunrise in his brain.
"With Maso, I could wish we were safely landed," answered the good canon; "the intense heat that a day like this creates in our valleys and on the lakes so weakens the sub-strata, or foundations of air, that the cold masses which collect around the glaciers sometimes descend like avalanches from their heights, to fill the vacuum.
Cloud's Rest is a thousand feet higher than Tissiack. It is a wavelike crest upon a ridge, which begins at Yosemite with Tissiack, and runs continuously eastward to the thicket of peaks and crests around Lake Tenaya. This lofty granite wall is bent this way and that by the restless and weariless action of glaciers just as if it had been made of dough.
Word Of The Day