United States or Zambia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Day by day, among the heights, I grew to feel that I wanted some explanation of why the strange panorama of splintered crag and hanging ice-fall was there at all. It certainly is not there with any reference to man at least it is hard to believe that it is all there that human beings may take a refreshing holiday in the midst of it.
He would sleep very likely in the hut on the Col, and go down the next morning to Courmayeur and make his arrangements for the Brenva climb. On the third day, to-day, he would set out with Walter Hine and sleep at the gîte on the rocks in the bay to the right of the great ice-fall of the Brenva glacier.
Having squeezed ourselves out again through the narrow hole, we now passed between the two gigantic columns, and found that the sea of ice became still broader and bolder. I much regret that I neglected to take any measurements in this part of the cave; but farther down, where it was certainly not so broad, I found the width of the ice to be 75 feet. It was throughout of the crystalline character which prevails in all the large masses in the glacières I have visited. For some distance beyond the columns, we found neither stalactites nor stalagmites indeed, I forgot to look at the roof until we came to the edge of a glorious ice-fall, down which Christian said it was impossible to go no one had ever been farther than where we now stood. I have seen no subterranean ice-fall so grand as this, round and smooth, and perfectly unbroken, passing down, like the rapids of some river too deep for its surface to be disturbed, into darkness against which two candles prevailed nothing. The fall in the Upper Glacière of the Pré de S. Livres was strange enough, but it was very small, and led to a confined corner of the cavern; whereas this of the Schafloch rolls down majestically, cold and grey, into a dark gulf of which we could see neither the roof nor the end, while the pieces of ice which we despatched down the steep slope could be heard going on and on, as M. Soret says,
And indeed he had, a better plan and a simpler one, a plan which not merely would give to any uttered suspicion the complexion of malignancy, but must even bring Mr. Garratt Skinner honor and great praise. But no idea of the plan occurred either to Sylvia or to Chayne as all through that long hot day they toiled up the ice-fall of the Col du Géant and over the passes.
Chayne sent for them. "Yes," they said. "At half past two this morning, the climbing party descended from the rocks on to the ice-fall of the glacier. They should be at the hut at the Grands Mulets now, on the other side of the mountain, if not already in Chamonix. Perhaps monsieur would wish for porters to-morrow." "No," said Chayne.
We soon found that the larger ice-fall looked extremely grand when seen from below, and that in a modified form it reached far down into the lower cave, and terminated in a level sea of ice; but, before making any further investigations into its size, we pressed on to look for the end of the cave.
This, at least, was the novices' point of view. But the little white volcano seemed quietly cross, and held her small head very high as she led the Princess from one ward to another to the beautifully fitted operating-room; and when she spoke her tone was strangely cold and mordant, as a woman's voice sometimes sounds in the Alps, when she speaks across an ice-fall or a frozen lake.
He uses sufficiently large words, speaking of the vaste, horrible et pourtant magnifique of the horreur du séjour, and the grandeur des demeures souterraines; but he only calls the glorious ice-fall a plan incliné, and says that the whole was less remarkable for the amount of ice, than for the characteristics indicated by the words I have quoted.
Once past its great ice-fall, the glacier leads without difficulty to the Montanvert hotel and Chamonix. But the Col des Nantillons is another affair.
And to the right of the hump, a depression in the ridge? That's what they call the Corridor. Once we are there our troubles are over." But between the party and the buttress stretched the great ice-fall of the upper Brenva glacier. Crevassed, broken, a wilderness of towering séracs, it had the look of a sea in a gale whose breakers had been frozen in the very act of over toppling.
Word Of The Day