Letters from Switzerland and Travels in Italy. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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before the sun, and charmed us with the sight, as being one which we do not often see. Single light vapours rose upwards from all the chasms in the rocks. It seemed as if the morning air were awakening the young spirits, who took pleasure in meeting the sun with expanded bosoms and gilding them in his rays. The upper heaven was perfectly clear; except where now and then a single cloudy streak, which the rising sun lit up, swept lightly across it. Balme is a miserable village, not far from the spot where a rocky gorge runs off from the road. We asked the people to guide us through the cave for which the place is famous. At this they kept looking at one another, till at last one said to a second, "Take you the ladder, I will carry the rope, – come, gentlemen." This strange invitation did not deter us from following then. Our line of descent passed first of all among fallen masses of limestone rock, which by the course of time had been piled up step by step in front of the precipitous wall of rock, and were now overgrown with bushes of hazel and beech. Over these you reach at last the strata of the rock itself, which you have to climb up slowly and painfully by means of the ladder and of the steps cut into the rock, and by help of branches of the nut-trees, which hung over head, or of pieces of rope tied to them. After this you find yourself, to your great satisfaction, in a kind of portal, which has been worn out of the rock by the weather, and overlooks the valley and the village below. We now prepared for entering the cave; lighted our candles and loaded a pistol which we proposed to let off. The cave is a long gallery, mostly level and on one strand; in parts broad enough for two men to walk abreast, in others only passable by one; now high enough to walk upright, then obliging you to stoop, and sometimes even to crawl on hands and feet. Nearly about the middle a cleft runs upwards and forms a sort of a dome. In one corner another goes downwards. We threw several stones down it, and counted slowly from seventeen to nineteen before it reached the bottom, after touching the sides many times, but always with a different echo. On the walls a stalactite forms its various devices; however it is only damp in a very few places, and forms for the most part long drops, and not those rich and rare shapes which are so remarkable in Baumann's cave. We penetrated as far as we could for the water, and as we came out let off our pistol, which shook the cave with a strong but dull echo, so that it boomed round us like a bell. It took us a good quarter of an hour to get out again, and on descending the rocks, we found our carriage and drove onwards. At Staubbachs-Art we saw a beautiful waterfall; neither its height was very great nor its volume very large, and yet it was extremely interesting, for the rocks formed around it, as it were, a circular niche in which, its waters fell, and the pieces of the limestone as they were tumbled one over another formed the most rare and unusual groups.
We arrived here at mid-day, not quite hungry enough to relish our dinner, which consisted of warmed fish, cow beef, and very stale bread. From this place there is no road leading to the mountains that is passable for so stately an equipage as we have with us; it therefore returns to Geneva, and I now must take my leave of you, in order to pursue my route a little further. A mule with my luggage will follow us as we pick our way on foot.
Chamouni, Nov. 4, 1779
Evening, about 9 o'clock.
It is only because this letter will bring me for awhile nearer to yourself that I resume my pen; otherwise it would be better for me to give my mind a little rest.
The Valley of Chamouni-Mont Blanc
We left Salenche behind us in a lovely open valley; during our noonday's rest the sky had become overcast with white fleecy clouds, about which I have here a special remark to make. We had seen them on a bright day rise equally fine, I if not still finer, from the glaciers of Berne. Here too it again seemed to us as if the sun, had first of all attracted the light mists which evaporated from the tops of the glaciers, and then a gentle breeze had, as it were, combed the fine vapours, like a fleece of foam over the atmosphere. I never remember at home, even in the height of summer, (when such phenomena do also occur with us,) to have seen any so transparent, for here it was a perfect web of light. Before long the ice-covered mountains from which it rose lay before us; the valley began to close in; the Arve was gushing out of the rock; we now began to ascend a mountain, and went up higher and higher, with the snowy summits right before us. Mountains and old pine forests, either in the hollows below or on a level with our track, came out one by one before the eye as we proceeded. On our left were the mountain-peaks, bare and pointed. We felt that we were approaching a mightier and more massive chain of mountains. We passed over a dry and broad bed of stones and gravel, which the watercourses tear down from the sides of the rocks, and in turn flow among and fill up. This brought us into an agreeable valley, flat, and shut in by a circular ridge of rocks, in which lies the little village of Serves. There the road runs round some very highly variegated rocks, and takes again the direction towards the Arve. After crossing the latter you again ascend; the masses become constantly more imposing, nature seems to have begun here with a light hand, to prepare her enormous creations. The darkness grew deeper and deeper as we approached the valley of Chamouni, and when at last we entered it, nothing but the larger masses were discernible. The stars came out one by one, and we noticed above the peaks of the summits right before us, a light which we could not account for. Clear, but without brilliancy, like the milky way, but closer, something like that of the Pleiades; it rivetted our attention until at last, as our position changed, like a pyramid illuminated by a secret light within, which could best be compared to the gleam of a glow-worm, it towered high above the peaks of all the surrounding mountains, and at last convinced us that it must be the peak of Mont Blanc. The beauty of this view was extraordinary. For while, together with the stars which clustered round it, it glimmered, not indeed with the same twinkling light, but in a broader and more continuous mass, it seemed to belong to a higher sphere, and one had difficulty in thought to fix its roots again in the earth. Before it we saw a line of snowy summits, sparkling as they rested on the ridges covered with the black pines, while between the dark forests vast glaciers sloped down to the valley below.
My descriptions begin to be irregular and forced; in fact, one wants two persons here, one to see and the other to describe.
Here we are in the middle village of the valley called "Le Prieuré," comfortably lodged in a house, which a widow caused to be built here in honour of the many strangers who visited the neighbourhood. We are sitting close to the hearth, relishing our Muscatel wine from the Vallée d'Aost far better than the lenten dishes which were served up to our dinner.
Nov. 5, 1779. Evening.
To take up one's pen and write, almost requires as great an effort as to take a swim in the cold river. At this moment I have a great mind to put you off, by referring you to the description of the glaciers of Savoy, given by that enthusiastic climber Bourritt.
Invigorated however by a few glasses of excellent wine, and by the thought that these pages will reach you much sooner than either the travellers or Bourritt's book, I will do my best. The valley of Chamouni, in which we are at present, lies very high among the mountains, and, from six to seven leagues long, runs pretty nearly from south to north. The characteristic features which to my mind distinguish it from all others, are its having scarcely any flat portion, but the whole tract, like a trough, slopes from the Arve gradually up the sides of the mountain. Mont Blanc and the line of mountains which runs off from it, and the masses of ice which fill up the immense ravines, make up the eastern wall of the valley, on which, throughout its entire length, seven glaciers, of which one is considerably larger than the others, run down to the bottom of the valley.
The Ice-Lake
The guides whom we had engaged to show us to the ice-lake came to their time. One was a young active peasant, the other much older, who seemed to think himself a very shrewd personage, who had held intercourse with all learned foreigners, well acquainted with the nature of the ice-mountains, and a very clever fellow. He assured us that for eight and twenty years, – so long had he acted as guide over the mountains, – this was the first time that his services had been put in requisition so late in the year – after All Saints' Day, and yet that we might even now see every object quite as well as in June. Provided with wine and food we began to ascend Mont Anvert, from which we were told the view of the ice-lake would be quite ravishing. Properly I should call it the ice-valley or the ice-stream; for looking at it from above, the huge masses of ice force themselves out of a deep valley in tolerable smoothness. Right behind it ends