Mont Blanc had been knocked off its pedestal - or, more accurately, it had become a pedestal - but plenty of other challenges loomed in its place and Saussure was keen to face them. The first to attract his attention was the Col du Géant. Not so much a peak as a high pass leading over Mont Blanc from Chamonix to Courmayeur, the Col du Géant had a reputation for inaccessibility stemming from a failed attempt in 1689. But a colleague of Saussure’s named Exchaquet had climbed it in 1787, overcoming the glacier that formed the most dangerous part of the route. Bourrit traversed the Col with his son later in the same year. It took him seventeen hours to reach Courmayeur, eleven of which were spent on the ice. He wrote that: ‘The difficulties of [Mont Blanc] do not approach those of this expedition … The crevasses exceeded those of Mont Blanc in horror as well as in size, and if snow avalanches were to be feared on Mont Blanc, there was [here] no less danger from the fall of séracs.’1 (Seracs, perilous cliffs of ice that are liable to collapse without warning, are as much a feature of glacial landscapes as are crevasses.) Their clothes froze, as did their shoelaces. Before they reached the top Bourrit’s son had lost all feeling in his feet and hands; icicles an inch long hung from his crépe veil. ‘The guides … ran backwards and forwards like men who, after a shipwreck, avoid the waves by scrambling from rock to rock.’2 When they arrived in Courmayeur, after a five-and-a-half-hour descent, Bourrit was jubilant. He returned to Geneva ‘bringing back from his memorable expedition the most extraordinary pictures and the honour of having crossed in one day… through a thousand dangers - dangers which added to his satisfaction by the proof they afforded of what men will do when animated by the love of glory.’3 It was ‘the most audacious expedition which has yet been made in the Alps,’4 he wrote wildly. (Disappointed to find that he was not the first to climb the Col, as he had believed himself to be, he added a disparaging note about Exchaquet, who had declared that he ‘met with no difficulties’ in the passage.)
Legend and Bourrit aside, the Col was a relatively easy climb. Saussure knew this and did not care. His main reason for visiting it was to complete the meteorological readings he had been unable to take on Mont Blanc. In many ways, his passage across the Col du Géant was more impressive than his ascent of Mont Blanc: at almost 11,000 feet above sea level the Col was not to be disparaged; the glacier was dangerous; and Saussure did not want just to cross the pass but to stay there for sixteen days. Two years previously it had been considered impossible to survive a night at high altitude. Saussure was proposing more than a fortnight. Nobody had ever done this. Always the diligent second-comer, he was now attempting a first. As he put it, ‘It seemed to me it would be interesting.’5
The expedition, which set off on 2 July 1788, comprised Saussure, his new manservant (the old one had finally given up), his son Etienne, and a team of guides of whom four, led by Jacques Balmat, were to remain on the Col to carry letters to Chamonix and fetch provisions. For such a prolonged stay the old Mont Blanc tent was deemed useless and Saussure took two more durable versions made of treated canvas. One was for stores the other for accommodation. They came from Widow Tillard in Paris and were ‘highly recommended if one does not mind the smell’.6
The climb was accomplished without too much trouble - though one guide fell down a crevasse on the glacier, emerging badly scraped - and Saussure was pleased to find that he suffered none of the sickness he had experienced on Mont Blanc. The encampment, however, which had been chosen on Exchaquet’s advice, was neither as high nor as spacious as Saussure would have liked. It was a narrow, snow-covered ledge whose uneven surface had to be cleared of boulders to make room for the tents. At one end was a rough stone shelter, barely six feet square, half filled with snow and flanked on two sides by a sheer drop. It was a disappointment for Saussure who, despite constant tramps through the mountains, was a man used to his comforts. Nevertheless, it was a good place from which to take his observations and initially he found the shelter a handy place to spend the night when the sleeping tent became too stuffy.
Despite one or two violent storms, and the unexpected distraction of Exchaquet who made a twenty-four-hour visit to the camp with a group of friends, Saussure was able to conduct most of the experiments he required. Work continued throughout the day, Saussure’s son rising at 4.00 a.m. and his father three hours later. They read their barometers, thermometers, electrometers, hygrometers, compasses and pendulums. They gauged the reaction of rocks when placed in different acids. They watched cloud formations and measured their speeds. They observed shooting stars - disappointingly small - and were happy to see that contrary to popular opinion they fell above rather than below them. At 10.00 p.m. Saussure fils went to bed while his father spent another two hours with the electrometer before retiring to the hut where, ‘on my little mattress which had been laid on the ground next to that of my son, I slept better than I did in my own bed at home’.7 On good days, they basked in sunshine while down below Chamonix was engulfed in cloud. Showers of puzzled butterflies settled on his camp, blown above the snowline by updraughts from the valley. In their pursuit came flocks of choughs. Saussure revelled in it all even though, come evening, the temperature was minus 4°F and the water froze in his glass.
Saussure was first and foremost a scientist, and his journals reflect that fact. His analyses of rock structure can become unbearably tedious. At times, however, a covert Romantic peeps out. In one passage, written shortly before their departure, he wrote glowingly of the views from the Col:
These heights have tried their best to make us regret them, we have had the most magnificent evening; all these high peaks that surround us and the snows that separate them were coloured with the most beautiful shades of rose and carmine. The Italian horizon was girdled with a broad belt from which the full moon, of a rich vermillion tint, rose with the majesty of a queen … These snows and rocks, of which the brilliancy is unsupportable by sunlight, present a wonderful and delightful spectacle by the soft radiance of the moon. How magnificent is the contrast between these granite crags, shadowed or thrown out with such sharpness and boldness, and the brilliant snows! … The soul is uplifted, the powers of intelligence seem to widen and in the midst of this majestic silence, one seems to hear the voice of Nature and to become the confidant of her most secret workings.8
But there were bad days too. Saussure was camped just at the height where thunderstorms form. To understand what this entails one should know a little about these fearsome phenomena. Normally the cold air of the upper atmosphere remains separated from the warm air below. Sometimes, however, pockets of warm air can burst through into the cold. Initially they produce harmless puffs of cumulus. But as the clouds build they coalesce into a large mass surmounted by a rapidly cooling head of moisture. When the air freezes it turns the cloud on its head. Plunging earthwards it creates first the wind that commonly precedes a storm and then a deluge of rain. And as the cold air falls, warm air surges up to fill the vacuum at speeds of 100 miles per hour, creating the conditions for yet another downpour. Each such cycle is known as a cell and each cloud can contain as many as five cells. A cell is short-lived - twenty minutes or so - but as the cloud drifts it may be fed by more warm air to produce a storm lasting several hours.
Sometimes a thunderstorm contains hail, frozen droplets of water and dust that form at about 15,000 feet and are then tossed by updraughts until they have collected an irresistibly heavy layer of ice. The ice tilts and then falls, adding a new dimension to the fury. And then there is lightning. As a thundercloud floats along it casts a positively charged electrical shadow on the ground below. The storm itself is negatively charged, and when high ground brings storm and shadow into proximity the result is explosive. Leaping from the ground - contrary to popular belief, lightning does not come from the sky - electricity arcs upwards under stresses of more than 100 million volts in channels that can stretch for five miles yet be only as thick as a pencil. The gases caught in its superheated passage expand to produce the rumble of thunder. Taking the wind and the electricity together, a single thundercloud contains as much energy as ten Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs.
Throughout 3 July a cloud had been forming over Chamonix and the following morning at 1.00 Saussure became the first man to record life at the centre of a thunderstorm. It was, he said, ‘the most terrible [thing] I have ever witnessed’. The wind was so fierce that he and his son huddled together, fearing
at every instant that it would carry away the stone hut in which [we] were sleeping. The gale had this peculiarity, that it was periodically interrupted by intervals of the most perfect calm. In these intervals we heard the wind howling below us … while the most absolute tranquility reigned around our cabin. But these calm moments were succeeded by blasts of an indescribable violence; double blows like discharges of artillery. We felt even the mountain shake under our mattresses; the wind penetrated through the cracks in the wall of the hut, it once lifted my sheets and rugs and froze me from head to foot.9
At daybreak the wind fell a little allowing them to join the guides in the relative shelter of one of the tents. But the storm soon rose again and all four guides were forced to hold the posts in position lest they topple and the whole tent be blown away with them inside. On two occasions when the wind relented the guides made a dash to their store tent to fetch provisions. Even though it was only a distance of 16 feet they could not make the journey without clinging onto a rock halfway to stop themselves being blown over the edge. They hung there ‘for two or three minutes while the wind blew their clothes over their heads and hailstones battered their bodies, before daring at last to resume their mission’.10 At about 7.00 a.m.,
continuous hail and thunder were added to the storm; one flash struck so near us that we heard distinctly a spark slide hissing down the wet canvas of the tent just behind the place occupied by my son. The air was so full of electricity that directly I put only the point of my electrometer outside the tent the bubbles separated as far as the threads would allow them, and at almost every explosion of thunder the electricity changed from positive to negative or vice versa.11
Towards midday on 4 July the storm blew itself out. They emerged from their twenty-four-hour ordeal badly shaken but with renewed confidence. Flimsy as their tents were, they had been sufficient to protect them from nature’s worst and Saussure was relieved to know that he would be able to complete his stay however bad the weather.
In his letters to the valley, Saussure painted a rosy picture of life on the Col. ‘I never felt in better health,’ he reassured his wife. ‘I slept last night in my tent, which had frozen after the rain, so that the canvas crackled like a bracelet, yet I have not had the least indisposition or cold.’12 In another: ‘I am writing to you in the silence of the night; all my companions are asleep, while I, shut up in my tent, buried in my furs, [have] my feet on a hot stone … I have just been out to take my observations. What a glorious night!’13 In another: ‘One would think we lived in a forge; as the coal will only burn when blown, our bellows are extremely exhausted and husky. Our guides, who are also ravenous, seize the stove as soon as we have done with it, so that one constantly hears their bellows mixed with the noise of the snow and rock avalanches all around us. We are perfectly sheltered from them; it is one of the chief amusements of [our son] and the guides to set rolling great boulders which, falling on the frozen slopes, produce really magnificent torrents of stones and snow.’14
The more glamorous descriptions he sent his wife were later inserted in his journal. But when the book was published, he filled in the details he had felt it prudent to omit. Every day at 5.00 p.m., no matter how good the weather, a bitter wind came from the north-west accompanied by snow and hail that made life ‘extremely bothersome. The warmest clothes - even furs - could not protect us: we could scarcely light a fire in our tents; and the hut… was hardly warmed at all by our little stoves; the coal only smouldered without the use of bellows and if, finally, we managed to warm our feet and calves our bodies remained constantly frozen thanks to the wind which blew through the hut.’15 They had to battle the cold for five hours before the wind dropped at 10.00 p.m.
As the days wore on the delightful shelter became ‘notre miserable petite cabane,’ and Saussure crept into the tent for warmth. Hail and sleet battered them and the gales were capricious. At one moment the tent’s guy ropes were stretched to their limit; the next they would be hanging limp; and then, without warning, they would be thrumming with a noise like thunder. In Courmayeur, meanwhile, the villagers were suffering a drought. Its obvious cause was the wizards who had set up camp on the Col du Géant. A posse of strong men was put on standby to bring them down by force.
Saussure’s ordeal - and Courmayeur’s - came to an end thanks to his guides. For a fortnight they had toiled downhill with Saussure’s letters and uphill with loads of coal and food. Their employer’s discomfort was nothing compared to theirs and they did not have the meagre satisfaction of taking observations. Balmat, who probably resented his role as courier, took increasingly long to deliver Saussure’s letters and on one occasion vanished for a week in order to have his portrait painted. Then, on 20 July, Saussure awoke to find that his food supply had run out. It had been gorged by the guides. Horrified by his delight at a particularly beautiful evening, and fearful that he might extend his stay, they had seen deprivation as the only way of driving him back to the valleys. He gave in with good grace and descended to Courmayeur, dizzy from lack of sustenance yet tingling with excitement. His observations had been ground-breaking, even if they led to no scientific breakthrough; paramount, however, was the glow he experienced at having survived for so long at such an altitude and the emotional impact which his stay had had upon him. In his own words he had been a ‘neighbour of heaven’.16
The first great push at the Alps had ended. After his triumphs on Mont Blanc and the Col du Géant, Saussure extended his researches into the Swiss cantons. He went to the Oberland village of Grindelwald, where he saw the Jungfrau, the immense wall of the Wetterhorn, the precipitous Eiger, and the Schreckhorn - the so-called Teak of Terror’, then reputedly the next highest Alp after Mont Blanc. In 1789 he explored an undiscovered valley below the Lyssjoch and announced that it did not contain civilisations from a lost age, as the Journal de Paris had suggested. He went to Zermatt in the Valais, where he climbed the lower peaks of Monte Rosa and peered at the terrifying rock known as Mont Cervin, or the Matterhorn, of which he remarked only that it looked like a blunted pyramid and, on seeing a river running though Zermatt, wondered where the Matterhorn’s debris was washed to. But nothing equalled his two sensational climbs from Chamonix.
Saussure retired to Geneva, his health badly affected by his mountaineering activities - just as his wife had feared. From a mansion, which Bourrit described as without doubt the finest in town, he devoted himself to politics and an unavailing attempt to have geography included in the national curriculum. Eminent people came to visit him and to marvel at his collection of specimens which comprised not only a vast array of rocks but rooms of stuffed birds, sheets of pinned butterflies and a series of fossils that included ‘the upper jaw of some species of large crocodile, and a string of elephant bones’ as well as a few hippo teeth. His library was ‘the biggest and best in private hands’.17
Saussure’s retirement was disrupted by the French Revolution of 1789. In ten years’ time the Revolution would have its foot in the door of every neighbouring state - if it wasn’t breaking the door down -and the Alpine regions were no less vulnerable than any other. Its immediate effect, however, was to render him bankrupt. Most of his investments had been in France and by 1793 they were worthless. His wife wrote to her sons, currently studying in England, that ‘you must look out for a travelling tutorship, or a wealthy bride; if these fail we shall have to live in our old stuffs and our old green tapestries, with a little maid in a black cap’.18 Saussure toyed for a while with emigration. Britain, for example, was offering a very attractive package to disaffected Swiss, its Parliament having voted £50,000 for the creation of a New Geneva in Ireland. This model town sited near Waterford was to be built to the finest specifications and, for the benefit of Swiss watchmakers, was to have its own, competitive gold standard.* By 1794 all ideas of travel had to be dropped. For in that year Geneva adopted a radical constitution modelled on that of France, and Saussure had a stroke. The diaries in which he had so precisely annotated his Alpine journeys now took a different slant: ‘weaker and thinner’ - ‘legs giving way’ - ‘writing difficult’.19 Instead of visiting the peaks he frequented the spas in a fruitless quest for a cure. He searched for a job, anything ‘which would allow me to put aside some five or six hundred louis a year’,20 but it was not forthcoming. He was offered a post as a teacher of Chemistry and Physics in Paris but could not afford the journey and was besides too weak. His wife wrote a romance to try and bring in some money, but although Saussure wept every time she read it aloud it was an ineffective thing. As a friend said, ‘In effect to write romances is to be in the local fashion. There is no one who cannot draw from his or her pocket a manuscript sufficient to meet the occasion.’21
Saussure tried to elaborate what he described as a ‘Theory of the Earth’ but constrained by ill health and his religious beliefs he managed no more than an outline. (It was a sketchy affair that laid down the precepts of geological investigation but dared not break with the Bible.) He spent his last years preparing the final volumes of Voyages for press. He died in 1798, two years after they came out and the same year in which France annexed Geneva. The final editing was left to his son Théodore who preserved Saussure’s most memorable utterance in its entirety: ‘Placed on this planet since yesterday, and only for a day, we can only hope to glimpse the knowledge that we will probably never attain.’22