Eighteen twenty-seven was an interesting year. It was the year in which Fellows opened a new route to the top of Mont Blanc. It was the year in which a Scot named John Auldjo followed the new route and on lighting his pipe made the discovery that ‘the rarity of the air rendered the scent of tobacco so powerful and disagreeable that I was obliged to desist’.1 This finding was ‘of profound interest’ according to an early nineteenth-century chronicler and earned Auldjo ‘the gold medal of civil merit from the late King of Prussia, an autograph letter of approval from the ex-King of Bavaria, and the gift of a valuable diamond ring from the King of Sardinia’.2 Eighteen twenty-seven was also the year in which Paccard wrote the last entry in his diary of Mont Blanc. It was typically curt: ‘Mr. Auldjo, English, arrived at the summit on the ninth [August] at 11 a.m., left again at 11.40, and returned to Chamonix at 8 p.m.’3
Paccard died before the year was out. Of the first heroes of Mont Blanc there now remained only Jacques Balmat, and he would go soon. Over the decades Paccard had resided magisterially in Chamonix, offering his barometers and thermometers to those who wanted to follow in his footsteps to the summit. He had been the point of first call for many visitors and in particular for those who wished to climb Europe’s highest mountain. During the 1820s, however, he must have felt a sense of disappointment. More often than not his instruments were broken or left unused. Clissold had been so depressingly bold as to reject them altogether, as had Auldjo, who stated that ‘I did not much regret the want of them, not professing to make my ascent for any scientific purpose, feeling that I could add very little to the stock of existing knowledge.’4 Paccard represented an age that did not exist any more. Mont Blanc was no longer a mystery. Chamonix was no longer a quaint hamlet where travellers stayed with the curé. The Alps were no longer the home of dragons -as far as anybody could ascertain, at any rate. In Paccard’s youth, science had been all. That thin membrane of academe was now punctured at regular intervals by climbers who went up Mont Blanc for the most unscientific of reasons. Matzewski, for example, had wanted to enhance his poetic skills (the first account of his climb was contained in a lengthy footnote to a poem titled ‘Maria’); Rensselear had done it for the hell of it; Auldjo had wanted to get a better view of the mountain’s reflection in a lake. Little better were the impulses that spurred subsequent climbers: in 1830 the Hon. Edward Bootle Wilbraham, an army colonel, climbed Mont Blanc because he had been told not to; in 1834 Dr Martin Barry, a Quaker, went up it to broaden his horizons; in the same year Comte Henri de Tilly was depressed by a recent love affair and thought a bit of exercise would do him good; in 1837 H. M. Atkins, a 19-year-old English boy, just wanted something to do; and in 1838 Comtesse Henriette D’Angeville climbed Mont Blanc in men’s clothes to prove that she was the equal of George Sand (to make her point she was hoisted onto her guides’ shoulders at the summit, thereby reaching a higher altitude than any other human being). Not without reason did Murray’s guide of 1851 state that ‘It is a somewhat remarkable fact that a large proportion of those who have made this ascent have been persons of unsound mind.’5 Then there were the dreadful Englishmen who swarmed across the lower slopes in their costumes.
In short, 1827 was the year in which the Alps established themselves beyond redemption as a destination for tourists. The roads were now better than they had ever been - thanks largely to Napoleon - steamboats puttered across the lakes, and it would not be very long before the first railway was driven into the mountains. Over the following decades thousands of Britons came to marvel at the wonders of ‘Switzerland’ - a catch-all word used to describe not only Switzerland but any area of France, Savoy, Piedmont or Italy that contained mountains. They came for the baths, the glaciers, the views and the mountains. They came for the exercise, the climate and the company. They came in hope of finding Byron’s signature on a wall (hoteliers were ever happy to oblige). They came in hope of stealing famous autographs from hotel ledgers (again, their hosts were at hand; as soon as a page was removed it would be replaced with another bearing the same comments and signature of the famous person who had never been there in the first place). They came in hope of finding a spa cure for whatever ailed them - ‘those at least of the bilious, dyspeptic, hypochondriac, pill-taking class,’6 as one doctor dismissed them. And they came because the Alps had become an England overseas.
In Geneva it was impossible to escape the sound of English. The Young Switzerland Society adopted the tune of ‘God Save the King’ as its national anthem. The best hotels laid on a table d’hote at 1.00 p.m. and then two more at 5.00 and 8.00 expressly for the English. Many Britons set up home there, starting a trend that would continue throughout the century. Among the settlers was a genteel couple named Arbuthnot. When Mrs Arbuthnot was struck and killed by lightning, the drama attracted hundreds of British pilgrims. Eventually, a memorial had to be erected. Less romantic but no less typical was Lord Vernon who took Swiss citizenship so as to be eligible for the Basle shooting competition and announced that he would never leave the country until he had won it.
The British liked to go on walking tours and took pride in the fact that they could travel light. ‘A healthy and robust pedestrian traveller … need carry with him only one package, and this in the shape of a water-proof knapsack of moderate size,’ wrote an enthusiast.7 They took with them a change of light clothes and wore small-crowned, wide-brimmed wideawakes on their heads. The cannier among them packed bars of Windsor soap - ‘it is rarely to be met with in the inns’.8 They walked, rode and steamed through the Alps. Occasionally they climbed some of the lower peaks, an achievement which sent them into ecstasies.
‘I can but ill describe what I felt, but I know I felt vividly and strongly,’ wrote one man who climbed the no-account Riffelberg from Zermatt and saw the majestic circle of peaks around him. ‘Sitting up there in mid-heaven as it were, on the smooth, warm ledge of our rock … under a sky of the richest blue, and either cloudless or only here and there gemmed with those aerial and sunbright clouds which but enhance its depth … we seemed to feel as if there could be no other mental mood but that of an exquisite yet cheerful serenity - a sort of delicious abstraction or absorption of our powers, in one grand, vague, yet most luxurious perception of Beauty and Loveliness. At another time - nay, it would almost seem at the same time, so rapid was the alternation from mood to mood - the immeasurable vastness of the scene … the utter silence, and the absence of every indication of life and living things … would excite a tone of mind entirely different - solemn, awful, melancholy.’9 When he let his mind wander the peaks became ‘an awful circle of Titanic Sphynxes’.
Not all the tourists came from Britain, and not all of them were so religiously appreciative of Alpine splendour. On 5 June 1832 Alexandre Dumas attended a funeral in Paris. A few days later he read in the papers that he had been party to a bloody riot in the capital and had been shot, gun in hand, on 6 June. This, coupled with the fact that Paris was in the middle of a cholera epidemic, drove him to the Alps. He had a lively time, during which he interviewed Balmat of Mont Blanc, ate what appeared to be a roast infant but which turned out to be a marmot, was flooded out of one hotel, smoked out the upper floors of another, attended a trial in which live bears were brought as witnesses, and acted as second in a duel between a Frenchman and an Englishman. This last had come about because the Frenchman could not stand the Englishman’s behaviour at dinner and so threw a bread roll at him. The Englishman promptly hit him on the head with a bottle of wine. They therefore met the next morning to settle their differences with pistols. The Englishman, who was a renowned shot, fired first. The Frenchman walked towards him. The Englishman fired again. The Frenchman kept on coming. Dumas intervened, and begged the Frenchman to fire into the air. ‘It is all very well for you to talk,’ said the Frenchman, revealing two holes in his chest. He then strode forward, put his pistol to the Englishman’s head and pulled the trigger. Dumas went home shortly aterwards, rather upset, and with little more to say about the Alps’ beauties.
More explicitly, in 1837 an exiled French count wrote a description of his stay at the Swiss resort of Interlaken:
Early in the morning one is awakened by the noise of a cavalcade getting ready for an excursion to the Staubbach or to Grindelwald. Five or six young women on horseback wait while a couple of matrons are hoisted onto donkeys, to cast an air of propriety over the party. A dozen beaux in blouses with long spiked sticks carried as lances curvet round the caravan on their mounts. After much talking, screaming and shouting, and when it is quite certain that nobody has been left undisturbed in the village, they move off in confusion. When the weather is fine, the evening is devoted to walks. But when it rains, it is impossible to escape the torture of hearing detestable music performed by amateurs who take possession of a piano, and murder the pieces which were the rage of Paris during the preceding winter.10
In his opinion, people came to Switzerland ‘out of pride, fashion, and having nothing better to do; only rarely out of real curiosity … one is bored before the tour is half over, and one only finishes it so as not to retrace one’s steps’.11
Less bilious but equally critical were the reports of a Genevan teacher named Rudolf Töppfer who led an international brigade of schoolchildren through the Alps between 1830 and 1842. His excursions were magnificently shambolic and moved relentlessly from one mishap to the next. He recorded them humorously, but could not hide his dissatisfaction with the area. He found the inns poor, he found the customs officers corrupt, he found the English frankly bizarre, he found the steamers unnerving, he found the tolls extortionate and on the Great St Bernard Pass he found a mouse in his umbrella. He was prone to giddy spells and took no delight in climbing steep hills: ‘the heart thumps, the head goes round, the legs shake, and, incapable of going forwards or back, of sitting down or standing up, the most self-assured grenadier in the world is changed into a lump from which one hears, “Come and get me out, come very quickly and get me out!” Ah, the horrid moments! Ah, the detestable recreation!’12
Enthusiastic or not, energetic or less so, tourists were now the main category of visitors to the Alps. There were, however, some who still saw the Alps as objects of scientific interest. They were not drawn, as had been Saussure and others, to the peaks. What attracted them were the glaciers. How were they formed? Why and how fast did they move? What caused the moraines that accumulated at their edges and in their middles? Why did they advance and retreat so inexplicably? More importantly, did they have anything to do with so-called ‘erratic’ rocks, those boulders, alien to the landscape in which they sat, which could be encountered in puzzling lines throughout northern Europe and were concentrated particularly heavily in Switzerland? Various solutions had been offered to most of these problems. Glaciers were formed by a build-up of snow that compacted into ice at high altitude - fine. They moved because the heat of the earth’s crust melted the lower layers of a glacier allowing it to slide along like a snail - almost right. The ‘erratic’ rocks had been dropped by one or more floods that had swept the globe in earlier times; they had been tossed there by volcanic eruptions; or maybe they had been deposited by ‘ice rafts’, land versions of icebergs, that had been born in the hills and had then wallowed across country, carrying their boulders with them, before dying in a gigantic puddle - completely wrong.
Nowadays geology does not have a reputation for excitement. Back then, however, it was at the cutting edge. In a world where everything rested on the Bible, geology was the one philosophy - to use an archaic term - that dared question Genesis. The De Lucs had been among the first to suggest the possibility that rock formations, so visible in the Alps, offered a clue to Earth’s prehistory. Saussure, too, had pondered on the forces that created the Alps. Had they been compressed in some fashion or lifted up by an unknown subterranean energy? (He favoured the former, the De Lucs the latter.) All over Europe, a growing band of gentlemen amateurs were amassing fossil collections that not only indicated the existence of extinct species but provided evidence that the planet had undergone considerable climatic and topographical upheavals.
Orthodox, Bible-based reasoning did its best: fossils were remnants of those creatures which had not been carried on Noah’s Ark; the strange vertical rock strata visible in the Alps and other mountains resulted from whatever mechanism God had used to form the continents; and ‘erratic’ rocks were clearly the debris left by the Deluge. But there were so many holes in orthodox reasoning, so many inexplicable facts that simply could not be explained in biblical terms. When people like Saussure went tapping with their hammers through the Alps, each rock specimen that they retrieved, and then wrapped in the sheets of grey paper that were recommended for the purpose, contributed to an uncomfortable sensation that orthodox reasoning was wrong.
Among the doubters was a vicar’s son named Louis Agassiz, who was born on 28 May 1807 in Neuchâtel, a Swiss canton which, by some quirk of history, was part of Prussia. His family was not wealthy and by the time he was a teenager he had learned how to make his own shoes, tailor his own clothes and fashion a watertight barrel. He did, however, have a natural affinity for geology which earned him in 1832 the professorship of Natural History at the University of Neuchâtel. ‘Whatever befalls me,’ he wrote, ‘I feel that I shall never cease to consecrate my whole energy to the study of nature; its all powerful charm has taken such possession of me that I shall always sacrifice everything to it; even the things which men usually value most.’13 He did sacrifice everything - his own money, his wife’s, the university’s - and by the 1830s employed a twelve-man research team, an artist and a fossil collector, whose findings were published by the twenty employees of his own private printing press. His speciality was ‘Fossil Fishes’, which were so easily chiselled from the Alps and whose remains were one of the first, most disturbing signs of a non-biblical prehistory. He corresponded regularly on the subject with his friend Baron Alexander von Humboldt, one of the most influential explorer-scientists of the early nineteenth century. The study of ‘Fossil Fishes’ obsessed him - colleagues in England called him the ‘famous foreign fishmonger’14 - and it was a topic that he turned to annually when asked to address Neuchâtel’s Helvetic Association, a forum that he had set up to discuss matters pertaining to geology. Old bones would have been the stuff of Agassiz’s existence had not a friend, Jean de Charpentier, asked him in 1836 to come and inspect a glacier in Bex, Switzerland.
Since the beginning of the century a few, isolated individuals had suggested that the only natural force capable of transporting erratic boulders was a glacier. Britain’s Professor John Playfair had proposed the notion in 1802 and it had been seconded by Sir John Leslie in 1804. In later years it received support not only from men of science but from those of relatively humble origins. Jean-Pierre Perraudin, a chamois-hunter from Lourtier, and Marie Deville, a Chamonix guide, both agreed with the theory; so did peasants in places such as Meiringen, Yverdon and Val Ferret. Charpentier had stayed with Perraudin in 1815 and on hearing his host’s theory had decided it ‘was too fantastic to be worthy of serious consideration’.15 As the idea gained ground, however, Charpentier concluded that some serious work must be done to set it to rest - particularly as one of his best friends had become a convert, an engineer named Venetz who had been responsible for the Bagnes sluice. Through the late 1820s and 1830s Charpentier made a detailed study of the erratic rocks that littered the Swiss lowlands and was dismayed to find that glaciers did, indeed, seem the most likely agent. He wanted to share the news with a colleague and so, in 1836, Agassiz found himself at Bex.
Agassiz was as much a doubter as Charpentier had been. But when he saw the evidence and heard Charpentier’s reasoning, he accepted the theory in its entirety. In fact, the only fault he could find was that it was too limited. For Agassiz the visit to Bex was a road to Damascus: in one of those rare moments that dot scientific history, everything became clear; he suddenly realised that the entire European landscape had been moulded by glaciers.
In the summer of 1837 the students of Neuchâtel gathered at the Helvetic Association to hear the usual sermon on ‘Fossil Fishes’. To their astonishment Agassiz started talking about glaciers. He postulated that ice had once been omnipresent, covering the earth from the North Pole to Central Europe. It had killed numerous life forms and had carved the landscape into its recognisable shape. The debris it left was visible in any mountain valley in the form of lateral moraines -the rocks which are carried on a glacier’s edge - and terminal moraines - the rocks which a glacier deposits at its snout; central moraines came into being at the Y-junction of two intersecting glaciers. This was so radical as to defy belief. The distinguished geologist Leopold von Buch ran from the room crying ‘O sancte de Saussure, ora pro nobis!’16 Similar scenes occurred elsewhere. ‘Agassiz joined us at Dublin, and read a long paper at our section,’ wrote the Revd Adam Sedgwick of the British Association. ‘But what think you? Instead of teaching us what we wanted to know, and giving us the overflowing of his abundant ichthyological wealth, he read a long and stupid hypothetical dissertation on geology, drawn from the depths of his ignorance … I hope we shall before long be able to get this moonshine out of his head.’17 But the moonshine was firmly rooted, and it flourished, to the upset of Europe’s learned bodies. ‘Once grant to Agassiz that his deepest valleys of Switzerland … were once filled with snow and ice, and I see no stopping place,’18 roared Sir Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society. Using the most friendly language, Humboldt advised Agassiz to stick to ‘Fossil Fishes’.
Agassiz did not care. The following year he visited the Alps with his journalist friend Édouard Desor and in 1840 he pitched camp on a glacier in order to refine his theories. The spot he chose was an overhanging rock halfway down the central moraine of the Unteraar Glacier in the Bernese Oberland. A stone wall was erected beneath the overhang, the floor was levelled with flat slabs, and a curtain was hung across the entrance. A niche outside served as a kitchen and a small hole beneath a boulder was used as a larder. Supplies were brought regularly from the nearby hospice of Grimsel. It slept six and became known as the Hôtel des Neuchâtelois. Its first inhabitants were Agassiz, Desor and four fellow scientists: Charles Vogt, Célestin Nicolet, Henri Coulon and François de Pourtales, a 17-year-old pupil from Neuchâtel University.
The gang of six were equipped with a host of scientific instruments - barometers, thermometers, hygrometers, hypsometers and microscopes - as well as a device for boring holes in the glacier. Agassiz organised their responsibilities with care. He and Pourtales were in charge of meteorological observations and taking the temperature of the glacier at various depths; Vogt was ordered to investigate red snow, a bewildering phenomenon that had been noted in the Arctic as well as the Alps; Nicolet was allocated the flora to be found on the glacier and its surrounding rocks; Desor and Coulon were told to study glacial attributes in their widest sense, including moraines and the movement of rocks.
They triangulated the positions of eighteen large rocks resting on the glacier and recorded their movements through the seasons. They measured the annual rate of melt. They drove stakes across the glacier to gauge the speed at which it moved. They poured coloured water onto its surface and dug holes into crevasse walls to see how quickly the dye found its way through the glacier’s capillary fissures. And during that year and subsequent ones they climbed all the nearby hills - the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn among them - to get a better picture of the dragon they were dealing with.
For five years, winters excepting, Agassiz lived on the ice. The Hôtel des Neuchâtelois drew scientists and tourists from all over Europe, who were each season rewarded by some novel discovery. In 1841, for example, Agassiz decided to drill down to the bottom of the glacier in order to study striations in the ice. These layers, alternating between clear frozen blue and a frothy white filled with air bubbles, had been brought to his attention by James Forbes, an Edinburgh professor who had visited the Hôtel that August. They were a puzzle that Agassiz wanted to solve. Accordingly, the bore having been sunk, he went down it sitting on a narrow length of plank roped to a tripod above. Desor directed operations, leaning over the hole to catch Agassiz’s instructions as they echoed up the shaft. At 80 feet Agassiz encountered a block of ice that divided the shaft into two channels, one wide and one narrow. He chose the wider opening only to find himself faced with a maze of tunnels that led into the very bowels of the glacier. Shouting up to Desor, he was hauled back to the split and then lowered into the narrower channel. Down he went, on his board, past insecure stalactites of ice that theatened at any moment to fall on his head. The layers grew less and less distinct and he was so involved with them that he did not notice, until he was at a depth of 125 feet, that his legs were in freezing water. He yelled up to Desor who mistook his instructions and let out more rope. It took a second cry before Agassiz was rescued, sodden and freezing, from his hole. This was the most dangerous experiment Agassiz ever attempted and one that he described as ‘a descent to hell’. He swore never to repeat it: ‘Had I known all its dangers perhaps I should not have started on such an adventure. Certainly, unless induced by some powerful scientific motive, I should not advise any one to follow my example.’19
Michael Faraday, the electrical pioneer, came to see Agassiz at work, but had no heart for the ice and got no farther than Grimsel. The teacher Rudolf Töpffer was also deterred by the glacier but he met Desor at Grimsel and wrote excitedly that ‘they are sinking a pit already 60 feet deep: that glaciers have fleas of their own, like cooks and dogs: and that red snow owes its colour to insects with crimson stomachs’.20 (Nicolet had indeed found a species of insect that he named the glacier flea; the red snow, however, was caused by microscopic plant life.) More daring were two young British lords, who reached the Hôtel with the intention of using it as a shooting box, and Mr and Mrs Cowan of Edinburgh who arrived in a sedan chair with eleven guides under the impression that the Hôtel really was a hotel. The most important visitor of that season, however, was James Forbes, who was making his own scientific tour of the Alps.
‘I here willingly record that I shall never forget the charm of those savage scenes,’ Forbes wrote of his stay at the Hôtel. ‘The varying effects of sunshine, cloud, and a storm upon the sky, the mountains, and the glacier; the rosy tints of sunset, the cold hues of moonlight, on a scene which included no trace of animation, and of which our party were the sole spectators.’21 Himself a glacial expert of some standing, he was professionally at odds with Agassiz and stated that ‘a multitude of interesting facts had hitherto been overlooked by me … Animated and always friendly discussions were the result; and, without admitting in every case the deductions of my zealous and energetic instructor, I readily allowed their ingenuity.’22 This was a tactful way of saying that a scientific squabble was brewing. For the moment, however, Forbes was enjoying himself too much to develop the matter. The scenery was beautiful, there were endless new things to study, the company was good and he smoked the first cigar of his life.
The weather was generally fine, and if a storm blew up they simply repaired to the hospice at Grimsel and contined their discussions around a roaring fire. On one such occasion Forbes wrote a brief portrait of the group:
M. Agassiz, cheerful, kind, and frank, not much disposed to active exertion within doors, but always ready to contribute to the cheerful companionship of a party, the chief of which he justly considers himself. Dr. Voght, a laughter-loving, and withal shrewd young man of twenty-three, a true German in complexion, phlegm and habits … M. Desor, a Frenchman by birth … and the journalist of the expedition: like all journalists placed in rather a difficult and dubious position, from which even a certain share of natural quickness and French vivacity did not serve wholly to extricate him. M. Burckhardt, the artist of our Agassian Club, a shrewd sensible man with a sly smile and some dry humour, often successfully used in rebutting the sallies of M. Desor.23
At times the hospice bulged with thirty or forty guests, but ‘all went on smoothly, cheerfully and without annoyance or a single unkind or hasty word … Many and pleasant were the evenings we thus spent!’24 Forbes arrived at the Hôtel on 8 August and after a fortnight of scientific heaven he regretfully announced that he would have to continue his tour. He had several other glaciers to explore and the season was drawing to a close. Full of bonhomie, Agassiz said he would accompany him part of the way - and why not climb the Jungfrau while they were at it?
The chain of mountains at the foot of which the Hôtel des Neuchâtelois lay was renowned not only for its beauty but its impenetrability. The north faces of peaks such as the Finsteraarhorn, the Eiger and the Jungfrau comprised cliffs of granite. To the south, however, they shed glaciers that could be climbed in the traditional fashion with ropes, crampons and ladders. Of all these hills the Jungfrau was deemed the most aesthetically pleasing. It was also the most contentious. It had first been climbed in 1811 by members of the local Meyer family. Nobody believed they had done it and so they repeated the climb in 1812 and this time planted a flag on the top which was seen from all around. Still people did not believe them, and the guides said that if a flag happened to have been spied from below, and if it was on the summit, then it had been planted by them and not the Meyers. From this confusing record, and the fact that in 1828 a scientist named Baumann reached the top without controversy, it can be seen that the Jungfrau’s conquest was awarded on a rather arbitrary basis.
Forbes and Agassiz, who took their own guides, had a hard journey ahead of them. It involved a twelve-hour hike across several glaciers before they were even in a position to start the ascent. Success rested on picking up a ladder for crossing crevasses, which had been hidden at Märjelen, at the base of the Jungfrau, by an expedition of 1832. Forbes was physically in bad shape, having sprained his ankle when he slipped into a crevasse a week before. They set off from Grimsel at 5.00 a.m. on 27 August 1841, to Forbes’s mingled delight and apprehension.
As we walked down the slope from the hospice, the less bright stars were vanishing before the dawn, and we thought the situation had never before appeared half so romantic. Scarce a word passed in our numerous company for two hours … Each was occupied with his own thoughts of how the expedition might end - which of the objects proposed he might attain -and probably all felt that they were engaging in an enterprise of some danger as well as labour, voluntarily, and on their individual responsibility - a thought which affects for a moment even the most volatile.25
The party of twelve - six guides and six scientists - marched through rock, snow and ice, each different terrain leaving its impression in Forbes’s journal. He was particularly impressed by the Vietsch Glacier, of which he wrote: ‘Red snow was here very abundant; its colour comes out by trampling; our course was marked by footsteps of blood.’26 On reaching their base camp at the chalets of Märjelen they found the ladder had been stolen so a guide was despatched to the valley to recover it. He returned empty-handed and was sent back with such a barrage of threats that the thief returned the stolen property and they were able to continue. The ladder was 24 feet long and the guide handled it single-handedly with an ease that astonished them. Taking advantage of the delay to sleep for a full twelve hours, they set out again at 6.00 on the morning of 28 August.
The Jungfrau has two main peaks, one a few feet higher than the other. It was the lower of the two that Forbes and Agassiz were aiming for. It was an unexceptional climb save that at the top of the last glacier they met a crevasse of unfathomable depth, over which bulged a near-vertical slope of ice leading to the lower summit. The ladder came into play. Its 24-foot length was just enough to bridge the gap and the guides scrambled up it to chip footholds in the ice above. They then drove an alpenstock into the slope and roped it to the ladder, thereby forming a makeshift balustrade. Even with this aid, however, the prospect of climbing such a terrifying cliff was too much for some. Four of the party refused point blank to attempt it, leaving Forbes, Agassiz, Desor, and five others to continue on their own.
Suddenly, the climb changed character. This was no stolid progression in the Mont Blanc mould, in which tents, barometers and food enough to feed an army were the norm. Instead, it was a perilous hack up inclines that were never less than 43° and sometimes as steep as 60° in which there was only the individual and the mountain. The scientists acquitted themselves respectably, but the experience unnerved them. As Forbes pecked his way up the slope, following the steps which the guides had cut, and constantly aware of the drop below him, he started to despair. ‘Our position seemed rather frightful, hanging thus on a slope of unbroken slippery ice, steep as a cathedral roof … with precipices at the bottom of the slope of an unknown and dizzy depth.’27 The higher they climbed the more frightful it seemed. ‘We were surrounded with mist,’ Forbes wrote, ‘so that we occasionally only saw our immediate position, suspended thus, in the middle of the frozen mountain, from which it really appeared as if a gust of wind might have detached our whole party.’28 When they reached the lower summit an even ghastlier prospect awaited them. To reach the top, to get that little bit higher, they had to cross a long ridge of snow. The ridge was the stuff of nightmares, a knife-edge that dropped hundreds of feet to cliffs on either side. Very carefully, the chief guide lowered himself belly-first onto it and dug his alpenstock into one side; then, teetering on the brink, he dug footholds on the other side. In this manner he slowly inched his way across, and equally slowly his charges followed him.
They finally reached the summit at 4.00 p.m. on 28 August. It was so giddying as to take their breath away. The Jungfrau was not like Mont Blanc, where tens of people could loiter with their scientific instruments - which, interestingly, Agassiz and Forbes had not taken, save for a thermometer. It was a true pinnacle, so pointy as to be near unsurmountable. It was, ‘in form almost like a bee-hive of snow piled up, and so small that even when smoothed over and trodden down, scarcely afforded footing for more than one person at a time’.29 They had to be helped up by their guide, one by one, in order to savour their achievement. The mist had now vanished and the view was magnificent. ‘I remained but a few minutes on the summit,’ wrote Desor, ‘but it was long enough to make me certain that the view from the Jungfrau would never fade from my memory. After having carefully inspected the most striking aspects of this unique landscape, I hastened towards Agassiz, for I rather dreaded that such an overwhelming emotion would deprive me of my usual composure and I needed to feel the grasp of a friend’s hand … I think we should both have wept, had we not felt shy.’30 What awed Forbes more even than the view was the looming presence to one side of a gigantic pile of cumulus, fully 10,000 feet high, whose top was 2,000 feet above their own position. He had never been this close to a cloud, and as it moved closer he swore that he could see crystals of ice glittering in its depths.
They planted a flag, and stayed there for half an hour, despite a thermometer that read 6°F below freezing. Then they began their descent. Back they went over the terrifying ridge, the equally terrifying ice slope and the ladder beneath it. During this time they enjoyed full sunshine. But once they rejoined their companions, night had fallen. Roped together, on the guides’ insistence, they made their way through the glaciers by moonlight. In the early hours they heard a distant yodel from across the mountainside. It was a farmer who had been sent up to save them with a bucket of warm milk. The milk was by now cold, but they lapped it up all the same and then ‘pursued our way unbound down the glacier with great elasticity, by a splendid moonlight brilliancy, reflected by the crystallised surface of the ice’.31
They reached Märjelen at 11.30 p.m. They had been walking and climbing for seventeen and a half hours without rest but were ‘by no means over-fatigued’.32 As for Forbes’s twisted ankle: ‘I will only add here that the ascent of the Jungfrau proved a sovereign remedy for the sprain.’33 These extraordinary statements might seem an exaggeration were it not for the fact that they all rose early the following morning, Forbes to spend fourteen days at the north foot of Monte Rosa and Agassiz to walk back to Unteraar with his friends. Their ascent had a sour coda. In 1843 Forbes revisited the region and heard the climb being discussed in an inn. In traditional Jungfrau fashion, everybody agreed that he had not reached the top.
Meanwhile, Agassiz’s glacial theories were gaining ground. ‘You have made all the geologists glacier-mad around here/wrote a British marine biologist, ‘and they are turning Great Britain into an ice-house. Some amusing and very absurd attempts at opposition to your views have been made by one or two pseudo-geologists.’34 That year Agassiz went on what he called a ‘glacier hunt’ through Scotland, North Wales and the north of England, and at every turn he found ancient moraines that proved his point. Charles Darwin, whose theories on evolution would soon become current, was deeply impressed. On visiting several specimens of what he called ‘extinct glaciers’ he announced that ‘they have given me more delight than I almost remember to have experienced since I first saw an extinct volcano’.35
In 1842 Agassiz’s Hôtel began to disintegrate so he moved into a three-room cabin, framed in wood and covered by canvas. One room was set aside for his guides, another for himself and his friends, and the third was used as a dining room, sitting room and laboratory. There were shelves for books, pegs for coats, a table, two benches and a couple of chairs for any important guests who might stop by. They nicknamed it ‘The Ark’. Settled in these relatively comfortable quarters, Agassiz made a number of novel observations. Seeing the way the ice sometimes cracked in crescents, the bulge of which pointed uphill, he came to the conclusion that glaciers moved faster at their sides than at the centre. He also expanded upon a theory of glacial movement which had first been suggested by Scheuchzer -the so-called dilatation theory. According to Agassiz, glaciers remained dormant in winter and then sprang into action during the summer months when they began to melt. The surface water flowed into capillary fissures within the glacier and then froze at night. As the water turned to ice it expanded; and in doing so it squeezed the glacier downhill. He had proof that these capillary fissures existed because he had tested them the previous year with Forbes. They had dug a hole into the side of a crevasse and then poured dye onto the surface above. It wasn’t actually dye because they had none, but Agassiz had sacrificed a couple of bottles of wine for the experiment, and it seemed to do the job, trickling obligingly onto the heads of the observers below.
Agassiz also wanted to witness the creation of a crevasse. He was rewarded on the afternoon of 7 August 1842.
I heard at a little distance a sound like the simultaneous discharge of fire-arms; hurrying in the direction of the noise, it was repeated under my feet with a movement like that of a slight earthquake; the ground seemed to shift and give way under me, but now the sound differed from the preceding, and resembled a crumbling of rocks, without, however, any perceptible sinking of the surface. The glacier actually trembled, nevertheless, for a block of granite three feet in diameter perched on a pedestal two feet high, suddenly fell down. At the same instant a crack opened between my feet and ran rapidly across the glacier in a straight line.36
He saw three more such cracks form in the next hour and a half and heard others elsewhere. By the time he went to bed eight new fissures had opened within a space of 125 feet and the splintering continued throughout the night. None of the infant crevasses was more than half an inch wide, but Agassiz reckoned they must be uncommonly deep because they drained a water-filled borehole that was 130 feet deep and six inches in diameter in a matter of minutes.
Agassiz also turned his attention to less dramatic concerns, such as the number of inexplicable half-moon depressions, or meridian holes, that covered the glacier. They invariably faced south, had a steep wall of ice at their upper side, a shallow one at the other, and contained a little heap of debris. After long examination he concluded that they were caused by small collections of dirt that had fallen onto the glacier and had then been warmed by the sun. Dark matter attracted heat, and as the sun was low in the morning, high at midday and low at dusk, the dirt would attract heat in similar measure. The resulting holes were, as Agassiz described them, ‘the sun-dials of the glacier’.
In all, 1842 was an exciting year for Agassiz and his team. They watched an eclipse of the sun from the summit of the Siedelhorn. They made an excursion to Nagerlisgratli and picked up several relics of the battle that had been fought there during the Napoleonic Wars. Desor climbed the Lauteraarhorn and another visitor, Johann Sulger, climbed the Finsteraarhorn. (Agassiz did not accompany them; after his previous exploits his mother had made him promise to abstain from further stunts.) The season ended on a high note. Several workmen had been employed to bore shafts through the ice and before they left they asked permission to bring some friends up to the ice. The guests arrived on a Saturday, and were forced by bad weather to spend the night. On Sunday, since there were so many people, Agassiz decided to hold a ball. A fiddler and a dulcimer player were hired from Oberwald, and from their arrival after Sunday Mass the musicians played their fingers out while the scientists, the guides, the workmen and their guests cavorted on the glacier. The dance floor was uneven, the musicians were mediocre, but when the party ended at sundown Desor announced he had never had a better time in his life.
By 1843 Agassiz’s keenness for ice work was wearing a little thin. The romantic Hôtel was gone; the cold was tiresome; and the diet was so unhealthy that he was in real danger of contracting scurvy. ‘The greatest privation is the lack of fruit and vegetables,’ he wrote to his friend the Prince of Canino. ‘Hardly a potato once a fortnight, but always and every day, morning and night, mutton everlasting mutton, and rice soup … What a contrast between this life and that of the plain.’37 In 1843 Agassiz spent less time than usual on the glacier -though the season was not without its moments: they made a nocturnal investigation of a glacial cave, lighting their way with a bowl of flaming eau de cologne; they slid down the glacier on a ladder, stopping at first at crevasses but, on finding that the ladder could leap over them, they tobogganed mercilessly; and Desor climbed more peaks while Agassiz remained obediently below. In 1844 Agassiz did not visit Unteraar at all, relying on others to take measurements and send their reports back to Neuchâtel. In 1845 a M. Dollfus-Ausset built his own hut on the glacier and the Neuchâtelois became his guests. In defiance of his mother Agassiz climbed the Wetterhorn, and Desor made the first ascent of the Galenstock. That was Agassiz’s last season on the ice. In 1846 he abandoned the Alps altogether for a more comfortable existence in America. He left behind him one of the most solid blocks of glacial research to date. He carried with him, however, the knowledge that almost every conclusion to which his research had led him was wrong. For this he was indebted to his friend, Professor James Forbes.