To Thomas Archer Hirst

My dear Tom

One of the best letters¹ you ever wrote to me reached me today. I have enclosed it to Debus, requesting him to hand it over to Wright, and him again to send it back to me as I intended it for still further circulation among your friends. To avoid all delay I sent, as soon as your letter reached me, the certificate² which you requested – I hope it will be what you wished it to be. Your account of your Houyhnhnm³ made me wish to be at your side there, and the description of your escape from the effects of that brute’s unstable equilibrium had something of romance in it. It is singular how such things befal. Regnault, as you are doubtless aware, fell some time ago⁴ upon his feet through a height of 90 feet and his life was dispaired of for a time. He is now recovering with extreme slowness. About the same time a little Irish boy fell⁵ from the top of one of the high houses in Hyde Park and escaped without a bruise. It would seem as if the gods extended an especial protection to some people under such circumstances. This is your second freak escape.⁶ I have not yet got properly to work as the molecules of my brain seem to require time to subside into London occupations. Before going to the Continent I wrote to Priddie⁷ concerning M^rs Booth,⁸ I have written to him again since my return, so that in my next letter I hope to be able to give you some information upon the subject. As Anna wishes it I will give you from time to time scraps from my journal. If I published any thing the journal of course would merely form the nucleus of my disquisition. I left London on the 12^th of August and went by Dieppe to Paris. I had agreed to meet Huxley at Basel on the 14^th, so I travelled as swiftly as possible and arrived just in time to see him in the corner of the diligence and to follow him in a beiwagen.⁹ At Berne we were joined by Hooker Mrs. Hooker and some of their friends, and we all travelled in jolly fashion to Interlaken together. Here we left Hooker (the Himmelayan traveller)¹⁰ and party, and Huxley Mrs Huxley and myself ascended the Wengern Alp.¹¹ We stayed the night at the hotel opposite the Jungfrau. My window was open and sometimes during the night the wind rose from perfect silence to a sigh, ascended to a moan of unearthly wilderness, and finished by blowing my hair into confusion, sinking afterwards into the same perfect silence as before. At 5 o’C I rose. The sun was hidden behind the Monk,¹² and his first beams had already smitten the peaked snow of the Silberhorn, converting it on one side into a pane of gold. I never saw any thing more beautiful. The white cone so high up in heaven, covered with snow of perfect purity, unsullied by a particle of dust or debris, rising higher & higher into the golden sunlight –, so silent and so solemn, helped by the contrast of the savage brown crags around it, formed an object never to be forgotten. Descended the valley towards the base of the mountain. An avelanche descended with the sound of thunder, sometimes continuous and sometimes broken into rounded explosions which seemed to assert a passionate predominance over the general tenor of the sound. The latter was like the magnified clamour of a railway train passing through a tunnel. Reached finally a secondary glacier formed from the snow which fell from the higher slopes of the Jungfrau. The view from this place down the valley has a savage magnificence which I have never seen surpassed. Clambered on the glacier with a feeling of timidity being ignorant of its structure and altogether unprepared with the weird and musical loneliness of the place. The ghostly rattle of the debris as it fell from the melting ice into the fissures made me start. One object of my journey was to examine the structure of the ice. Much has been written upon this subject especially by Forbes who first noted that it was striated and resembled slate rock. I observed the structure here for the first time, but as yet was much puzzled to account for it. Forbes’ explanation seemed to me wholly inadequate,¹³ but to supply a correct one was still a difficulty. The true nature of the avelanches first revealed itself to me this morning. It had puzzled me to conceive how mere snow could produce the thunder peals which announce the descent of an avelanche. This morning I learned that it was not snow but masses of solid ice which produced the noise. Once I noticed what seemed to me a sudden and enormous augmentation of the waters of a cascade which fell from the heights. In a moment I was informed by the sound that the increase was due to the descent of an avelanche which had chosen the track of the stream. From afterwards my eyes were fixed upon the snow resting on a slope perhaps 5000 feet above me: a kind of zig zag channel was cut into the almost perpendicular sides of the mountain and along this I saw the rush of an enormous avelanche. The thunder came some time after the motion was first seen: the moving mass was sometimes revealed, sometimes concealed by the sides of the channel through which it ran – sometimes it appeared shooting like a cataract down a height of 1000 feet. Some of the masses darted like inverted rockets with snowy trails in advance of the general mass: These were the solid larger lumps which had thus far escaped being shattered, and which in the resisting atmosphere moved forward. The thunder of this avelanche endured for several minutes.

Rain and thunder caught me in the valley, but it cleared up with magical speed; I returned to the hotel and although many prophets of evil promised us bad weather we pursued our journey. Crossed the summit and here our difficulties commenced. The road was steep at intervals, indeed sometimes so steep as to be formed into stairs down which the little donkey which bore Mrs Huxley had to pick its steps: she was totally unable to walk herself. Anxiety for her impaired our enjoyment but could not totally quench it. Wild masses of clouds smote the flanks of the great Eiger;¹⁴ before us one end of a splendid rainbow rested in the valley and beaming over the crags of the Matterhorn,¹⁵ seemed to clasp the mountain in its embrace. The sun which painted thus formed a flood of golden light a down the slopes of the Wengern Alp. Black pines, crowded here and there into the forest, anon broken into clusters, were interleaved with sunny slopes of the most lively green. The cows browsed and shook their mellow bells; chalets and patches of golden corn spotted the landscape. The ragged crags of the Eiger rose 10000 feet to the right. The peaks of the Matterhorn were in front with light on their summits, and gloom on their sides. The Jungfrau¹⁶ thundered in the rear his avalanches being brought down by the rain which still fell there. Thus sunlight, shadow, colours, sound and vastness conspired to render the scene a miserable one. The journey was too much for Mrs Huxley, and instead of pursuing her way to Meyringen as was first proposed she had to wend her way back by coach along a level road to Interlaken.

Having taken up our quarters at Grindelwald our object was to examine the glacier. We engaged a powerful guide and with him faced a swift ascent which brought us to the side of this glacier. Our arrival was greeted by a thundering crash, the mass was split into chasms and ridges, transverse masses which sometimes fell together and produced the noise that we had heard. At first the ice seemed a mass of confusion, long fissures with their corresponding ridges; broken blocks, and minarets of dazzling whiteness. Reached a spot which commanded a long view and here a mechanical problem of exquisite beauty revealed itself, and the whole structure of the mass was such as might be predicted à priori, from mechanical principles. I cannot of course enter into it here. We stood above a place where the glacier had changed in gradient, falling from a more level to a steeper incline. In the centre the mass was broken right across by parallel fissures of great regularity. The glacier here was narrow, but a little lower down it widened, owing to the lateral movement thus permitted the transverse ridges broke across and became intersected by fissures transverse to them. At first the square blocks thus formed bore the dirt which was strewn over the surface of the glacier. But as they slowly descended (for you know the glaciers are always in motion) their angles were melted away, the dirt disappeared and the blocks became converted into those beautiful minarets. Coming down the glacier with those white peaks shining in the evening sun and projected against the black pines upon the opposite mountain their appearance is indescribably lovely. As the mass crossed the crown of the slope above which we stood, it was as I have said broken into transverse chasms. The force was here a force of tension. Higher up the surface was more level, the force was pressure, and here the chasms formed at a more elevated point were pushed together and quite closed up. The line below represents the surface of the glacier. At a

wide fissures yawn,

[FIGURE XXII]

at b they are closed, at c they gape again, and below c where the glacier widens the ridges are broken across: lower still we have the shiny minarets. To a superficial observer the sides appear to be dragged downwards so that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the sides of the mass move more quickly than the centre; indeed this is stated in the writings of Agassiz.¹⁷ I will here stop – more in my next. affectionately – John.

RI MS JT/1/T/1005