A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

but a close inspection disabled the hair-trunk theory,

and further discussion and examination exploded it

entirely–that is, in the opinion of all the scientists

except the one who had advanced it. This one clung

to his theory with affectionate fidelity characteristic

of originators of scientific theories, and afterward won

many of the first scientists of the age to his view,

by a very able pamphlet which he wrote, entitled, “Evidences

going to show that the hair trunk, in a wild state,

belonged to the early glacial period, and roamed the wastes

of chaos in the company with the cave-bear, primeval man,

and the other Oo”litics of the Old Silurian family.”

Each of our scientists had a theory of his own, and put

forward an animal of his own as a candidate for the skin.

I sided with the geologist of the Expedition in the

belief that this patch of skin had once helped to cover

a Siberian elephant, in some old forgotten age–but we

divided there, the geologist believing that this discovery

proved that Siberia had formerly been located where

Switzerland is now, whereas I held the opinion that it

merely proved that the primeval Swiss was not the dull

savage he is represented to have been, but was a being

of high intellectual development, who liked to go to the

menagerie.

We arrived that evening, after many hardships and adventures,

in some fields close to the great ice-arch where the mad

Visp boils and surges out from under the foot of the

great Gorner Glacier, and here we camped, our perils over

and our magnificent undertaking successfully completed.

We marched into Zermatt the next day, and were received

with the most lavish honors and applause. A document,

signed and sealed by the authorities, was given to me

which established and endorsed the fact that I had made

the ascent of the Riffelberg. This I wear around my neck,

and it will be buried with me when I am no more.

CHAPTER XL

[Piteous Relics at Chamonix]

I am not so ignorant about glacial movement, now, as I

was when I took passage on the Gorner Glacier.

I have “read up” since. I am aware that these vast

bodies of ice do not travel at the same rate of speed;

while the Gorner Glacier makes less than an inch a day,

the Unter-Aar Glacier makes as much as eight; and still

other glaciers are said to go twelve, sixteen, and even

twenty inches a day. One writer says that the slowest

glacier travels twenty-give feet a year, and the fastest

four hundred.

What is a glacier? It is easy to say it looks like a

frozen river which occupies the bed of a winding gorge

or gully between mountains. But that gives no notion

of its vastness. For it is sometimes six hundred

feet thick, and we are not accustomed to rivers six hundred

feet deep; no, our rivers are six feet, twenty feet,

and sometimes fifty feet deep; we are not quite able

to grasp so large a fact as an ice-river six hundred feet deep.

The glacier’s surface is not smooth and level, but has

deep swales and swelling elevations, and sometimes has

the look of a tossing sea whose turbulent billows were

frozen hard in the instant of their most violent motion;

the glacier’s surface is not a flawless mass, but is a river

with cracks or crevices, some narrow, some gaping wide.

Many a man, the victim of a slip or a misstep, has plunged

down on of these and met his death. Men have been

fished out of them alive; but it was when they did not

go to a great depth; the cold of the great depths would

quickly stupefy a man, whether he was hurt or unhurt.

These cracks do not go straight down; one can seldom see

more than twenty to forty feet down them; consequently men

who have disappeared in them have been sought for,

in the hope that they had stopped within helping distance,

whereas their case, in most instances, had really been

hopeless from the beginning.

In 1864 a party of tourists was descending Mont Blanc,

and while picking their way over one of the mighty glaciers