More Science from an Easy ChairLankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
History
More Science from an Easy Chair
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Natural history; Science
Filled with interest and delight in these things, I reached the
railway station at Lauterbruennen, from whence the little train is
driven far up the mountain, even into the very heart of the Jungfrau,
by an electric current generated by a turbine, itself driven by the
torrent at our feet, the waters of which have descended from the
glaciers far above, to which it will carry us. In a few minutes I was
gently gliding in the train up the to the "Wengern Alp" and the
"Little Scheidegg"--a slope up which I have so often in former years
painfully struggled on foot for four hours or more. One could to-day
watch the whole scene, in ease and comfort, during the two hours'
ascent of the train. And a marvellous scene it is as one rises to the
height of 8,000 ft., skirting the glaciers which ooze down the rocky
sides of the Jungfrau, and mounting far above some of them. At the
Scheidegg I changed into a smaller train, and with some thirty
fellow-passengers was carried higher and higher by the faithful,
untiring electric current. After a quarter of an hour's progress we
paused high above the "snout" of the great Eiger glacier, and
descended by a short path on to it, examined the ice, its crevasses
and layers, and its "glacier-grains," and watched and heard an
avalanche. The last time I was here it took a couple of hours to reach
this spot from the Scheidegg, and probably neither I nor any of my
fellow-passengers could to-day endure the necessary fatigue of
reaching this spot on foot. Then we remounted the train, and on we
went into the solid rock of the huge Eiger. The train stops in the
rock tunnel and we got out to look, through an opening cut in its
side, down the sheer wall of the mountain on to the grassy meadows
thousands of feet below.
Then we start again, and on we are driven by the current generated
away down there in Lauterbruennen, through the spiral tunnel, mounting
a thousand feet more till we are landed at an opening cut on the
further side of the rocky Eiger, which admits us to an actual footing
on the great glacier called the Eismeer, or Icelake. We lunch at a
restaurant cut out as a cavern in the solid rock, and survey the
wondrous scene. We are now at a height of 10,000 feet, and in the real
frozen ice-world, hitherto accessible only to the young and vigorous.
I have been there in my day with pain, danger, and labour, accompanied
by guides and held up by ropes, but never till now with perfect ease
and tranquillity and without "turning a hair," or causing either man
or beast to labour painfully on my behalf. We had taken two hours only
from Lauterbruennen; in former days we should have started in the small
hours of the morning from the Scheidegg, and have climbed through many
dangers for some six or seven hours before reaching this spot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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