Page:The Geologist, volume 5.djvu/96

76

A charmingly written and entertaining book ought a book about the Alps to be; and so is M. Berlepsch's 'Sketches of Life and Nature in the Mountains.'

The Alps are amongst the sublimest results of terrestrial physical power, and there are but few men who know them in their real and full majesty. That unveils itself least of all where the broad military roads stretch over passes and anticlinal "saddles," or where the scenes of daily life are busy at the footstool of the giant mountain edifice, that towers to the skies above. You must, as M. Berlepsch says you must, penetrate into the secrets of the hidden world of mountains, into the solitude of closed gorges and valleys, where man's power of cultivation sinks powerless as he comprehends the weakness of his efforts against the majesty of Nature in the Alps. "You must climb above the ruins of a primeval world, and press through labyrinths of glacier and wastes of ice into the temple sanctuary, where it strikes up freely and boldly into the sky before your wearied eyes. Then you will encounter the indescribable splendour of the Alpine world in all its vastness, till you are ready to sink under the thought of its awfulness; and when you have recovered from your first impression, when in sight of the gigantic masses, you have opened your heart, and prepared it to receive still nobler revelations, then question boldly those mausoleums of immemorial time: ask them what hand raised them from the depths of eternal darkness into the kingdom of light; consult the rocky leaves of this stone-chronicle, for the history of their creation and the end of their existence. The vast dead masses will become alive for you, and a view w ill open for you into the endless cycle of eternity." With the eye and understanding of a geologist look upon those enormous rock-masses. See the strata upheaved and contorted, bearing the relics of primeval seas, buried in the fine dust of earth, and the ground-down waste of former lands; and ponder on the hundreds of thousands of years that those old silts and muds lay beneath the waters of the cold transparent sea.

"Who could have witnessed those convulsions and outbursts, when in the central Alps, the very inmost kernel of the gigantic mountain fabric, the granite, gneiss, and crystalline schists were forced up from the depths of the earth's crust, pierced by the sharp masses of the hornblende rocks, and spread out like a fan? How powerless would be the wildest natural convulsions we know, how insignificant the earthquakes, storms, volcanos, and landslips of the present time, by the side of that catastrophe, when the Alps took their present shape! Our understanding has absolutely no standing-point from whence to form a conception, even faintly answering to those moments when a world was shattered. . . . Those majestically aspiring masses which run free and bold into the clouds, like gigantic obelisk spikes, as the lone and inaccessible Matterhorn, 17,405 feet in height, the dazzling snow pyramid of the Dent Blanche, 14,322 feet, or the nine-pointed diadem of the Monte Rosa, 15,217 feet, which never can have been protruded through the earth's crust in their present shape, and can be nothing but isolated ruins of the primeval mountain fabric. What fearful ages of destruction must there have been, to allow the intervening masses now vanished, to be torn away, and to sink, probably, into the depths whence they rose? For a number of proofs show