Crossing an Alpine glacier

Text 1: On the Ice before Dawn, by Frederick Haldane

An original travel writing written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

We left the hut at three in the morning, five of us roped together like convicts, our lanterns making small yellow islands on the snow. Above us the peaks were not yet visible; there was only a vast blackness pricked with stars, and the creak of the rope, and old Anselm’s breath steaming in front of me as he went.

The glacier, when the dawn came, revealed itself by degrees. First a faint grey; then a pale and sickly green in the hollows; then, as the sun struck the summit of the mountain far above, a flush of rose that ran down the slopes like wine poured slowly into a glass. I had read many descriptions of such sunrises and believed none of them. I believe them now.

But the glacier is not a place for admiration. It is a frozen river, and like any river it is moving, splitting, groaning to itself in the cold. Everywhere the ice was broken into crevasses, some no wider than a man’s hand, some so wide and so deep that their walls passed from white to blue to a blackness that had no bottom I could see. We crossed the narrow ones at a stride. The wider we crossed upon bridges of snow, and Anselm went first, testing each with his axe, and then, one by one, we followed, not breathing, not looking down, the rope paid out between us like a line of faith.

Halfway across, the snow gave way beneath the porter behind me. I heard no cry, only a soft sound, like a sigh, and felt the rope snap tight at my waist and drag me to my knees. For a moment, an eternity, I hung upon the brink and looked at the place where he had been.

We hauled him out in under a minute. He was laughing. Anselm lit his pipe.

Explore how Frederick Haldane uses language and structure to present the danger and beauty of crossing the glacier.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.