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Show 123. tie saw a dead world, with "no sentiment of beauty in the whole scene." The desolate landscape, the ruin of a bygone glacial period, was presented with an "unrelenting clearness," and all he saw was "a fearful sense of wreck and desolation, of a world crushed into fragments." The scene was purely the result of mechanical forces, and yet it was also, despite King's best literary intentions, a dead world. Even though he desired to avoid any subjective or distorting views, his scientific perspective devalued mountains as significant sources of spiritual insight. Whymper joined King and Tyndall in pointing out the limitations of Ruskin's trust in the distant view. Ruskin, for instance, had said that there was "no aspect of destruction about the Matterhorn cliffs." But Whymper had been on the mountain and knew better. He had heard the "descending masses thunder loudly as guns" as he sat by the side of the Z'Mutt Glacier. On the mountain, he had found himself target for a storm of stones. He knew that the mountains were coming down. Ruskin could believe in the permanent and eternal aspect of the mountains precisely because he had watched them from a great distance. Up close, Whymper watched the stones fall, and reported "a strong smell of sulphur, that told who sent them." Tyndall, always the physicist, watched the same storm of stones, from nearly the same place as Whymper, but he avoided interpreting their descent personally. To him, they described their proper parabolas and were deflected by the rocky towers. |
