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of a very cold June day in today's terms. Moreover, these months were extremely wet, mak-
ing life miserable for both villagers and tourists, and smothering the mountaintops in re-
cord snows. Accustomed to the summer pasturing of their cattle on the Alpine meadows, the
highland farmers could only look on anxiously as the low winter snow line persisted into
the spring. Huge avalanches, normally a feature of the springtime melt, continued through
August. 2
The Shelleys observed at close quarters the ecological impacts of the volcanic summer of
1816 across the Alpine landscape. Riding mules for the ascent to the tourist hub of Chamonix,
they barely negotiated a raging torrent that, three days before, had “descended from the snow
& torn the road away.” The ever-present clouds of that summer obscured the airy summit of
Mont Blanc as they passed into the valley of Chamonix, but this minor disappointment was
soon assuaged by another highly gratifying expression of the mountains' elemental power:
Suddenly we heard a sound as of a burst of smothered thunder rolling above…. Our guide
hastily pointed out to us a part of the mountain opposite from whence the sound came.—It
was an avalanche. We saw the smoke of its path among the rocks & continued to hear at
intervals the bursting of its fall—It fell on the bed of a torrent which it displaced & presently
we saw the torrent also spread itself over the ravine. 3
The thunderous avalanche signaled a glacier on the march. The smoky deluge of snow, soon
to harden into ice, marked a glacier's first claim upon its extended frontier. Glaciers are “sens-
itive barometers of climate change,” capable of rapid and dramatic response to fluctuations
in atmospheric temperatures and precipitation. Summer temperatures are especially decisive,
accounting for 90% of interannual growth in glacier mass. 4 As the Shelley party would soon
learn, the Alpine ice had been particularly aggressive that year, locking up valuable highland
pastures and advancing menacingly upon the populated valleys. The empire-hungry Napole-
on, who had in 1800 marched his armies across these mountains to conquer Italy, now lan-
guished in exile, but the cold, snowy years of 1815-18 had stirred the territorial ambitions of
an even greater force of nature.
The literary members of the Shelley Circle, for all their differences in style, shared the
talent of every serious writer: they transformed their ordinary lived experiences into art. De-
scriptions of events in their personal letters very often show up, in altered form, in their
poems or fiction. So it was with the Shelleys' tour of the Mont Blanc glaciers in the cold
summer of 1816. The night of their arrival in Chamonix, Shelley described in a letter to his
friend Peacock inLondon hisexhilarated wonder onirst coming into viewofEurope's highest
mountain range. “I never knew I never imagined what mountains were before,” he wrote,
groping for words. “The immensity of these aerial summits excited, when suddenly they burst
upon the sight, a sentiment of extactic [ sic ] wonder, not unallied to madness.” 5 The next day,
housebound once again by rain, Percy revisited the experience in verse form as the poem
“Mont Blanc,” with its famous concluding challenge to the Alpine summit:
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
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