In the 1860’s, after two hundred years of prayer and an annual pilgrimage to the glacier, their prayers seemed to be having some effect when the glacier began to retreat. They should have quit while they were ahead, but made the fatal mistake of carrying on praying and the situation has become so serious now that their parish council and the local bishop have petitioned the Pope to change the prayer to make the glacier grow large again.
Meanwhile, in the Himalayas, they have the opposite problem. For reasons which no-one understands the glaciers there are growing. Perhaps now that the villagers of Fiesch have no further use for their old prayers, they could send someone to the Himalayas to carve one on a waterwheel. My thanks to Paul Simons, author of Weatherwatch, for the information about the villages of Fiesch.
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