About The Book
Get to know Switzerland‘s most beloved criminal, its real traditional foods, the stinky side of its bucolic agriculture, its true size (ironed flat), its polluted glaciers and its (four) packs of wild wolves. Check out William Hill‘s odds that Geneva will vanish in a black hole, Kim Jong-un‘s remarkable school career, and the routes that neighboring drops of Swiss rain take to distant seas. Find out who built Switzerland, and who actually rules it. Learn about the dirty secrets of Swiss chocolate, Swiss weapons, Swiss intelligence and Swiss happiness. You will soon notice that the 66 improbable questions in this book have even more improbable—and compelling—answers!
Why Do the Swiss Have Such Great Sex?
Extraordinary Answers to 66 Improbable
Questions About Switzerland
Why Do the Swiss
Have Such Great Sex?
Extraordinary Answers to 66 Improbable
Questions About Switzerland
ASHLEY CURTIS
First edition
© 2018 Bergli Books, all rights reserved
© Text Ashley Curtis
European Edition, ISBN 978-3-03869-047-4 :
Printed in the Czech Republic
International edition, ISBN 978-3-03869-058-0
Also available as an ebook.
Epub ISBN 978-3-03869-059-7.
Mobi ISBN 978-3-03869-060-3.
Also available in German: Warum Haben die Schweizer so
grossartigen Sex? ISBN 0978-3-03869-048-1
Bergli Books received a grant from the Swiss Federal Office
of Culture 2016–2018
For a list of sources, see www.bergli.ch/Why?Sources.
www.bergli.ch
Table of Contents
1.Why Do the Swiss Have Such Great Sex?
2.Could a Tsunami Strike Switzerland?
3.How Many Lives Does a Tunnel Cost?
4.Could Swiss Gold Sink the Swiss Navy?
5.What Happens to a Corpse in a Crevasse?
6.What Happens to All the Cow Manure?
7.Has Switzerland Ever Had a King or Queen?
8.Who’s the Fastest Climber in the Swiss Alps?
9.Will Geneva Vanish in a Black Hole?
10.Am I More Likely to be the Victim of a Mass Shooting in Switzerland, or in the USA?
11.Did William Tell Really Shoot an Apple Off His Son’s Head?
12.What Did the Swiss Alps Look Like to the Dinosaurs?
13.Who Is Switzerland’s Worst Arsonist?
14.Why Aren’t There “No Trespassing” Signs on Privately Owned Swiss Land?
15.Did Kim Jong-un Go to School in Switzerland?
16.What Are Switzerland’s Real Traditional Foods?
17.How Much Does Heroin Cost in Switzerland?
18.Is Switzerland the Most Mountainous Country in Europe?
19.What Was Switzerland’s Major Export in the High Middle Ages?
20.What is the World’s Most Valuable Banknote?
21.Who’s Got the Safest Grave in Switzerland?
22.Was Switzerland Built by the Italians?
23.Is Cannabis Legal in Switzerland?
24.Why Can’t I Have a Pet Rat in Switzerland?
25.Does Swiss Cheese Cost More Than It Used To?
26.Could the Whole World Sleep in Switzerland?
27.Do Swiss Cows Commit Suicide?
28.What Does the Rest of the World Think of Switzerland?
29.Is Switzerland Bad for the Environment?
30.How Much Would It Cost to Buy Switzerland?
31.How Late Are Swiss Trains Every Day?
32.Were the Swiss Alps Conquered by the British?
33.How Many Toblerones Would It Take to Make a Matterhorn?
34.Why Are So Many Swiss Sheep Killed by Wolves?
35.How Large Would Switzerland Be If It Was Ironed Flat?
36.Where Can I Find Prehistoric Art in Switzerland?
37.Is Switzerland a Haven for Nasty Dictators?
38.What Happens When You Accidentally Land an Airplane on a Glacier?
39.Is it Ethically OK to Buy Swiss Chocolate?
40.What Happens If I Commit a Violent Crime in Switzerland?
41.Is Swiss Hydropower Really Clean?
42.How Dangerous Are Swiss Poisonous Snakes?
43.What Does My Country Have to Do to Buy Arms from Switzerland?
44.If You Balanced Switzerland on the Tip of a Pin, Where Would the Pin Prick?
45.How Much Vacation Do You Get If You’re Unemployed in Switzerland?
46.Who Is Switzerland’s Most Beloved Criminal?
47.If a Hostile Country Wanted to Attack Switzerland, What Would Be the Best Way to Do It?
48.What Was Switzerland Like During the Last Ice Age? Will It Ever Be That Way Again?
49.What Would Happen If a Dam Broke?
50.How Will the Swiss Ski Industry Die?
51.How Much Rubble Was Excavated Digging the World’s Longest Tunnel? And Where Is It Now?
52.Is Switzerland Homophobic?
53.Are the Swiss Alps Growing or Shrinking?
54.How Happy Are the Swiss?
55.What Is Switzerland’s Most Offensive Statue?
56.Where’s the Best Place to Spit If I Want My Spittle to Travel Far and Wide?
57.What Happens to Swiss Nuclear Waste?
58.Who Gets Swiss Trains When the Swiss Get Tired of Them?
59.If Switzerland Were a Swimming Pool, How Deep Would It Be?
60.If Switzerland Were Placed Under a Dome, Would It Survive?
61.How Often Are the Clocks in Swiss Train Stations Wrong?
62.How Much Money Would the Ice in Swiss Glaciers Be Worth If It Were Chopped Into Ice Cubes and Sold?
63.Can Swiss Currency Be Counterfeited?
64.Do You Need a PhD to Vote in Swiss Elections?
65.If You Made a Snowman with All the Snow That Falls on Switzerland in a Year, How Tall Would It Be?
66.What Is Switzerland?
1
Why Do the Swiss Have Such Great Sex?
In 2013 the market research and data analytics firm YouGov carried out a widely reported survey of sex lives in 13 European countries. YouGov is a highly respected sampler of opinions, and its CEO has an illustrious name: Shakespeare. The Guardian newspaper has dubbed Shakespeare “the pollster with the uncanny ability of getting it right.”1
And who came out on top? Latin lovers? Liberated Dutch? The tabloid-loving Brits? None of it. Switzerland had the highest ratings both of “my sexual performance” and “the quality of my sex life,” ahead of Spain, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, and, in last place, Shakespeare’s homeland. The Swiss tabloid Blick (June 24th, 2013) celebrated this astonishing victory with a splashy headline: “We are the Sex Masters!”
Two years later an article in the online journal Alternet, which was based on a whole slew of different surveys, listed the top twelve most sexually satisfied countries “in no particular order,” but with the Swiss as the first nation on the list. This led to an explosion of reports (The Independent, The Mirror, Salon, Metro News, Elite Readers, etc.) claiming that the Swiss were the number one lovers in the world. “Switzerland is both hot and safe,” reported the online women’s magazine Bustle. The news made it all the way to India, where the Internet media and news company Scoopwhoop asked, “Is it the picturesque landscape? Is it the romantic Yash Raj movies? Is it the sex education programs they start from kindergarten itself?”2
These excellent results from 2013 and 2015 were all the more remarkable for the vast improvement Swiss lovers had obviously made since April 18th, 2012, when the same Blick displayed the devastating headline: “What a Defeat: Swiss are Losers in Bed!” This time it was reporting on a C-Date survey that revealed Brazilian men and Italian women as the world’s best lovers, and put the Swiss unceremoniously in last place.
If Switzerland can move from last place to first in a single year, you might wonder what ups and downs it has experienced throughout the centuries. So let’s have a peek.
Six hundred years ago, in 1417, the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini—a man who fathered 14 children with his mistress and another 6 with his wife—visited the baths at Baden in Canton Aargau and filed this report:
These baths are the general resort of lovers and their mistresses, of all, in short, who are fond of pleasure. Many ladies pretend to be sick, merely with a view of being sent for cure to this watering place. You consequently see here a great number of handsome females without their husbands and not protected by any male relations, but attended by a couple of maids and a man-servant, or some elderly cousin, who is very easily given the slip . . . I believe there are no baths in the world more efficacious in promoting the propagation of the human species . . . I think this must be the place where the first man was created, which the Hebrews call the garden of pleasure.
This must have been one of those good years—even better, perhaps, than 2013. Poggio made some more remarkable observations:
Here we meet with abbots, monks, friars, and priests, who live with greater license than the rest of the company. These ecclesiastics, forgetting the gravity of their profession, sometimes bathe with the ladies, and adorn their hair with silken ribbons.
Two centuries after Poggio’s visit, the Swiss were still living it up in Baden. Thomas Coryat, a British traveler and court jester at the time of a more famous Shakespeare than the pollster, was shocked and befuddled by the baths—suggesting, perhaps, that 1608 was another of those bad years for the Brits.
But let these Germans and Helvetians do as they list, and observe these kind of wanton customs as long as they will; for mine own part were I a married man, and meant to spend some little time here with my wife for solace and recreation sake, truly I should hardly be persuaded to suffer her to bathe herself naked in one and the self-same bath with one only bachelor or married man with her, because if she was fair, and had an attractive countenance, she might perhaps cornify [cuckold] me.
Yet Swiss sex also had its less exciting periods. In 1685 the future Bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet, was in Bern and noted that, “The third adultery is punished with death, which is also the punishment for the fifth act of fornication.”3 Burnet observed the execution of a woman who “confessed herself guilty of many whoredoms,” and he found it a very tender beheading:
The Advoyer, after the sentence [was read], took the criminal very gently by the hand, and prayed for her soul; and after execution there was a sermon for the instruction of the people.
According to Burnet, however, adultery and fornication were not common. An “eminent physician” had told him that the Bernese women, even those of high rank, did all their housework themselves, and so
among them the blood was cleansed by their labour; and as that made them sleep well, so they did not amuse themselves with much thinking, nor did they know what Amours were.
Up in the Alps, meanwhile, fornication was also frowned upon—but only when the sun was up. After dark it might be time for a Kiltgang. Kiltgang literally means evening walk, but my dictionary gives it a more colorful definition: “a traditional nightly tryst of love in rural Switzerland.” The Swiss painter Franz Niklaus König provides a picture from 1814:
The Kiltgang is a deeply rooted and intractable custom in Canton Bern. The young men secretly visit the girls at night—sometimes alone, sometimes in groups. The way in is via the window; first, however, protestations of tenderness are delivered, often in a comical enough style; these are followed by a kind of capitulation. When the young man has finally made it [up the ladder and] into the girl’s room, he is refreshed with some kirsch. From here on it all proceeds, so they say, with the utmost politeness and respectability! I’d love to believe this, but it just won’t lodge in my brain: a rustic mountaineer going through all this rigmarole for some platonic entertainment? For this he has climbed a rough mountain path, for three or four hours, through rain and wind, as is often the case? Besides, there are afterwards frequently symptoms of these visits, and they hardly seem platonic, though happily they generally lead in the direction of the church.
The church battled for centuries against the Kiltgang, but to no avail. Villagers tacitly accepted the practice—partly because a premarital pregnancy was just the thing to confirm a couple’s ability to do what was existential for mountain peasants: have children.
In 1836 a well-known hatter in Canton Glarus published Eros: the Male Love of the Greeks—the first monograph on gay sex in the modern western world. Heinrich Hössli was way ahead of his time in arguing that homosexuality should not be punished as a crime, treated as an illness, or damned as a sin.4 Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History seconds Hössli’s biographer in judging his book “the most important work on male love since Plato’s Symposium.” A good year for Swiss sex? Yes and no. Eros was banned by cantonal authorities, and most extant copies were incinerated in the Glarus conflagration (see Question 13). Hössli himself, once sought out as a milliner with an incisive eye for female fashion, died an embittered and impoverished vagrant.
In Switzerland as elsewhere in Europe, the end of the 19th century saw a growing awareness of abuses in the widespread practice of prostitution. Impoverished women, teenagers, and even child sex slaves were brutally exploited by pimps and their customers. On the other side, government authorities resorted to forced gynecological examinations (known as “steel rape”) of lower-class women suspected of being prostitutes—in order to find and lock up those who were diseased, and thereby safeguard the venereal health of the male (and especially the military) population. In reaction to these abuses a Social Purity Movement, largely driven by women, sprang up in Switzerland, but at first fought only for the forcible repression of prostitution and the deportation of foreign sex workers. Around the turn of the century the movement became gentler, and the focus shifted from criminalization to education and social assistance. This “education,” however, focused on abstinence, the banning of dances and parties, and the censorship of literature and films. As after the Reformation, sex itself became the bad guy, and “great sex” an oxymoron.
A century later, and another flip—or flop. Prostitution has been legal in Switzerland since 1942, and sex work is a 3.5 billion franc industry. Earnings are taxed, and the workers contribute to and benefit from social insurance. In Zurich, government-constructed Sex Boxes provide infrastructure for the trade: a drive-in facility, where you can have sex in your car with a waiting prostitute, also features a café, a laundry, and showers for the workers.
As for education, today it’s of another order than that imagined by the purity campaigners. In Basel, in 2011, Sex Boxes of a different kind from those in Zurich found their way into kindergarten. Tactile tools for sex-ed, they contained, among other items, a wooden penis and a plush vagina. Parents concerned about social purity initiated legal proceedings against the schools, but were brusquely rebuffed by the Supreme Court, which wrote that
it is obvious, that being informed about the basic terms and connections of the human body and sexuality fundamentally supports the publicly acknowledged goal of preventing sexual molestation and of protecting health.
Swiss sexual education seems to work: Switzerland has the lowest teen pregnancy rate in the world—one-seventh that of the US, one-sixth that of Britain, a third the rate in France, and half that of the Netherlands.
In another sign of the times the “Last Sex Shop Before the Jungfrau,” which opened its doors 20 years ago on the main street in Interlaken, reports that its clientele has evolved in the direction of equality. While at the start customers were 80 percent male, the sexes are now evenly represented: emancipation, perhaps, in another sense than that intended by the feminist abstinence campaigners a hundred years ago.
It is not surprising that sexual mores should vary over the centuries, but we are still left with that inexplicable jump in Swiss loving from 2012 to 2013. For an explanation we can turn to Swiss sex expert Caroline Fux5. Fux, a psychologist who answers distraught questions about sex and relationships in a column in Blick read by half a million Swiss every day, has a simple explanation:
There are certainly surveys about how different countries perform in bed, but most of them are not at all scientific. A lot of what are sold as serious studies are completely unfounded nonsense.
Completely unfounded nonsense might explain a lot here. Especially those dismal results arrived at by C-Date, which, now that I look it up, I find is far from a serious research institution—rather, it’s an online tool for hooking up. (The “C” stands for casual.) But is Ms. Fux really ready to throw away the data collected by Shakespeare, the man with the “uncanny ability of getting it right?” Not necessarily. Here is Fux’s take on Swiss lovemaking:
The image of the Swiss is not exactly that of superlative lovers. We actually tend to stand as opposites to the classic Latin types. However, I would say that Swiss lovers are pragmatic, and in a positive way. They have a good sexual education, a lot of knowledge—and this is not to be underrated when considering sexual competence. In addition, we Swiss are very open about sex. We are emancipated, and therefore care a lot that the sex is good for both partners. Thus you shouldn’t underestimate Swiss lovers—they’re the outsiders who you suddenly find have qualified for the finals.
No Latin lovers, but the outsiders who qualify for the finals. If you’re looking for a raffish opera star to sweep you away on a motorcycle, you might want to head south. Great sex is after all a matter of taste—but also, unfortunately, often a matter of delusion. What really makes sex great, according to yet another survey—this time by Durex and YourTango—might not be riding on that motorcycle. Here’s a Durex spokesman reviewing their 2013 poll:
When people think of great sex, many often conjure up images of one-night-stands or Spring Break. Our research shows the contrary, that when you are with someone who wants only you, you feel confident enough to try out new things and express your fantasies, which in turn leads to more intimacy and even better sex between partners.
Your Tango CEO Andrea Miller agrees.
We’ve been conditioned by the media to believe that sex is primarily physical and a couple’s sex life will inevitably fizzle with time. However, these findings indicate just the opposite—getting closer on an emotional level is the key to getting closer physically.
If Durex and YourTango are right, then it’s good love that makes good loving—which has nothing to do with Brazilian lovers, Italian lovers, Swiss lovers, or lovers from Mars. And, wonder of wonders, it’s what we might have expected from the beginning. Nations don’t have sex, after all—people do.
1 In 2001, YouGov predicted Labour’s general election victory to within one percentage point. In 2017, it correctly predicted a hung parliament for the general election—a description that the Guardian described as “certainly brave,” and which was also certainly correct.
2 How the 75 Hindi films produced by the Indian entertainment company Yash Raj might have contributed to Swiss sexual prowess remains somewhat obscure, but Switzerland’s unlikely reputation as a land of lovers has clearly penetrated all the way to India.
3 Today close to 40 percent of Swiss adults have had sex with more than ten people. If post-Reformation Bernese justice were still being consequently administered, there wouldn’t be many Swiss left alive.
4 In 1942, just over 100 years after the appearance of Hössli’s book, Switzerland did decriminalize homosexuality—beating out England (1967), Germany (1969), Finland (1971) and Spain (1979), but losing out to Vatican City (!) and Italy (both 1890), and getting creamed by France (1791). Cantons Ticino, Valais and Vaud, however, were way ahead of the game—they made the move in 1798.
5 Yes, this is her real name.—though in German Fux rhymes with books rather than bucks.
2
Could a Tsunami Strike Switzerland?
The Tauredenum Event could be the title of a disaster movie. And a disaster it was, but not a movie—yet. Here is a description from the contemporary chronicler Gregory of Tours in his History of the Franks. The year is 563.
A great prodigy appeared in Gaul at the fortress of Tauredenum, which was situated on high ground above the River Rhône. Here a curious bellowing sound was heard for more than sixty days: then the whole hillside was split open and separated from the mountain nearest to it, and it fell into the river, carrying with it men, churches, property and houses. The banks of the river were blocked and the water flowed backwards. The water flooded the higher reaches and submerged and carried everything which was on its banks.
And yet again the inhabitants were taken unawares: as the accumulated water suddenly broke through the blockage, it drowned those who lived lower down, just as it had done higher up, destroying their houses, killing their cattle, and carrying away and overwhelming with its violent and unexpected inundation everything which stood on its banks as far as the city of Geneva. It is told by many that the mass of water was so great that it went over the walls of the city.
In 2012 geophysicists at the University of Geneva published a paper analyzing huge deposits of sediment near where the Rhône enters the lake. Their conclusion was that the Tauredenum event involved a massive landslide that caused a collapse of the Rhône delta and a slippage of sediment at the eastern end of the lake, and this in turn created a tsunami. A 13-meter high wave, traveling at 70 kilometers per hour, would have reached Lausanne 15 minutes after the slippage. Three quarters of an hour after that, its height reduced to 8 meters, it would have inundated Geneva, crashing over the city walls just as Gregory reported.
The Swiss Seismological Service agrees. It catalogues several tsunamis that have crossed Swiss lakes and inflicted widespread devastation. An earthquake near Aigle set off a tsunami in Lake Geneva in 1584. In 1601 an earthquake caused submarine landslides in Lake Luzern, and a 4 meter high wave engulfed the city. Luzern was hit again in 1681, this time with a 5-meter tsunami. And in 1806 the Goldau landslide, which destroyed the village of that name and killed 500 of its inhabitants, unleashed a 10-meter high wall of water in Lake Laurerz.
Today there are over a million people living on low-lying land around Lake Geneva. And it turns out that the Tauredenum event was not a one-off. In fact,
The sedimentary record of the deep basin of Lake Geneva, in combination with the historical record, show that during the past 3,695 years, at least six tsunamis were generated by mass movements, indicating that the tsunami hazard in the Lake Geneva region should not be neglected . . . We believe that the risk associated with tsunamis in lakes is currently underestimated, and that these phenomena require greater attention if future catastrophes are to be avoided.
So wrote the Geneva geophysicists, who calculated that we can expect a tsunami on Lake Geneva, on average, once every 625 years.
A big one happened in 563. A small one in 1584. Now it’s 2018. Do the math.
Next time you’re in Geneva, don’t just worry about what’s going on in the Large Hadron Collider out by the airport (see Question 9). Keep an eye on that big lake as well—for an only partly unexpected “event.”
3
How Many Lives Does a Tunnel Cost?
On June 8th, 2000, a 40 kg metal rod fell down a shaft and struck dead a 33-year old German worker.
On December 21st, 2005, the last two cars of a trolley carrying rubble jumped the track and set a service car rolling. The service car crushed two Italian workers, 24 and 31 years old. One of them was due to be a father in three months’ time; the other was finishing his last planned day of work.
On March 13th, 2001, a 23-year-old South African worker was buried under a pile of rubble.
On April 3rd, 2003, a German worker was struck dead by a falling block of stone.
In autumn of 2003, a 37-year-old Austrian worker, father of a small boy, was run over by a rolling spool of heavy cable.
On November 23rd, 2006, a German worker was crushed by a trolley wagon. He left a wife and small child.
On June 24th, 2010, a 46-year-old German engineer died after falling from a transport train.
On June 16th, 2012, a Sicilian worker fell to his death from a piece of scaffolding.
The deaths described above occurred during work on the Gotthard Base tunnel—at 57.1 kilometers, the longest traffic tunnel in the world. It cost one life for every 6.3 kilometers. For comparison, the Eurotunnel under the English Channel cost one life for every 4.6 kilometers. The Lötschberg Base Tunnel between Cantons Bern and Valais has cost one life for every 6.9 kilometers so far, but it hasn’t been completely finished, so that toll may rise.
Traveling back in time, things get distinctly worse. The Simplon tunnel between Brig and Iselle, which was the world’s longest for 77 years, cost 67 lives, or about one for every 300 meters of track. Its predecessor as the world record holder, the first Gotthard train tunnel, cost 199 lives (See Question 22). This tunnel, still used as an alternative to the new Base Tunnel, takes about 8 minutes to ride through on a train. Every two seconds of the ride corresponds to the death of a worker.
One dead worker for every two seconds, however, is a vast underestimate, because it only includes deaths which occurred during actual work on the site. Many, many others died due to pathologies directly attributable to their work on the tunnel, or to the workers’ atrociously unsanitary living conditions—pathologies such as hookworm, typhus and silicosis (also known, pleasantly, as grinder’s asthma, miner’s phthisis or potter’s rot).
Hookworm rarely kills on its own, but it severely weakens you through abdominal pain, diarrhea, weight loss, and anemia, making you more vulnerable to other diseases. Typhus leads to fever, a full body rash, inflammation of the brain, altered mental states, coma and death. Both of these commonly arise when living conditions are unsanitary. Silicosis, on the other hand, is earned in the tunnel through inhalation of crystalline silica dust. It can result in the rapid onset of a chronic and debilitating cough and shortness of breath, weakness and weight loss, lung scarring, fever, a gradual darkening of the skin until the upper body is bluish, rifts and cracks in fingernails and toenails, heart disease and death. Silicosis can develop up to 10 years after exposure to the dust.
The deaths due to work on the transit tunnels mentioned above will be seen by many as “justified” by the convenience the tunnels provide both for travel and trade. Harder to justify are deaths on train lines that are useful for neither. The cog railway up to the Jungfraujoch, derided by the British minister to Switzerland in 1905 as an “insensate” and “vulgarizing” scheme, and by a Swiss senator as a “speculating, greedy, all-consuming golden Moloch,” cost 30 Italian lives for just over 7 kilometers of tunnel. Buying a full-price round-trip ticket from the Kleine Scheidegg today, you’ll be paying this golden Moloch 4.27 Swiss francs per dead Italian worker.
An “Indian Buffet” at the Bollywood Restaurant at the Jungfraujoch, on the other hand, will set you back SFr 32.50.
Life is cheap at the “Top of Europe.”
4
Could Swiss Gold Sink the Swiss Navy?
“He’s the admiral of the Swiss Navy” is a way of putting down a pompous, self-important fellow. Yet the Swiss navy does exist—sort of. It’s even being refurbished. Fourteen new patrol boats—made in Finland—will be arriving between 2019 and 2021, each equipped with a fully automatic 12.7 millimeter cannon for taking out lightly armored vehicles on land and water, as well as low-flying helicopters. The navy—technically, Motorboat Company 10—defends Swiss borders against enemies who might attack from Germany, France and Italy on, respectively, Lake Constance, Lake Geneva, and Lakes Lugano and Maggiore. Strangely enough, however, the navy trains on Lake Luzern—directly in the middle of landlocked Switzerland. From here the boats can be transported on trucks to the lakes they might actually need to defend.
Each of the fourteen Patrol Boat 16s weighs 9 tons, and has a maximum carrying capacity of 1 ton more. The Swiss National Bank, meanwhile, owns 1,040 tons of gold bullion, worth 41 billion francs, in bars half the size of a loaf of bread weighing 12 kilograms each. Most of the bullion is stored in a top-secret location—which happens to be, as a reporter from the Bund newspaper discovered in 2008, directly under the Government Plaza in Bern. The Government Plaza is itself directly in front of the Federal Palace, where the Parliament and Federal Council meet. In summer the plaza becomes a waterpark, with 26 fountains shooting variable jets of water directly out of the gneiss pavement. Half-naked children play in the water, while underneath them precious gold sits in a vault the size of half the plaza and extending down, down, down—dozens of meters straight down—almost to the level of the Aare River.
The gold of Bern was stolen once—in one of the greatest thefts in history. In 1798 Napoleon’s troops, having conquered the city, made their way into the treasury and confiscated its treasure for their leader—to the tune of 126 million of today’s Euros. The French transported the gold in several columns of wagons to Paris, where it was melted down, turned to French francs, and used to pay the army.
If a Napoleon of today were to loot the Bernese treasury, he would enter the vault below the sopping children and find 728 tons of bullion. (Perhaps because they learned a lesson in 1798, the Swiss today keep 30 percent of their reserves in the Banks of Canada and England.) With the Aare so near, our new Napoleon might be tempted to transport it via water. Having conquered Switzerland, he would have the Swiss Navy in his pocket—so why not use the Patrol Boat 16s of Motorboat Company 10?
Well, here’s why. You’re talking 52 tons of gold per boat. Since gold is extremely dense—each liter weighs over 19 kilograms—you could fit it onto the boats without too much of a problem: each boat would get a neat cube of the shiny stuff, 140 centimeters on a side. These little 52-ton cubes, however, would immediately sink the entire Swiss Navy. Napoleon IV’s gold would end up on the bottom of the Aare, and would be of little use for paying his troops.
You might think that gold in water like this would be a novelty—after all, who would store gold in a river? But not all Swiss gold is owned by the National Bank. A 2017 study by the Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology found that there are 1.5 million francs worth of gold in a most surprising and very wet location: Swiss sewage. This gold is concentrated in the sludge of the Jura (where the Swiss watch industry is based) and the Ticino (where two-thirds of the world’s raw gold is refined). It doesn’t smell very nice, but hey—1.5 million francs is nothing to sneeze at.
Which gives me an idea. Since the location of the Government Plaza gold has been leaked, and we don’t really want to sink the Swiss Navy, the Swiss National Bank might think of hiding it in a very smelly, highly unattractive place. I won’t spell it out in case criminals are reading this, but I’ve probably said enough to make my idea clear to the astute reader.
And just one more thing about gold and water: if you were to hammer out all of the Swiss National Bank’s gold bullion until it was very thin—one ten thousandth of a millimeter—you could do a remarkable thing with it. And before you say that it’s impossible to make such a thin gold foil, let me inform you that it’s not impossible at all—and that, in fact, it was gold foil of just this thickness that allowed the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford, back in 1911, to discover the structure of the atom.
Once we’ve hammered it out, we could take our very thin layer of Swiss gold and lay it on top of some water—to be precise, on top of Lake Geneva. It would almost exactly fit. It might wreak havoc in the financial markets, and you’d want to gather it in before the next tsunami—but on a nice evening, you’d really have a golden sunset on the lake.
5
What Happens To a Corpse in a Crevasse?
You’ve died on, or in, a glacier. You’re alone—or perhaps there are no survivors of your party left to call the REGA (Swiss Air Rescue) to haul you out. Perhaps you’ve fallen into a deep crevasse, but maybe you’ve been buried in a storm or an avalanche, or have died of exposure or trauma on the surface of the ice.
If you don’t get eaten as carrion by a fox, an eagle or a vulture, one of two things can happen to your corpse. The first of these occurs to those bodies, or parts of bodies, that are in a moist environment sealed off from oxygen—in our case, inside the ice of the glacier, or in the frigid water at the bottom of a crevasse. This process is called saponification, which literally means “turning into soap.” The organs and soft tissues of your body will change into a wax-like, fatty substance called “adipocere” or “corpse wax”—sometimes gray and sometimes tan, depending on the color of your blubber.
You can make good candles out of adipocere. When the English physician Augustus Granville gave a public lecture on dissecting a mummy in 1825, he lit his talk with candles he had made himself—from what he presumed was wax used to preserve the mummy. In fact, his lecture was lit by the mummy’s own saponified fat.
Granville’s mistake shows us that mummification—our second process—and saponification can both happen to the same corpse. In contrast to saponification, mummification occurs when a body dries out. This happens when it’s on the surface of a glacier, subject to dry air and glacial winds. The soft tissues shrink and the skin becomes hard and leathery. If you’re half-buried in dense snow your body can do both tricks at once: mummify above the snow and saponify below it.
A mummified body can survive for thousands of years—as long as it’s kept cold. Such was the fate of the “Ice-Man,” Ötzi, who was frozen for over 5 millennia in the upper reaches of the Niederjochferner glacier on the Austrian-Italian border. When Ötzi emerged from the ice in 1991, a woman from Zurich falsely identified his 5,000-year-old corpse as that of her father, who had been missing for only a decade. That’s how well Ötzi was preserved.
Ötzi’s situation was unusual for a glacial corpse—he had been buried at a flat spot at the very top of the glacier, a place where the ice didn’t flow down the mountain. By 1991 all the ice above him had simply melted away. Your corpse would most likely not be so immobile, for most glacier ice does move, and in complicated ways.
Glaciers don’t only flow down mountains like very slow molasses—the ice within them also moves in a vertical direction relative to the surface. Since snow is always accumulating, and then turning to ice, at the upper reaches of a glacier, anything sitting there—like your corpse—will get progressively more deeply buried. Thus while you’re being carried toward the valley by the glacier’s flow, you’re at the same time sinking deeper and deeper into the glacier’s gut.