AGENTS IN AMERICA
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
THE ALPS DESCRIBED BY W. MARTIN CONWAY PAINTED BY A. D. McCORMICK
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1904
HAYMAKERS IN THE VAL MAGGIA
The loads carried by the women are enormous in size, what they are in weight I don't know; but many of them are larger than those shown in the picture. One load I measured was twice the height of the woman.
CONTENTS
THE TREASURES OF THE SNOW 1
HOW TO SEE MOUNTAINS 22
HOW MOUNTAINS ARE MADE 46
ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF ALPS 72
THE MOODS OF THE MOUNTAINS 101
MOUNTAINS ALL THEYEAR ROUND 128
TYPES OF ALPINE PEAKS 151
PASSES 177
GLACIERS 202
ALPINE PASTURES 226
THE HUMAN INTEREST 251
VOLCANOES 274
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
1. Haymakers in the Val Maggia [Frontispiece]
2. Bern from the Schänzli [2]
3. View of the Bernese Alps from the Gurten, near Bern [4]
4. The Pier at Scherzligen, Lake of Thun—Evening [6]
5. Melchior Anderegg [8]
6. Storm coming up over Lake of Lucerne [10]
7. Looking up Valley towards Zermatt from near Randa [14]
8. Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau from Scherzligen, near Thun [16]
9. Lucerne and Lake from the Drei Linden [20]
10. The Jungfrau from Interlaken [24]
11. Fiescherhorn and Lower Grindelwald Glacier [30]
12. The Castle of Chillon [34]
13. The Corpus Christi Procession to the Hofkirche of St. Leodegar [38]
14. Cloud-burst over Lucerne [44]
15. At Meiringen [48]
16. Storm Clouds over the Lake of Thun [52]
17. Vitznau and Lake of Lucerne [54]
18. The Falls of Tosa, Val Formazza [60]
19. Looking over Lucerne from the Drei Linden [70]
20. François Devouassoud [72]
21. At Bignasco [76]
22. Looking down the Aletsch Glacier from Concordia Hut [82]
23. Asconia—on Lago Maggiore [84]
24. Locarno from the Banks of the Lake [88]
25. Pallanza—Evening [90]
26. The Madonna del Sasso, Locarno [92]
27. Locarno at Sunset, and North End of Lago Maggiore [100]
28. Moonlight in the Val Formazza from the Tosa Falls [104]
29. A Mountain Path, Grindelwald [108]
30. The Aletschhorn [112]
31. The Grosser Aletsch-Firn from Concordia Hut [116]
32. Thunderstorm breaking over Pallanza [124]
33. The Wetterhorn [130]
34. Märjelen Alp [134]
35. Lower Glacier and Grindelwald Church [142]
36. Grindelwald looking towards the Wengen Alp [146]
37. Rimpfischorn and Strahlhorn from the Riffelberg [150]
38. The Matterhorn, Twilight [156]
39. Weisshorn and Matterhorn from Fiescheralp [160]
40. Aiguille Verte and Aiguille du Dru from the Chamonix Valley [164]
41. Boden and Gorner [166]
42. The Breithorn from Schwarz See [172]
43. The Lyskamm [174]
44. The Road from Vitznau to Gersau [180]
45. Amsteg in the Reussthal [188]
46. The Dent Blanche from the Riffelberg [192]
47. The Village of Soldimo, at the Entrance of the Val Maggia [198]
48. Flüelen at end of Lake of Uri, South Arm of Lake of Lucerne [200]
49. Furggen Glacier Icefall [206]
50. The Gletscherhorn from the Pavilion, Hôtel Cathrein, close to Concordia Hut [208]
51. The Trugberg [210]
52. Pallanza—Sunset [212]
53. Kranzberg—Rotthalhorn—and Jungfrau: Sunset [214]
54. Märjelen See and Great Aletsch Glacier [220]
55. The Castle of Zähringen-Kyburg, Thun [226]
56. Chalets and Church. Riederalp [234]
57. Evening in Zermatt [236]
58. Bern from the North-West [238]
59. Looking down the Val Formazza from Tosa [240]
60. In the Val Bavona [242]
61. In the Val d'Aosta [246]
62. Châtillon, Val d'Aosta [260]
63. A Corner of the Town of Altdorf [262]
64. Ponte Brolla [266]
65. In the Val d'Aosta [268]
66. In the Woods of Chamonix [270]
67. In a Garden at Locarno [272]
68. Pilatus and Lake of Lucerne from the Slopes of the Rigi [276]
69. Montreux, Lake of Geneva [280]
70. After the Sunset [290]
THE ALPS CHAPTER I
THE TREASURES OF THE SNOW
JOHN RUSKIN, in a fine and famous passage, describes the effect of a first view of the Alps upon a young and sensitive mind. He was at Schaffhausen with his parents. "We must have spent some time in town-seeing," he writes, "for it was drawing towards sunset when we got up to some sort of garden promenade—west of the town, I believe; and high above the Rhine, so as to command the open country across it to the south and west. At which open country of low undulation, far into blue—gazing as at one of our own distances from Malvern of Worcestershire, or Dorking of Kent,—suddenly—behold—beyond! There was no thought in any of us for a moment of their being clouds. They were clear as crystal, sharp on the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by the sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought or dreamed,—the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful to us; not more awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred Death. It is not possible to imagine, in any time of the world, a more blessed entrance into life, for a child of such a temperament as mine."
Many a lad or man has felt a similar awakening when the snowy Alps first smote upon his vision, though none has ever so nobly expressed the emotion. It is a feeling not to be forgotten in after life. All who love mountains have begun to love them from some remembered moment. We may have known the hills from infancy, but to know is not necessarily to love. It is the day of awakening that counts. To me the hills were early friends. Malvern of Worcestershire was my childish delight. I climbed Snowdon at the age of seven, and felt the delight that arises from standing high and gazing far. But the mountains as beautiful things to look at came later. Well do I remember the year when I was at last going to the Alps. A vague feeling of expectation and suspense pervaded the summer term—the unknown was in the future and hovered there as something large and bright. What would the great snow mountains look like? That was the abiding question. One June day I was idly lying prone upon a grassy bank, watching piled masses of cumulous cloud tower in the east with the afternoon sun shining splendidly upon them. Could it be that any snow mountains were really as fine as clouds like these? I could not believe it.
BERN FROM THE SCHÄNZLI
The seat of the Swiss Government. The Rathhaus, a modern "old Catholic church," in centre of picture. The Bernese Oberland Mountains in heat-haze at top.
At last the day came when the sea was crossed and the long railway journey (how long it seemed!) was accomplished. We approached Olten. The Oberland ought to have appeared, but only rain fell. We reached Bern, and drove up to the little country village of Zimmerwald, where my friends were staying; still there was no distant view—nothing but wooded and green hills around, that reminded me of other views, and revealed no such startling novelty as I was awaiting. One day passed and then another. On the third morning the sun rose in a sky perfectly clear. When I looked from my window across the green country, and over the deep-lying lake of Thun, I saw them—"suddenly—behold—beyond!" Jungfrau, Mönch, Eiger, and the rest, not yet individuals for me, not for a long time yet, but all together, a great white wall, utterly unlike any dream of them that had visited me before, a new revelation, unimaginable, indescribable, there they stood, and from that moment I also entered into life.
Returned to my school friends in due season, I thought to tell them of this new and splendid joy that had come to me, but a few attempts cured me of any such endeavour. It was impossible. My words fell upon deaf ears, or rather I had no words. What I said failed to raise a picture in their minds, as what had before been said to me had failed. I have never repeated the attempt; I shall not do so now. The prophet who saw the vision of the Almighty could speak only by aid of types and shadows. The great revelations of nature's majesty are not describable. Who that had never seen a thunderstorm could learn its majestic quality from description? Who can enter into the treasures of the snow by way of words? The glory of a great desert must be seen to be realised. The delicate magnificence of the Arctics none can translate into language. We may speak of that we do know, and testify that we have seen, but no one receives our testimony, because words cannot utter the essential facts.
VIEW OF THE BERNESE ALPS FROM THE GURTEN, NEAR BERN
In writing about the Alps, therefore, we write and paint primarily to remind those who know; to suggest further visions of a like character to those they possess within themselves. Even the greatest master of descriptive writing can only manifest his mastership by knowing what to omit and where to stop. "Suddenly—behold—beyond!" That is enough for those who know. For those who do not know, no words can embody and transmit the unfelt emotion.
Since the first day when I saw the snowy mountains, I have seen them again and again in all parts of the world, and have come to know them from above as well as from below. I have penetrated them in all directions and grown to understand the meaning of their smallest details of couloir, crevasse, ice-fall, cornice, arête, and bergschrund. It has not been all gain. Gladly would some of us be able to shed our knowledge of detail, if it were but for a moment, and once again behold the great wall of white as ignorantly as we first beheld it—a thing, vast, majestic, and above all mysterious—unapproachable as the clouds—a region not for men but fairies—the rose-clad tops of the mountains where dance the spirits of the dawn. Fairest of all is ever the first vision, not completest. Later we know more, we understand more, we may even come to love more, but the first vision of a young man's love is surpassed by no future splendour, and the first glory of a mountain view never comes again.
Doubtless there may exist some people who, even if they had been smitten by the glory of the mountains in the age of their own most abounding youthful powers of body, would not have been attracted to climb them; yet such folks must be rare. Those who first see mountains in the years of their solid maturity naturally escape the attraction. But most young and healthy individuals as naturally desire to climb as they do to swim or to wander. The instinct of man is to believe that joy is somewhere else than where he stands. "Dort wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück." It is not true, but life is not long enough to teach us that it is not—and fortunately, else were half our efforts quenched in the impulse.
To see round, over, and beyond—that is the natural desire of all. We want to go everywhere, to behold everything. Who would not rush to visit the other side of the moon, were such journey possible? If Messrs. Cook were to advertise a trip to Mars, who would not be of the party? "To see round, over, and beyond"—that is a common human instinct, which accounts for the passion of historical and scientific investigation, for the eagerness of politicians, for the enthusiasm of explorers and excavators, for the inquisitiveness of psychical societies, for the prosperity of fortune-tellers, and for the energy of mountaineers. What! There is a height looking down on me and I cannot attain it? There is a mountain wall around me and I cannot look over it? Perish the thought! There is an historical limit behind which I know nothing about the human race? Give me a spade, that I may dig out some yet earlier ancestor and discover something about him. There is an unmapped region at the south pole? What is my Government made of that it does not send forth an expedition to describe it?
THE PIER AT SCHERZLIGEN, LAKE OF THUN—EVENING
The Niesen on the right.
In face of the unknown all men are of one mind. They cannot but endeavour to replace ignorance by knowledge. What is true of the mass is true to some extent of each individual. There exists in the unit the same tendency at all events as in the multitude. Each man wants to see what he has not seen, to stand where he has not stood, to learn more than he knows. In the presence of mountains this desire urges him upward. He does not start as a mountaineer intending to climb, and climb. He starts for a single expedition, just to see what high peaks and glaciers are like. The snowy regions beheld from a distance puzzle him. Evidently they are not like the places he is familiar with. He will for once go and take a nearer look. He will climb somewhither and get a sight all round. Little does he suspect what the outcome of his venture may be. A week ago he was perhaps laughing at the tattered-faced climbers he met, as mad fools, going up to mountain-tops just to come down again and say they had been there. Of such folly he at any rate will never be guilty. Climbing has no fascinations for him; he is merely going to have a look at the white world, so that he may know what it is that he hears people talking about—their corridors and their couloirs, crevasses, snow-bridges, séracs, and bergschrunds.
So he hires a guide and sets forth for the Breithorn, perhaps, or some such high and safe-reputed peak. He hits upon a day when the weather turns bad. Winds buffet him; rain and snow drench him; he labours through soft snow; he is bewildered by fog. If the sun shines for a few moments, it is only long enough to scorch the skin off his face and ensure him a few days of great discomfort to follow. He has no view from the summit. He returns wearied out to his inn.
MELCHIOR ANDEREGG
Born 1828. A celebrated Alpine guide; with the late Sir Leslie Stephen made many first ascents, including the Rympfischhorn, Alphubel, Oberaarhorn. Also well known for his wood-carving.
Yes!—and thenceforward the alpine fever masters him. He is caught and makes no effort to escape. His keenest desire is to be off once more into those same high regions—once more to feel the ice beneath his feet—once more to scramble up clean crags fresh from nature's sculpturing and undefiled by soil or vegetation. With each new ascent he becomes eager for more. The summers are all too short for his satisfaction. He goes home to read about other people's climbs, to study maps and guide-books, to lay out schemes for future seasons. Dauphiny, the Graians, the Engadine and Tirol—he must give a season or seasons to each. Thus is the climber fashioned out of an ordinary man.
Each new votary of the peaks in turn experiences the same sudden conversion, expects to be able to explain his new delight to his lowland friends, and in turn discovers the same impossibility. He learns, as we all have learned, that the delight is not translatable into words; that each must experience it for himself and each must win his own entrance into the secret alone. The most we can do is to awaken the inquisitive sense in another, who beholds the visible evidence of our enjoyment and wonders what its source may be. In that fashion the infection can be spread, and is spread with the extraordinary rapidity that the last half-century has witnessed.
What climber does not recall the enthusiasm of his first seasons? the passionate expectation of the coming summer, the painful awaiting for the moment when his foot should once again crunch the ice-corn of the glacier beneath its hob-nailed sole? Gradually that enthusiasm passes and is replaced by a settled mood of calmer, but no less intense, satisfaction. But does the æsthetic delight in the beauty of the mountains remain through all these experiences undimmed? Not always. In the first view of them it is the beauty of the snowy peaks, of the great white walls, that appeals to the eye. Ignorant of the meaning of every detail, the details are almost unseen. It is the whole that is beheld in the glory of its whiteness. The wonder of the silver snow beyond the green and beneath the sky invades the mind of every new spectator. Small need be our surprise that unsophisticated, semi-civilised peoples have always believed the snowy regions to be part of the other world—the home of ghosts and fairies, or of demons and dragons. "Not more awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred Death," says Ruskin in the passage above quoted, thereby manifesting how close in its instincts is the sympathy between genius and the purely natural man. Almost universal is the feeling aroused by a first sight of a great snowy range that it is unearthly. Mystery gathers over it. Its shining majesty in full sunlight, its rosy splendours at dawn and eve, its pallid glimmer under the clear moon, its wreathed and ever-changing drapery of cloud, its terrific experiences in storm, all these elements and aspects strike the imagination and appeal broadly to the æsthetic sense. Nor are they ever quite forgotten even by the most callous of professional mountaineers.
STORM COMING UP OVER LAKE OF LUCERNE
Sketch made from Flüelen.
But with increase of experience on the mountains themselves come knowledge and a whole group of new associations. A man does not climb a mountain without bringing some of it away with him and leaving something of himself upon it. Returned to the level and looking back, he does not see his peak as before. Every feature of the road he traversed is remembered, and he instinctively tries to fit the features to the view. That velvet slope above the trees is the stony tract up which he toiled before dawn and where he stumbled in the fitful lantern-light. That grey band beside the glacier is the moraine, whose big rocks were unstable beneath his tread. That glacier—how slippery it was before the sun smote it! There are the crevasses that made his track so devious; and there began the snowfield so hard and pleasant under foot in the early hours, so toilsome to wade through as the day advanced. In the upper part of the mountain all the little features, that seemed unimportant from below, take on a new meaning. He finds it hard to identify different points. Can that tiny thread of snow be the broad gully up which so many steps had to be cut? He looks at it through a telescope, and the actual traces of his staircase become visible. The mountain judged by the scale of remembered toil grows wonderfully in height. The eye thus trained begins to realise and even to exaggerate the vast scale on which peaks are built. But along with this gain in the truthful sense of scale comes the loss of mystery. The peak which was in heaven is brought down to earth. It was a mere thing of beauty to be adored and wondered at; it has become something to be climbed. Its details have grown intelligible and interesting. The mind regards it from a new aspect, begins to analyse its forms and features, and to consider them mainly in their relation to man as a climber. As knowledge grows this attitude of mind develops. Each fresh peak ascended teaches something. The nature of the climbing on peaks not yet ascended can to some extent be estimated from below. The inquiry naturally arises, How shall that peak be climbed? Which is the way to attack it? The eye traces possible routes and foresees probable difficulties. It rejects or modifies proposed ways. It observes all kinds of structural details. It notes the path of avalanches and the signs of falling stones. It concentrates its attention upon ice-falls and endeavours to thread the maze of their séracs. Thus the intelligence replaces the æsthetic sense and the enjoyment of beauty becomes or is liable to become dimmed.
The longer a climber gratifies his instincts and pursues his sport, the larger becomes his store of reminiscences and the greater his experience. If he confines his attention to a single range of mountains such as the Alps, he is almost always in sight of mountains he has climbed and glaciers he has traversed. Each view shows him some route he has once pursued, some glacier basin he has explored, some pass he has crossed. The labyrinth of valleys and the crests of successive ridges do not puzzle him. He knows how they are grouped and whither they lead. Beyond those mountains is the Zermatt valley; that peak looks down on Zinal; that col leads to Saas. Thus there grows in him the sense of the general shape and arrangement of the country. It is no longer a tangled chaos of heights and depths, but an ordered anatomy, formed by the action of definite and continuous forces. So far as his knowledge extends this orderliness is realised. He has developed a geographical sense. That in its turn poses problems for solution. He notes some corner of his map where a deep-lying valley is intricately fitted in amongst ridges which he has seen from without. He becomes desirous to visit it, so that he may complete the map in his own understanding.
When he goes to a new district he cannot but be eager to obtain a geographical grasp of its form and arrangement. The instinct that desires to see round corners and over walls has now new food to grow on. In a fresh district the geographical problem is always fascinating, but in one that has been explored by no mountaineer before, its fascination is overwhelming, especially if the explorer be a surveyor and cartographer, as I can attest. To see the sketch-map of a previously unsurveyed country grow upon the paper is an intense satisfaction. The aspect of every peak gives rise to a twofold problem. Can it be climbed, and if so by what route? How should it be depicted on the map? These questions are ever present. The solution of them is the thought of every hour, the first point of interest in every view. As it is with the explorer, so to a less extent is it liable to be with every climber; for all climbers are to some extent explorers, even though they are but exploring previously described and mapped territory. It is new to them, at any rate, and that is the important fact. Climbers, when they begin to exhaust a district, move to another in hunger after the unknown.
LOOKING UP VALLEY TOWARDS ZERMATT FROM NEAR RANDA
Theodulhorn and Furggengrat in distance.
Hence, as the seasons go by, it happens that the æsthetic interest, which was at first the climber's main delight, begins to fade. If he be a man of scientific interests it is liable to an even quicker evanescence than if he be not, for problems of geological structure, or of botanical distribution, or of glaciology and the like, are a keen source of intellectual enjoyment. At length, perhaps, the day comes when the loss is felt. There is a gorgeous range of snow mountains with every effect of cloud and sunshine that the eye can desire, displayed about and upon them, yet the climber finds with dismay that his heart is cold. The old glory has vanished from the scene and the old thrill is an unfelt emotion. What is the matter? Have his eyes grown dim? Has he lost the faculty of delight? Is he growing old? Whatever the cause, the effect is painful in the extreme. It is one that many of us have felt, especially towards the close of a long and successful climbing season, or extensive journey of exploration. There is but one remedy—to quit the mountains for a while and attend to the common business of life. When winter months have gone by and summer is again at hand, the old enthusiasm is liable to return. Sooner or later the true mountain-lover will begin to starve for sight of the snows.
When age comes upon him and his limbs grow stiff and his heart enfeebles, the desire to climb may slacken, but the love of mountains will not diminish. Rather will it take on again something of its first freshness. Then it was purely objective; now it becomes objective once more. The desire to obtain and to possess passes away. We know what it is like to be aloft. We foresee the toil with no less, perhaps with even greater clearness of prevision than we foresee the triumph and the delight. We have learnt the secret of the hills and entered into the treasures of the snow. Now we can afford to rest below and gaze aloft. If the mystery of our first views can never return, the glow of multitudinous memories replaces it not unworthily. The peaks have become inaccessible once more. They again belong to another world, the world of the past. The ghosts of our dead friends people them, and the ghosts of our dead selves. When the evening glow floods them at close of day it mingles with the mellow glories of the years that are gone. The old passionate hopes and strivings, the old disappointments and regrets, the old rivalries, and the old triumphs, vaguely mingling in a faint regret, beget in the retired mountaineer an attitude of peace and aloofness. He feels again the incommunicable and indescribable delight that thrilled him at the first; but now, though it is less passionate, less stimulating, less overwhelming than of yore, it is mellower and not a whit less beautiful and true.
EIGER, MÖNCH, AND JUNGFRAU, FROM SCHERZLIGEN, NEAR THUN
One precious thing beside memory the retired mountaineer possesses, which he who has never climbed must lack: it is knowledge. The keenest mountain-lover who never climbed does not really know the nature of what he is looking at. Even Ruskin, the most gifted mountain-lover that never climbed, constantly reveals in his writings failures to understand. The true scale of things was never apparent to his eye. Like all beginners, at first underestimating, he presently came to overestimate the size of cliffs and ridges. Ability to see things truly is a great possession. None but an experienced mountaineer can ever so see mountains. He instinctively recognises the important features and distinguishes them from the unimportant. He is conscious of what is in front and what behind. He does not mistake foreshortened ridges for needle-pointed peaks. A range of mountains is not a wall to him but a deep extending mass. He feels the recesses and the projections. He has a sense of what is round the corner. The deep circuits of the hills are present in his imagination even when unbeheld. He knows their white loneliness. The seen end of a glacier-snout implies to him all the unseen upper course and expanse of its gathering ground. Thus every view to him is instinct with implications of the unseen and the beyond. Such knowledge well replaces the mystery of his youthful ignorance. If time has taken something away, it has amply repaid the theft. It is not his debtor. He may mingle now with the crowd who never quit the roads, and no external sign shall distinguish him from them, but the actual difference between them is fundamental. For the snows are beyond their ken and belong to the same region as the sky; but they are within his area; they form part of his intellectual estate; they hold his past life upon their crests. Where the lowlander looks and wonders, the mountaineer possesses and remembers, nor wonders less for being able to realise the immensity of the mass of beauteous detail that unites to form a mountain landscape.
To attain such ripe fruition, however, does not come to every man, nor to any without taking thought. The most callous person will feel some thrill from a first view of a snowy range, but it may soon become a commonplace sight, its beauty soon be unperceived. Only by taking thought can this be avoided. Unless we can learn from year to year to see more, and more recondite, beauties in nature, we are yearly losing sensitiveness to nature's beauty. There is no standing still in this matter. We must advance or we must go back. A faculty must be used or it will atrophy. It is not enough to go to the mountains in order to grow in their grace. Sensitiveness to beauty increases in the man who looks for beauty and greatly desires to find it. Pure nature is always and everywhere beautiful to the eye that knows how to see. The perception of the beauty of a thing is, however, not the same as the mere sight of a thing. Many may behold a view, and of them all only one may see beauty in it. He does so because he brings with him the innate or trained capacity for seeing that kind of beauty. But how is that capacity to be acquired or emphasised by training? This question might be answered in a volume and even then the answer would be incomplete and would not compel assent from all. We can only afford a single phrase here for the reply—"by taking thought." If, when a sight produces on the spectator the thrill that comes from the recognition of beauty, he will concentrate his attention upon it and remember it (as a youth remembers the beautiful face of a girl he has merely passed in the street), and if he will be on the alert to find it again and yet again, he will assuredly obtain by degrees a completer understanding and a more sensitive recognition of that particular kind of beauty. He will find more sides and aspects of it than he at first suspected. It will lead him on to a larger knowledge and a wider sympathy. His æsthetic capacity will be increased and his powers of delight continuously developed. All this in the case of mountain-beauty will come to him, not merely because he wanders among or upon mountains, but because being there he retains towards them a definite attitude of mind,—an attitude, however, which is not that of the climber, and which mere climbing and exploration do not by themselves encourage. He that looks for structure will find structure; he that studies routes will find routes. To find beauty it is beauty that must be searched for as a prospector searches for gold. More priceless than gold, beauty abundantly rewards those who find her. With that guerdon in mind let the mountaineering reader ask himself, "Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?"
LUCERNE AND LAKE FROM THE DREI LINDEN
Pilatus with storm breaking over mountain and town.
CHAPTER II
HOW TO SEE MOUNTAINS
I HAVE borrowed the title of this chapter from that of an excellent book, recently published, called How to Look at Pictures. The natural man might suppose that such were questions on which there is nothing to say. The picture is before you, and all you have to do is to open your eyes and let the image of it fall on your retina. What can be more simple? Yet that is not all, because the eye only sees that which it brings with it the power of seeing. How much more one sees in the face of a friend than in that of a stranger! It is similar with all objects. In order to see aright and to see fully, the power of seeing must be acquired. Some learn more easily than others, but all must learn. It is admittedly so with music. The most self-satisfied person cannot refuse to admit that even a short tune is better grasped, better heard, on a second hearing than the first time. What is true of a simple tune is more obviously true of a complicated work. The most accomplished musician does not grasp a Wagner opera at a first hearing. Man is a creature with faculties that need training. He is not born with faculties fully trained by instinct.
To perceive beauty in a scene implies a power of selection. There is beauty in every view if you know how to find it, but the eye has to sift it out. Open your eyes at random. They are saluted by an infinite multitude of details. You can pass from one to another, but you cannot see them all at once. Looking at a tree, you can see a few leaves and twigs surrounded by a green spludge, which experience has taught you is made up of leaves or twigs, but you do not see all the leaves at once; so with blades of grass, flowers in a field, strata edges on a cliff, or crevasses in a glacier. In a broad effect of sunset you cannot be simultaneously conscious of more than a few forms and colours, and, of those you are simultaneously conscious of, one will be more important than the rest—one will give the key-note. Nor can you be equally conscious at one moment of forms and colours, or of colours and light and shade. If a view strikes you at all, it strikes you by some effect in it which you perceive, even though you may not be able to state in words what that effect is. It is clear, however, that any effect is the result of selection by the eye. The effect upon the eye would be unchanged if a quantity of details were blotted out, so long as none of those details formed part of the effect. Thus if you were attracted by the bright effulgence of a snow slope seen against a clear sky (to take a simple instance), and if your mind were concentrated upon that contrast, you would not notice the sudden obliteration of a crevasse in the slope. That detail would form no part of the effect.
As you gaze at any scene you may be continually and rapidly changing the effects you are observing, and that without altering the direction of the eye. Such, in fact, is what every view-gazer is always doing. He is searching for a satisfying effect of beauty out of the multitude of possible effects that could be found, such possible effects being always practically infinite in number. Ultimately it is probable that some one effect will obtain the mastery within him, an effect that his eye is specially capable of seeing and his mind of comprehending. He passes on his way, and a day afterwards recalls yesterday's view. What rises in his memory is not the whole scene with all its details, but the special effect that ultimately impressed him, the result of a kind of survival of the fittest within him of a multitude of competing effects that he saw or almost saw.
THE JUNGFRAU FROM INTERLAKEN
First ascended 1811.
Take, for example, a very simple instance, the view of the Jungfrau from Interlaken on a clear day. What most people see is a roughly triangular white mass below a blue sky, and limited on either hand and below by green slopes and foreground. Suppose the looker to be a meteorologist whose special study is the atmosphere and its clouds. Probably the first thing he will notice will be the quality of the blueness of the sky and the tone of the lower atmosphere between him and the white mountain and green hills. He will, in fact, observe the air-tones, and consciously or unconsciously they will be the key-note of his impression. Next comes an East Londoner with a Toynbee Hall party, let us say. What strikes him is the novelty of the white mountain. Its whiteness is his main impression, the blue and the green being perceived as mere contrasts to that, and the forms of mountain and hills being unimportant shapes of the colour limits. The size of the mountain may be a subsidiary impression, but it will depend still upon the white colour, the wonder being that so large a natural object should be of snow. Anon comes a lover of woods and trees and of the green world. The white mountain for him will merely emphasise and dignify the pine woods and the grassy swards. He will note the draping of the hills by the pine-trees, and the character of the woods. The white peak will have value in the view to him, but only a value subordinate to that of the forest. After him comes a climber, trained, let us say, in the Canadian Rockies, and now for the first time visiting the classic land of climbers. When, on a clear day, the Jungfrau bursts upon his vision, he will give all his eyes to her and her only. He will not observe the greater or lesser blueness of the sky, nor the forms and features of the foreground hills—that is to say, they will not be the first object of his attention, the key-note of the effect he perceives. No! he will notice the form of the snow peak, the modelling of the glacier surface, the striping of the avalanche tracks, the character of the outlining ridges and minor buttresses. He will be subtly conscious of what is snow and what ice, of how and why rocks emerge from the snowy envelope. Where the ignorant will conceive the peak to be a great mound of snow, the newly-arrived climber will feel it to be a mass of rock draped in snow and ice, and his attention will be caught and held by that drapery, its forms and foldings.
Finally there comes an artist, who knows nothing about mountains or forests and cares nothing, but who loves above all else (let us say) colour. What he will see will be some colour effect, some special harmony of tints in sky and snow and forest, some unifying effect that will make white, blue, and green all qualities of a single glory. If he paint the view, that is the effect he will strive to render, and in so doing he will care little about forms and details, little about modellings of glacier drapery and rocky skeleton. The colour-chord will be his aim, and all the power of his vision and the skill of his hand will be concentrated upon that. Or perhaps the artist will not come alone but in company with another of different character. This one cares less about colour than form. What will strike him will be the graceful architecture of the view, the delicate outlines, the intricate rareness of surface modelling in the snow, the strongly relieved emphasis of the limiting lines of the framing hills. Whether the sky be blue of a special tone and the foreground embellished with every shade and combination of greens will be immaterial to him for the time. He will feast his eyes upon form, and form will be the real subject of whatever representation of the scene he may endeavour to set down.
Any one can multiply instances for himself and carry further to any extent the analysis of possible simultaneous varieties of effect in a single view. If to that he add the changes of effect that nature makes by variations of the weather, time of day, and season of the year, it will be evident enough how a single scene may be beheld with infinite variety by the eye of man; and the suspicion will arise that all conceptions, all appreciations, may not be equally fine or equally easy to grasp, and that, where one man may see little, another may be able to see an effect of singular beauty.
It is the true and proper function of a landscape painter to find effects in views, but it does not follow that the effects he sees are those seen by any man in the street. "I never saw a sunset look like that," said a man to Turner when looking at one of his pictures. "No!" was the reply, "but don't you wish you could?" It should be the business of a painter to inspire such envy in those who see his works. If he merely shows us things as we see them for ourselves, he is of little service. At best he does but revive our memories. He should do more. He should stimulate our imaginations to a higher activity, or provide us with something to look for in the future even more than to revive in the past.
To return to our two painters of a previous paragraph: if their drawings of the Jungfrau were shown to the meteorologist, he might be prompt to observe that the atmospheric effect was not rendered, and that the colour of the sky was incorrect. The Toynbee Hall excursionist would find the snow lacking in the radiance that had dazzled him. The forest-lover would declare that he could not identify the character of the trees and that the various greens of the foreground were untrue to nature. Whilst the climber would regard the colourist's Jungfrau as a daub in which all the character of the peak was missed. He would fail to recognise any possible route up its painted image or the signs of the difficulties and dangers of the way. Finally, each artist might regard the other's picture as a more or less mistaken effort.
Yet if all these gentry were animated by a proper spirit they would recognise that their own view was not the only way of seeing the peak, but that any of the others was equally truthful, perhaps equally worthy, nay, that some other effect than those they respectively felt might be superior. Each might learn from the drawings another kind of effect to look for, and raising his eyes from the paper to the peak might then and there see the pictured effect for himself, and thenceforward be able to discover the like again in other places. It is difficult to estimate how far the effective sight of any man has been thus educated, either by pictured scenes, or by a word in season from some companion who shared with him this or the other splendid view. Each of us starts but poorly equipped; each may discover something for himself and to some extent develop his faculties by his own unaided efforts; but ultimately each, even the most naturally gifted, learns far more from others than he originates. The most efficient teachers of how to look are painters—of how to look at scenery, landscape painters. It is unfortunate that the snowy ranges have not been studied by a larger number of the great landscape artists. Turner handled them in their broader aspects and from relatively low and distant points of view; by so doing he greatly helped to spread and deepen a knowledge of mountain beauty. No inconsiderable number of later artists, mostly, however, admittedly of the second rank, have devoted at least a part of their time to mountain-landscape art, some pursuing it to the higher and inner recesses of the snowy region. Yet it must be admitted that the great mountain pictures are yet to be painted. Stott seemed on the verge of a higher success. Segantini almost touched the goal, and would doubtless have come nearer if he had lived longer. Such men amongst the dead, and many living artists, whose names I do not venture to set down lest by inadvertent omission I were to be unjust, have earned our thankfulness by the lessons they have taught; yet plenty more remains to be accomplished. The hills have not inspired landscape painters with all the fulness of their charm.
FIESCHERHORN AND LOWER GRINDELWALD GLACIER
It is often forgotten that mountains and even snowy mountains found their way into pictures at a very early date. Even the father of modern landscape painting, Hubert Van Eyck, introduced admirable renderings of lines of snowy peaks into the backgrounds of some of his pictures, as, for instance, in the "Three Maries at the Sepulchre," belonging to Sir Frederick Cook, where the effect of a distant range is beautifully suggested. Albrecht Dürer again, about a century later, made a series of the carefullest studies of mountain scenes in the neighbourhood of the Brenner road, and thenceforward he was fond of introducing excellently-drawn peaks into the backgrounds of his engravings and woodcuts. He possessed a remarkable knowledge of the essential facts of mountain form, so that even a modern mountaineer can learn from his works some of the elements of "how to see." Well-drawn mountains are of frequent occurrence in sixteenth century woodcuts and drawings by the prolific masters of sixteenth century south German and Venetian schools. The fact is one of many proofs of the vitality of that first modern outburst of mountain enthusiasm which gradually faded as the sixteenth century advanced.
It is the commonplace of seventeenth and eighteenth century writers, who chance to refer to mountain scenery, to describe it as of monstrous, horrible, or even hideous character. Contemporary artists gave it corresponding expression. We are wrong to assume that their pictures and prints manifest any incapacity to draw, because we do not recognise in them the peaks and landscapes we know. The fact was that those artists gave quite truthful expression to the impression produced upon them by mountain scenery. Most Alpine lovers have seen prints professing to depict such objects as the Grindelwald glaciers and the surrounding heights, and have wondered how any one with the view before him can have so libelled it. But the artist intended no libel. All snowy peaks to him were inaccessible altitudes; in imagination he doubled their steepness. I myself, when a boy, approached the Matterhorn with a belief that it was built of precipices. I had always heard it so spoken of. With the thing itself before me I sat down to draw it, and quite unintentionally and unconsciously exaggerated its steepness and sharpness in a way that now seems difficult to account for. If such was the effect of preconception upon a modern lad who had already climbed several relatively high Alpine mountains, how easy it must have been for a seventeenth-century artist to be misled, who never thought of climbing at all, and to whose mind the notion of any individual interest attaching to a particular peak was altogether foreign. He merely felt a general awe, or horror, of his surroundings, and in depicting mountain scenery very properly made the rendering of either emotion his chief aim. Pictures painted at that time under those influences are not to be regarded as valueless and ridiculous. They are of great value as enabling us to see with our own eyes what mountain scenery actually looked like to the people of those days, and thus to account for the extraordinary language employed by travellers going the grand tour who attempted to describe the scenery through which they passed when crossing the Alps.
THE CASTLE OF CHILLON
Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls:
A thousand feet in depth below
Its massy waters meet and flow.
BYRON.
I have thus far only spoken of the educative effect of mountain paintings in teaching us how to see mountain scenery, but there are other forms of art equally efficient. As a matter of[history], it was the writers,[1] and especially the poets, who induced the intelligent public to change their attitude towards mountains. I do not know who was the initiator of the movement or in what country it was first apparent. Rousseau deserves to be remembered in this connection. Sir Walter Scott and Byron carried on the work, and were supported by the poets of the Lake School. Goethe and Schiller were widely influential in the same direction. At first it was the vague romanticism of the hills and of the supposed simple life of mountain peasants that attracted sympathetic notice and description. Gradually mountains came to be looked at in greater detail and for their own sake. Finally, in our own day, Ruskin for the first time attempted to analyse mountain beauty, and not only produced in the fourth volume of Modern Painters a most suggestive and illuminating work, but by the magic of his language and the charm and aptness of his illustrative drawings attracted to it the attention of all that was best in English society. Whether what followed was directly due to his initiative, I do not know. The next important step was the publication of Mr. Edward Whymper's Scrambles amongst the Alps, which rapidly attained popularity of the best kind. It is difficult nowadays to put one's self in the place of mountain lovers who met with that book when it first appeared. To us it is still full of freshness and charm, but to them it was far more significant. They compared its illustrations with those in Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, published twelve years before, and they were smitten with admiration. "Look at the poor old chromo-lithographs," wrote Leslie Stephen, "which then professed to represent the mountains, and compare them with Mr. Whymper's admirable woodcuts. The difference is really remarkable. Though some of these old illustrations, copied from photographs, suggest the general outlines with tolerable fidelity, most of them utterly fail to represent a mountain at all to an educated eye.... The old daubs are mere random indications of certain obtrusive features which could not well be overlooked. Mr. Whymper's woodcuts seem to bring the genuine Alps before us in all their marvellous beauty and variety of architecture." Ruskin and Whymper, in fact, took up mountain-drawing where Dürer had left it three hundred and fifty years before. They looked at the mountains themselves with the humility that belongs to men who love the truth, and they taught others so to look. Alpine climbing taught men for the first time what mountains actually are. The power so to see them was simultaneously developed, and photography has helped.
[1] NOTE.—As to the historical question referred to at the foot of page 34, see Coolidge's Swiss Travel, pp. 24 and 128, and the references there given to A. von Haller's Die Alpen of 1732.
The question of mountain-photography is a thorny one, but it must be faced. The reader can scarcely deny that if mountains really looked like the ordinary run of commercial photographs of them, they would be ugly or at least unattractive objects. A volume of such photographs would scarcely lead a man, who had never left his home, eagerly to desire a close acquaintance with snowy peaks. That, however, was actually what Mr. Whymper's woodcuts did. Hundreds of readers of his book were thereby led to become mountaineers. Wherein does this different efficiency consist? A photograph, in theory, repeats every detail of the view it contains. Such details as drop out are either too small or too faint to be visible in the print. A camera does not select. It takes all. In this respect it differs altogether from the human eye. If you look fixedly in a definite direction and regard carefully what it is that you actually see, you will discover it to be a few central details only, and that they are surrounded not merely by vaguely defined objects but by objects duplicated. Thus the sight of the eye and the sight of a camera are not alike, either in what is beheld or what is selected. The sense of beauty depends upon what the eye selects. It would seem then that the beauty of a view could not possibly be reproduced by photography, and such was the crude conclusion once held by artists of the capacities of this modern process. Photographers, however, have proved that such is not necessarily the case.
In the infinite effects, all of them beautiful, that a single landscape is capable of yielding, and yielding simultaneously, most are beyond the reach of photography; but the same is likewise true of any one art-process. Pen-and-ink drawing, for example, is as incapable of reproducing colour effects as photography. Each art has its own limited area of possible effect. Photography, in so far as it is an art, is subject to its own definite and rather narrow limitations. A photographer can choose his subject and determine its exact limitations. As he can deal only with forms and tones, he must choose a subject so arranged by nature that its forms are in themselves beautiful, and its tones a harmonious distribution of light and shade. But light and shade varies with the hour of the day and season of the year, and forms vary with the drift of clouds over the hills, so that the selection of moment becomes for the photographer as important as the choice of point of view, direction, and area of subject. Again, by choice of length of exposure and by methods of development, the photographer can alter the quality of light and shade in his negative and the amount of detail he renders. These three factors are entirely under the photographer's control, and in so far as he avails himself of them, not merely to reproduce a view but to reproduce the picturesque effect in a view, he becomes and deserves to be regarded as an artist.
THE CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION TO THE HOFKIRCHE OF ST. LEODEGAR
The Principal Catholic Church of Lucerne.
In our own days, as the photograph exhibitions of the Alpine Club have demonstrated, there are no inconsiderable number of mountain artist-photographers. It has been proved that snow mountains are a specially suitable subject for such art. Views in the high regions of ice and rock seldom depend for their chief beauty upon colour. He whose eye is sensitive to colour-effects can, indeed, find such in profusion in the regions of snow, but they are not the effects to which experience shows mountain lovers are as a rule most sensitive. What most of us love in mountains is primarily their form. Grand forms are profusely supplied by frost-riven rocks and cloven glaciers. In great snow-fields and slopes, the surface modelling is often of transcendent beauty, and that modelling can be rendered to perfection by photography, if the right moment be chosen. Photographers who have known what to look for and what to reject, have perhaps done more even than any other kind of artists in revealing the mountains. But the right moment comes comparatively seldom and has to be seized. A climber may pass for hours through gorgeous scenery, full of subjects for a painter, yet there may not be offered to him one photographable effect. He may expose plate after plate, and carry away with him the most interesting topographical and geographical records, but among them all there will not be a single picture that will render a picturesque effect and be worthy to rank as a work of art. The artist-photographer is a man who can snatch the right moment for the right effect. He must be able to recognise immediately and instinctively, when it comes before his vision, an effect of beauty that can be reproduced. He must see in the complexity of every view what the camera will make of it, knowing for a certainty what it can be made to reflect and what to exclude. In fact he must possess the same qualities as any other kind of landscape artist, the eye that recognises an effect suited to his art and the skill to render that effect in his resulting work of art.
Such photographers, as I have said, there are and have been. Their works have opened the eyes of many a climber to effects of beauty in mountains of which they had before been unconscious. Returning to the regions of snow, they have been thus enabled to look for them and to find them. Their own sensibility to beauty has thus been enriched and their power of enjoyment correspondingly increased.
In consequence of the work of poets, writers, painters, photographers, indeed all kinds of artists, and of the stimulus exerted by them upon mountain travellers of all sorts, men have learned in the last half-century to see mountains far better, more truly, and more beautifully than was possible before. We find in them complexities and refinements of beauty the very existence of which was previously unsuspected. We do not merely wonder at their size or shudder at their savagery. We can do that when the mood is on us, but the mood seldom comes. Our forefathers generally looked at them from a distance and thought of them as a whole, seldom doing more than to identify here and there a single individual from the mass. We, on the contrary, have learnt to know them from nearer at hand. We have made friends with them; we can call them all by their names. We know the aspect of each from many points of view, and their features are as familiar to us as were the features of woodside and stream to the mediæval villager. This intimacy with the mountains has taught us that all the snowy ranges of the world are, as it were, of a single race, and that he who knows one knows something about all.
The Alpine climber, who knows the Alps, can be interested in mere description of mountain ascents elsewhere. Knowing what Alpine peaks look like and how they appear in picture and photograph, he can, by aid of pictures and photographs, attain a tolerably complete idea of the aspect of other mountain ranges. Hence the explorers of such ranges, of the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the peaks of Central Africa, South America, and New Zealand, have been called upon to describe the peaks they have climbed, the valleys and glaciers they have traversed, and the scenery of the regions and ranges they have explored, in a way that would have been unintelligible two generations ago. What we now demand of a mountain explorer is not merely to tell us the adventures of his route, but to explain to us wherein the quality of the mountain scenery differs from that which is familiar nearer home. He must be prepared to answer many questions which would not have been asked till recently. Has he been to the Himalayas or the Andes? We want to know whether those great mountains look their size, and, if so, wherein the effect is manifested of a scale greater than the Alps. Is he returning from Sikhim? We shall ask him to tell us what the great peaks there look like when seen from the beautiful forest below. What are the atmospheric effects peculiar to the region? And, with yet more persistence, what is the quality of mountain form which distinguishes the great peaks there, so that, beheld merely through the medium of photographs, they so impress their individuality upon us?
CLOUD-BURST OVER LUCERNE
Knowing, as we do, the great variety of mountain scenery that can be found in the Alps, between the Dolomites of Tirol at one end and the crags of Dauphiny at the other, we expect to be told whether, in the case of the long Andes range, corresponding varieties are discoverable, and what and where they are. Such questions and multitudes more arise within us. It is much if a traveller can answer a few of them. At best he leaves us hungry. It is this hunger that impels us to travel afar ourselves, if fortune permit. Some indeed travel and explore for merely scientific reasons. They desire to add to knowledge and to diminish the area of the unknown. Some perhaps believe that they go merely in search of sport. The normal man is more complex. He has these ends in view to a greater or less extent perhaps; but, if he be a normal mountaineer, deep down within him there assuredly resides a true and hearty attachment to mountains and mountain scenery for the sake of their beauty. He may be too dumb to express it or too shy to admit, but we soon discover that the feeling is there, and that it is a dominant fact in his nature. He may not have analysed it. He may never speak of it, never perhaps even state it to himself, yet when we stand beside him on a mountain height, gazing abroad on the undefiled world of snow spread abroad at our feet, we find that we share with him a common feeling and embrace a common joy. After all, it is the beauty of the snows that takes us all back to them, and again back. Were that beauty blotted out, how many of us would be climbers? We are like anglers in this respect. We set an aim before us and pursue it with vigour and seem to be wholly intent upon it, but it is the beautiful, natural surroundings of our sport to which it owes its charm. Only the artist can make the realisation of that beauty his active aim, and activity is a necessity to most of us, so we employ ourselves actively in the world of beauty, and take her for the exceeding great reward of our seemingly needless and unprofitable toil.
CHAPTER III
HOW MOUNTAINS ARE MADE
"OLD as the hills" is not a comparison that would be considered apt if invented to-day, for we now know that, geologically speaking, the greatest mountain ranges are of recent elevation, and that even low hills are seldom of great antiquity. It was not till men became climbers, and so grew to have an intimate acquaintance with mountains in detail, that a recognition of the rapid degradation which all mountains are suffering was clearly obtained. To look at the Matterhorn from below is to behold an apparently everlasting tower, yet its base is strewn with ruins, and its flanks are continuously swept by falling masses of rock.
The realisation of this different point of view, which we must presently discuss in more detail, forms a clear mark of division between the attitude towards mountains, of men in the pre-scientific age and to-day. Our forefathers naturally regarded the hills as eternal and everlasting. They defined the beginning of things in such phrases as "Before the mountains were brought forth." The tops of peaks, actually their newest feature, were hoary-headed to them. This was indeed partly due to their limited idea of the stretch of time into the past. Six thousand years, which to us seems but a day, was an eternity to them. Of course six thousand years is a brief period in the life of a mountain. Judged by such a standard it may be called eternal, and that was the kind of meaning they attached to the word. Mountains have grown young as our notions of time past have extended. If we could lengthen our time-span, the interval of time (about one-tenth of a second) of which we are simultaneously conscious, if we could extend it to years instead of a fraction of a second, we should actually see the mountains changing. In a sense that is what we have imaginatively accomplished.
Pre-scientific man possessed no such power. Dwellers in mountain countries beheld the peaks apparently ever the same. Each summer, as it stripped away part of the winter accumulation of snow, revealed the same apparently unaltering features. They knew nothing of the movement of glaciers. They regarded snow-mountains as accumulations piled up continuously from the beginning of the world and destined to go on increasing till the end. I remember reading in the comparatively recent book of travel written by an Anglo-Indian, how he went up some Himalayan valley and came to the glacier at the head of it. He attempted to go no further. He conceived himself to have reached the limit of possible advance. He mounted some way up the hillside and looked along towards the head of the valley; all was ice—an accumulation fallen from the cliffs on either hand for thousands of years and some day destined to fill the trough to the brim—such was his notion of the thing he was looking at.
Changeless, eternal, forbidding, still, silent, and horrible—thus the snowy ranges appeared to the pre-scientific gaze. To us they seem the very reverse. We know them to be ceaselessly changing, of relatively short persistence, the theatre of movements of all kinds both violent and slow—not places of death by any means, but the home of an active, a beneficent, and a formative life—not regions cut off and unrelated to the lowlands and habitable world, but the very parent of such, the laboratory where soil is made, and the head of water collected that distributes it below; the counterbalance of the denuding forces that would level the earth with the ocean; regions beneficent as they are beautiful, and as necessary to the well-being of the habitable world as is the richest and most fertile plain.
AT MEIRINGEN
Ridge above the Brünig Pass in distance.
He that would know mountains and mountain regions aright must know them as the theatre of change, the domain of action. He must not merely look upon peaks as they are, but must conceive of them as they have been and will be. As this kind of knowledge grows and becomes instinctive within him, it will alter his attitude towards Alpine panoramas and broaden his grasp of the significance of mountain physiognomy.
Let us briefly consider the stages of formation and decay of a single group of mountains, not volcanic. If we go back to the very start, we may imagine their future site occupied by a plain. The slow cooling and consequent shrinking of the world involves the wrinkling of its surface, and the position of the wrinkles is determined by a variety of forces, as yet little understood, with which we need not concern ourselves. Suffice it to assume that our plain occupies the position of the next coming group of wrinkles. A single range or line of mountains hardly exists in the world outside of the commonplace cartographer's mind. Old-fashioned maps used to represent mountains by a kind of caterpillar meandering about on them, and thus gave currency to the notion that mountains are generally arranged along a single line—a notion, by the by, that (in the minds of politicians negotiating boundary treaties) has been prolific in costly disputes and misunderstandings.[2] Mountains generally exist in rows of more or less parallel ranges intricately jointed together, and they do so because, when the wrinkling that caused them began, it did not begin with a single wrinkle, but with a row of wrinkles, such as a soft tablecloth makes on a smooth table when parts of it are moved toward one another.
[2] Witness the Argentine and Alaska boundary disputes.
Thus the first sign of a mountain range will be a series of undulations upon the surface of the supposed plain. These undulations will be roughly parallel to one another. We call the direction of their parallelism the strike of the ranges. From the moment the wrinkling movement begins, a set of forces is put in operation tending to level the wrinkles and fill up the hollows or valleys between them. These are the forces of denudation. People often vaguely speak as though mountains were first elevated to their full height and then only began to be pulled down; but of course the process of mountain sculpture is due to the simultaneous operation of the elevating and destructive forces. Every mountain is being pulled down in the very process of its elevation. It grows only because it is elevated faster than the destructive forces avail to level it. For all we yet know, some of the mountain ranges which seem most rapidly disintegrating may, in fact, still be growing. No one has yet divided the mountain ranges of the world into those which have not yet reached and those which have passed their maturity. When that has been done we shall doubtless find some clearly marked difference in aspect between them which now we do not know enough to recognise. The visible difference once discovered, the two groups will raise different kinds of emotion in the man who sees them. He will note the aspect of growth in one set and of decay in the other, and will be correspondingly affected, as we all now are by the young leaves and buds of spring and the fruits and faded foliage of autumn. Sad folk will love the fading and sanguine folk the growing hills. There will arise a new subject for poets and a new group of similes for preachers and moralists. In this way also science enlarges the material of art.
But we must return to our nascent mountain group, as yet a mere series of parallel wrinklings, higher here, lower there, with lines of depression between them. Rain falling will need to drain away, and in doing so will form pools in hollows, and will run along the furrows till it reaches the open country and can turn away. Thus the first streams of a nascent group of mountains follow and do not flow across the strike. Only the rivulets that actually flow down the slopes will flow in a direction perpendicular to the strike, and will be tributaries to the main lines of drainage that flow along the strike.
STORM CLOUDS OVER THE LAKE OF THUN
Looking up the Kander Thal. The Niesen on the right.
The mountains are rising steadily as the millenniums of years pass on. The rain keeps falling on them, and as they grow higher the snows of winter first, and later of all the year, whiten their summits and gradually descend upon their slopes as the summits reach higher and higher aloft. If the rain always fell uniformly over the whole area, and if the ranges were of rock, homogeneous like a great lump of plaster, equally strong in every direction—if such were the case, each range would remain approximately symmetrical on both sides, and the crest of it would lie evenly between its two flanking troughs. But that is never the case. The rain-bringing winds are sure to come more frequently from one side of the mountain area than from the other. The wet quarter will be the east or the west or the south-west, as the case may be, and more moisture will be precipitated and consequently more denudation effected by it on one side of the ridges than on the other, with important sculpturing results as we shall presently observe.
We may best regard the rising mountain area as a plateau with a wrinkled top, such a plateau as Tibet, for example. As time advances the plateau will present ever loftier walls to the outside world, but the undulations within will not greatly develop by any directly wrinkling process. It is not the wrinkling that splits the plateau up into ranges, but quite other forces. All that the wrinkling does is to give to those forces their first direction. The interior of Tibet shows us what, but for these other forces, a great mountain region would be like. It would be traversed from end to end by low and roughly parallel ridges, separated from one another by shallow valleys raised high aloft on the great plateau-pedestal. In the shallow valleys there would lie many lakes, some having no outlets, others drained by slow streams flowing along the strike of the ranges, and fed by driblets from the slopes of the flanking hills.
But at the ends and around the periphery of the plateau generally a different condition of things will be found. Let us regard the ends first. The slow flowing rivers of the plateau as they reach its extremity will become swift, where they plunge down to the plain. In proportion to their swiftness is the speed with which they cut down their beds into the mass of the plateau-pedestal. If the end of the plateau were a cliff, the rivers would tumble over it in waterfalls, and these would cut their way back and thus dig out cañons in place of the shallow valleys of the original wrinkling. In any case a similar result will be arrived at, and the plateau will be more and more cut down into deep valleys with high ridges between. What were originally small wrinkles above the mean level of the plateau and slight depressions beneath it will be changed by denudation into high mountains and deep valleys, their scale being determined by the amount of general elevation of the plateau above the low-lying country. As the general elevating process goes on, so does the excavation. The deep valleys will be formed first at the edge of the plateau. They will work back into its heart in process of time. The original Tibetan plateau is now greatly reduced, and only the remaining middle part of it preserves any resemblance to its primary surface-form. As you go eastward or westward from that central portion you come into ever deepening valleys and ever relatively higher peaks, measured from the neighbouring valley floor.
VITZNAU AND LAKE OF LUCERNE
Vitznau is the terminus of the Rigi Railway. The two promontories on the right and left of the picture are the Nasen, Ober Nase and Untere Nase.
Thus far we have only spoken of the natural development of the strike rivers, those original lines of flow that follow the direction of the ranges. We must now observe how their course is affected by the development of the tributary streams that flow down the slopes of the ridges approximately at right angles to the strike. In the case of the Himalayas the rains come from southerly quarters. The damp air-current drifts against and over the plateau from that direction. Contact with the elevations against which it drifts causes the rains to fall. As the damp current flows further north it becomes continually dryer, so that less and less rain falls. Thus denudation is most energetic on the southern slopes. As the plateau rises its southern edge (to consider that alone for a moment) is most vigorously cut into by the water pouring down that face and forming gullies, which continuously tend to deepen and to cut back into the mass of the plateau. The process has only to go forward long enough, for the most energetic of these side-streams to eat its way back, right through the outermost wrinkle of the plateau, till it taps the first or southernmost of the strike rivers. From that moment the course of the strike river is changed, and instead of flowing away along its original valley, it turns at right angles and flows out through the gully cut by the side-stream, which thus becomes the main river. The next wrinkle is in turn attacked by the side-streams flowing down its south slope and in turn cut through, so that the second strike river becomes thus tributary to the first. And so the process continues.
Such is the history of the formation of a great river like the Indus. It is filled by the robbed waters of countless smaller rivers, one by one drawn within its drainage area by the action of side-streams cutting through intervening ridges. All these rivers and their tributaries go on cutting their way back with ever-increasing vigour as the trunk outlet is lowered by their united volume. This is the process whereby an original plateau is sculptured into a maze of ridges and valleys. The towering heights we behold were never elevated in isolated magnificence. A different thrust did not send up the Matterhorn, the Weisshorn, and Monte Rosa, but all the neighbourhood was elevated by one great heaving. To begin with, some lines of elevation were a little higher than others, and they determined the position of principal peaks and ridges; but as the mass was elevated the hollows were engraved by the burin of flowing water. The higher the mass was raised the deeper the hollows were impressed and the wider became their opening, for the self-same forces operate on every slope and continually eat it away and open side-valleys and subsidiary side-valleys into them. These forces operating on both sides of every ridge rapidly pull down its crest and ultimately round it off and reduce it lower and lower continually, so that it is only a question of time for the biggest mountain mass to be lowered to the level of the plains around it.
Running water is not the only agent that has to be considered. Even more energetic agents act in the higher regions of frost. There the snow that is melted by the sun (whose dissolving power is as operative in the regions so-called of perpetual snow as it is below) percolates into the crevices of the rocks and finds out all their weak places. At night this water freezes, and in freezing expands, thus acting like a wedge and splitting the rock it has penetrated. Next time the sun shines the pieces thus split off may fall. Sooner or later, after repeated operations of the wedge, they must fall, and a new surface of rock will be uncovered to be split and shivered in its turn. The rocks that fall tumble ultimately on to the snow-fields that spread over the high open spaces, where they are taken charge of by the great carrying agents of the heights—the glaciers. The higher a peak is, relatively to its neighbours, the more rapidly will frost attack it, and the more energetic will be the destruction wrought upon it. I have heard it estimated, or perhaps only guessed, that 1000 tons of rock fall daily from the upper portion of the Matterhorn's rock-pyramid. The great peaks of the Himalaya are falling yet more rapidly to pieces.
But what in this relation is the action of the glaciers? At one time they were regarded as a great abrading agency. It was thought that the high valleys were fashioned out by them. Later it was concluded that their hollowing action was a negligible quantity. The general belief now is that it is not considerable. Whatever may be the action of glaciers upon their beds, it is at all events a small matter compared with their action as transporting agents. Glaciers are not hoary accumulations of snow, collected in hollow places since the beginning of the world, as our forefathers supposed, but flowing streams of ice, whose rate of movement varies with the slope, the latitude, the mean temperature, and other factors of their situation. The snow that falls at high elevations lies in great masses where it finds lodgment, or falls to such places from the steep rocks which are unable to give it steady support. By these means it falls and drifts together into those great upper reservoirs we call the snow-fields—resplendent areas of purest white, so toilsome to cross when the sun shines hotly upon them, and so incomparably beautiful to look upon. Here by melting of the surface, percolation into the body of the snow-field, and freezing there, and by the pressure of the ever-increasing accumulation of snow, the substance is gradually changed into granulated ice, and the ice thus formed slowly moves down-hill. The various neighbouring streams of ice flow and unite together, and thus, reaching lower and lower levels and continually melting, they come to a line where the annual increment of snow is equal in amount to the depth of snow annually melted. This is called the snow-line. Still downward flows the mass, and now the amount melted becomes greater than the amount annually received. The thickness of the ice steadily diminishes till at last the total arrival melts and the glacier ends in a so-called snout.
THE FALLS OF TOSA, VAL FORMAZZA
Said to be the grandest in the Alps, 470 feet high. The Tosa falls in three cascades. The first only is shown in the picture.
The great importance of glaciers in mountain formation is the part they play as carrying agents. There is practically no limit to the weight of rock they will bear down with them in their steady uninterrupted flow. Whatever falls upon the glacier at any part of its course is carried down by it and ultimately dumped off its sides or end. A stone that falls on the highest rim of the snowfield will presently be covered up by newly-fallen snow and will be carried down at, or close to, the floor of the glacier, where it will either be ground to powder or will not emerge till it is melted out at the end of the glacier's snout. A stone that plunges in a crevasse to the bottom of the glacier will have similar experiences. Stones that tumble on to the glacier surface further down will not be so deeply covered by annual accumulations of snow, and will therefore sooner emerge again on to the surface by the melting away of the accumulation above them. Stones that fall on to the glacier below the snow-line will not be covered up at all, but will simply be carried down on the surface.
The visible collections of stone rubbish carried by a glacier are called its moraines. As the surface of a glacier tends to become convex the moraine-stuff tends to be rolled off towards the sides, where it forms the right and left lateral moraines. Where two glaciers flow together and unite, the right lateral moraine of the one and the left of the other will join and be carried down as a medial moraine on the surface of the united glacier. Such medial moraines may be observed in considerable numbers flowing down, side by side, on glaciers formed by the union of a number of higher tributaries. First comers to the Alps, beholding them from a distance, or seeing them in photographs, sometimes have thought they were cart-ruts, thus showing how false a scale of size their unaccustomed vision applies to mountain views.
A given kind of rock subjected to the action of frost and the other disintegrating forces operative at high levels, usually breaks up into debris of a roughly uniform average size. There will, of course, be some large masses and a lot of dust and gravel, but the average lump will be fairly uniform. A climber in a given district comes to know what to expect on a moraine, and he will immediately notice if the average size of the debris is much larger or smaller than usual. Thus, when he sees a debris-slope or a moraine from a distance, he is instinctively conscious that its granulated aspect represents great blocks of rock. That gives him a roughly correct scale for the view. The lowlander, who has never been in contact with a moraine, has no such sense, and can imagine that the brown streak he sees a few miles away is, as it looks to be, a mere line of dust. It was through the aspect of the moraines and debris-slopes that I first obtained an approach to a direct visual understanding of the vaster scale of the Himalayas than that of the Alps.
A cliff below the snowy regions, if it does not rise out of the sea, is protected at its base by the debris fallen from it. What tumbles from above piles up below, and keeps the foot of the cliff from being eaten away. But a cliff or slope of rock rising out of a glacier or snow-field is deprived of such protection. All the stones that fall from it are carried away by the ice, so that the surface of the whole cliff keeps on peeling off, and that face of the mountain is gradually planed away. Where a great glacier bay reaches into the mountains this action may be very energetic. The whole surrounding cirque is constantly eaten at and continually extends its inner circumference. In some regions this action is more rapid than in others. Where, as in the tropics, the heat is great by day and the frost at high altitudes bitter by night, destruction goes quickly forward, and the mountains are vigorously reduced. Weak points in the rocky structure are soon found out. The range itself will be penetrated. A pass thus formed tends to be continuously lowered. In the neighbourhood of the greatest altitudes the destruction is of course most vigorous. This is the reason why, in so many places, alike in the Himalayas and the Andes, cross-cutting rivers find their way through a range by a gorge that passes quite near a culminating peak. The great Indus gorge below Nanga Parbat is the most notable instance I can recall.
We have thus, in the briefest possible manner, sketched out how some of the chief sculpturing forces operate to form mountains. I have not attempted to go into detail or to explain the various corrections and modifications that have to be applied to make the simple outline correspond with facts. Some valleys are actual depressions formed by the caving in of the earth along a line of weakness. Every mountain region contains examples of such hollows. Now and again by some complication or intersection of the wrinkling process a small area may be forced up considerably higher than the surrounding elevation and thus the mass provided for an exceptionally high peak. Volcanic peaks also remain to be considered, and have been excluded from the foregoing brief survey.
In the main, however, the statement is correct that the mountains of a region are produced by the sculpturing into ridges and subsidiary ridges of a great and slowly elevated mass. What begins as a growing plateau, passes through the stage of rocky and snowy ranges, becomes later on an area of undulating country, and if time sufficed would ultimately flatten out once more into a plain. Between the first stage and the last the sculpturing operations of nature pass through many phases. In the beginning, when the area has only just begun to rise from the level, those forces operate gently. Slopes are slight and streams flow easily down them. When the mountains have been roughly blocked out and the valleys precipitously deepened, the region enters into the dramatic stage of its history. The peaks are at their highest, the valleys at their deepest relatively to the heights. Cliffs are boldest, needles sharpest, torrents most voluminous and rapid. Now is the time when great mountain-falls most frequently occur. The rocks do not merely crumble away stone by stone, but huge masses are undermined and fall with gigantic crash and violence into the valleys, temporarily damming them across and forming lakes, which presently burst, and pour an incredible volume of water in destructive flood down the narrow and winding valley below. The flood transports and grinds up great quantities of rock and carries the material afar, for hundreds of miles perhaps, before the plain is reached and the mud deposited upon it.
In the theatrical stage mud avalanches are likewise common. To produce them there must be a great supply of loose debris on steep rocks at a high level and much rapidly melting snow about them, whose water drains into gullies and unites in larger gullies, all with banks of rotten and crumbling rock. On a suitable day in early summer, when the sky is clear and the sun hot, the stones will fall in such numbers that they will plug some gully and dam back the water. It will collect and burst the dam, and a flow of stones, dust, and water will begin. At other neighbouring spots the same thing will happen, and the elements of the avalanche will flow together, block a larger gully, and presently burst that block also. So it will go on till a great mass of mud, water, and rocks collects somewhere and finally bursts loose in an avalanche which sweeps all before it.
Such an avalanche I saw from close at hand on 8th July 1892, in the mountains of Nagar. We were walking up the right bank of a great glacier river, and were forced at intervals to cross its tributaries which came rushing down the hillside on our left. Approaching the mouth of one of these side gullies we heard a noise like thunder and beheld a vast black wave bulging down it. It passed before we arrived and there was silence for a few minutes. Presently the sounds of another were heard aloft, and it soon heaved into view—a terrific sight. The weight of the mud rolled masses of rock down the gully, turning them over and over like so many pebbles. They restrained the muddy torrent and kept it moving slowly with accumulating volume. Each big rock in the vanguard of the avalanche weighed many tons; some were about 10-foot cubes. The stuff behind them filled the gully some 15 feet deep by 40 wide. The thing travelled perhaps at the rate of seven miles an hour. Sometimes a bigger rock than usual barred the way till the mud, piling up behind it, swept it on. The avalanche ate into the sides of the gully and carried away huge undermined masses that fell into it. We saw three enormous avalanches of this sort pass down the same gully in rapid succession, and, after we had gone by, others followed. All the neighbouring similar gullies discharged such groups of mud avalanches during that period of the year. They are one of the chief agents used by nature to pull down mountains during this, the dramatic stage of their existence. The roaring torrential river below carries off the mud and receives the boulders in its bed, where they are rolled along and in time ground to powder.
Mud avalanches are rare now in the Alps, and are only caused by some exceptional event, such as the bursting of a glacier lake. Once they were common. Mountain-falls of any great size are also much rarer in the Alps now than they were formerly or than they are in some Himalayan regions. Alps and Andes have passed beyond the culmination of their dramatic stage. The mountains of Hunza, Nagar, and North Kashmir generally, are in the midst of theirs.
A mountaineer who has acquired a knowledge of how mountains are made, who has seen in action the forces I have briefly described, who has climbed among mountains in sunshine and storm, in heat and frost, who has spent nights on their cold crests, who knows how and where avalanches of snow, ice, and rock are likely to fall and has a realising sense of their force, their frequency, and their mass: a mountaineer who has attained by long experience a knowledge of the ways and action of glaciers, who can as it were feel their weight and momentum, in whose mind, when he looks at them, they are felt to be moving and vigorous agents, who sees the lines of motion upon them, their swing round corners, their energy in mid course, their feebleness at the snout:—such a man can look abroad over a mountain panorama with an understanding, a sense of the significance of what he beholds, which, far from detracting from its aspect of beauty, adds greatly to it.
To him a mountain area is no confused labyrinth of valleys and tangle of ridges, but the orderly and logical expression of a number of forces, and of forces that are still operative. To him what he beholds is not a painting on the wall, finished and done once and for ever, but, as it were, a scene in a play—a scene to which others have led up, and after which others will follow, all linked together and arising one out of another in unavoidable and necessary sequence. He perceives the arrangement of the peaks to be as logical as that of the men in a regiment on parade. Each stands in its own proper place, buttressed, and founded upon a broad and sufficient base. Its drapery of snow is not a kind of fortuitous whitewashing, splashed on anyhow by the whim of a storm. It is a vital part of the peak to which it adheres, owing all its forms to the modelling of that peak—here lying in deep and almost level snow-fields where broad hollows exist beneath it; there breaking into a mass of towering séracs where it is forced to fall over a step in its bed; there again reuniting in a smoothly surfaced area where the bed is once more relatively smooth; yet again opening a system of crevasses where its substance is torn asunder by unequal rates of flow.
LOOKING OVER LUCERNE FROM THE DREI LINDEN
The Towers of the Musegg in the middle distance.
To the instructed eye it is not mysterious why one peak should be a tower of rock and the next a dome of snow. All the forms assumed are the result of a few simple causes. They express the past history of the action of natural forces, not difficult of comprehension. Be assured that the understanding eye is well rewarded for the power of comprehension it has slowly and perhaps laboriously acquired. Such understanding comes not merely by familiarity with mountain regions, and is not to be attained by climbing alone, no matter for how many seasons or with what refinement of gymnastic ability. It comes indeed only to the climber, to the man who makes himself familiar with the fastnesses of the hills by actually going amongst them; but it only comes to him if he avails himself of his opportunities to watch the action of Nature's forces when he comes in contact with them. It is not enough merely to see, it is necessary also to look, to examine, to remember, and to love. He that thus acquaints himself with the high places, will learn to know them as they can be known by no other. They will become to him a home, full of reminiscences, full of shared pleasures, full also of problems yet to be solved, and of hopes yet to be fulfilled. To such a mountain-lover weariness of mountains can never come. His climbing days may be ended, for whatever reason; he may cease to expect or even to desire to mount far aloft; but the mountains themselves, whencesoever seen, will remain to him a joy, permanent, indescribable, and of priceless worth, which he at least will hold to be superior to all other emotions aroused within him by the beauties of Nature.
CHAPTER IV ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF ALPS
RELATIVELY few Alpine climbers of the present generation know the Alps. They know a district or two, perhaps, though even that amount of knowledge is not so common as might be expected. It were truer to say that the normal present-day climber knows a special kind of climbing and only cares to go where that is to be found. The popular kind of climbing to-day is rock-climbing. The new mountaineer is a specialist rock-climber. Having once fallen in love with rock-climbing, he devotes himself to it, becomes more and more skilful, hunts out harder and harder climbs, and only cares to go where those are to be had. He has discovered that England is not ill-provided with such scrambles, if you know where to look for them; and he knows. He may be found at Easter and Whitsuntide in recondite gullies in Wales, the Lakes, Derbyshire, or Scotland. In the summer he is to be looked for among the Chamonix Aiguilles or in the Dolomites, or, if at other centres, then on the more difficult rock routes. Naturally a small area suffices him. It is not mountains he seeks but climbs. A single peak will afford him several, a small group might even occupy him for a lifetime of scrambling holidays.
FRANÇOIS DEVOUASSOUD
He does not care for easy ways. He hates snow-pounding. A glacier route does not attract him unless it be difficult. Hence his knowledge even of his own particular district or districts is likely to be incomplete. He is not drawn to travel far afield. A wanderer by nature he cannot be; nor is the wandering instinct likely to be developed in him. He does not care for all sorts and conditions of Alps, but for one sort. Only where that kind is to be found is he attracted to go. All present-day mountaineers, of course, are not of this type; but this is the type that present-day mountaineering tends to develop; and of this type the output is considerable.
The old generation of climbers—the founders of the Alpine Club—men who were active in the sixties and seventies, were essentially wanderers. The craft of climbing was less an object of pursuit to them than the exploration of the Alps. Probably the reason was that they had the Alps to explore, and theirs was the pleasure of exploration which we have not. The Alps have all been explored before our coming. The old men had not even decent maps of the snowy regions to go by. No one knew what was round most upper corners, or whither passes led, or how you could get by high-level routes from place to place. It was a great delight to solve such problems, and it led climbers to become geographers and to interest themselves in the general structure and topography of the Alps. No such problems now remain to be solved. Admirable maps exist, solving them all. The game of exploration is played out in Central Europe. He that would take a hand in it now must wander further afield.
Yet even now to know the Alps would be a life-work for any one. To know them, like the writer of a Climbers' Guide, is more than a life-work. For the Alps cover a much larger area than most people realise. Ordinary persons think of the Alps and Switzerland as almost identical, yet less than a third of the Alpine area is in Switzerland. By the Alps I mean the whole mountain area between the Mediterranean and the plains of North Italy, France, and Northern Europe, from where they begin at an arbitrary point of offshoot from the Apennines, called the Colle di Tenda, to where they fade out along a curved line, which may be vaguely described as joining Vienna to Fiume. They lie therefore in the five countries, Italy, France, Switzerland, Bavaria, and Austria.
Very few people indeed have any considerable general knowledge of the whole of this great area, or indeed even any sense of the size of it and the main features of its chief divisions. I spent one summer in the attempt to traverse round along the curved middle line of it from the Col di Tenda at one end to the neighbourhood of Vienna at the other, and after walking approximately a thousand miles, including zigzags, I only reached the termination of the snowy ridges, but by no means that of the forest-covered eastern outliers. That journey, however, taught me how much there is to know, and enables me to realise how little I have actually learnt of the contents and character of the Alps as a whole. This one fact, however, it demonstrated to me: that the several divisions and subdivisions of the Alps contain varieties of scenery of the utmost diversity. Thus a man who knows only the great ranges of the Central Alps must still regard himself as ignorant of the Alps at large. Not only are there all sorts and conditions of peaks, but there are all sorts and conditions of types of scenery, and between these types there is as much divergence as there is between a Kentish landscape and a view from the Gorner Grat.
In this chapter I by no means propose to describe all the regions and types of scenery that the Alps contain, but only to mention a few of them as specimens of far more numerous other types, which there is no space here to include or of which I am ignorant. A scientific writer would divide these types of scenery according to the geological nature of their upbuilding and substance. For instance, he would broadly contrast the limestone with the slaty-crystalline areas, and show how scenery and structure match. I propose to adopt no such rational method, but to roam at random through the region of old memories, and refer as chance directs to such types of scenery and such local varieties as happen to suggest themselves in turn for description or brief analysis.
AT BIGNASCO
Old Bridge over the Maggia. Shrine at end, looking up Val Bavona. Basodino in background.
Literally speaking, "alps" are high pastures where cattle go to graze in summer-time. We here use the name with no such meaning, but to designate the mountains in general. The Alps, par excellence, to the normal man are the great groups of snowy peaks in the heart of the Alpine area. Let us in the first place confine our attention to them. In popular estimation these groups are the following, the Dauphiny, Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, Oberland, and Engadine masses. In the second rank come others we will refer to later.
Place au géant! First among all is Mont Blanc and its satellites, pre-eminent in size, pre-eminent also in dignity. For this group is really one buttressed mountain, and all its minor masses are supports to the central dome, like the semi-domes, vaulted porticoes and abutments of Hagia Sophia to the uplifted cupola. He who stands on the summit of the great mountain beholds that this is so. His position there is pre-eminent. No other neighbouring height rivals that which he occupies. The highest are many hundred feet below, and they are all obvious supporters and tributaries of Mont Blanc itself. It is only the yet smaller and remoter elevations that assert a claim to independence.
This pre-eminence of the central mass is the key-note of Mont Blanc scenery. Moreover the mountain is not merely pre-eminent in altitude, but in volume and simplicity of form. Its upper part is a great white dome, whereas the buttress-peaks are for the most part rocky pinnacles. The contrast between these slender, jagged supports and the reposeful majesty of the Calotte is a most picturesque feature and a very rare one, not repeated, so far as I remember, in any other part of the Alps. It dominates the scenery of the whole district. No doubt within the district there are views of great beauty and considerable comprehension, where Mont Blanc forms no part—such, for example, as the Montenvers view up the Mer de Glace—but the characteristic prospects contain Mont Blanc as their central and most important object. This is specially true of all the views from summits, a quality that distinguishes them from summit-views in other districts. Whatever Aiguille you stand upon, and whatever may have been the character of the scenery passed through on the way up, the moment you arrive upon the top, Mont Blanc assumes the predominance and all else takes second rank. The ordinary summit-view, the wide world over, is a panorama, in which the uninterrupted roving of the vision round the whole circuit is the chief charm. From a minor summit in the Mont Blanc region, the great mountain shuts out a large fraction of the distant panorama and attracts chief attention to itself. Of the other conspicuous beauties of this district, its glorious ice scenery, its astonishingly precipitous crags and slender needle-peaks, we shall take occasion to speak hereafter. In this place it is only the dominant note of each locality that calls for brief description.
From Mont Blanc we naturally pass to Monte Rosa and the Matterhorn. The fact that the two peaks call for co-ordinate attention, at once marks the dispersion of interest characteristic of the Pennine Alps. Indeed not two but nearly a dozen mountains in that group are of almost equal importance, each having votaries who prefer it to the rest. The Matterhorn, of course, is in its own way pre-eminent, if seen from certain points of view; but, when beheld from other summits around, it does not maintain an appearance of leadership. Monte Rosa from Macugnaga, the Dom and Täschhorn from Saas, the Weisshorn from north or east, the Dent Blanche from the Triftjoch, are objects as imposing each in its own way as is the Matterhorn from Zermatt or the Riffelalp. That peak, as we shall hereafter take occasion to observe in more detail, surpasses them, and perhaps all the rock mountains in the world, in grace of outline from certain points of view. It likewise rejoices in a rare prestige, due to its tragic history and its geographical position. But to those who know it from all sides, and know its neighbours also, it is not the unique and dominating mountain of its district that it is popularly supposed to be. The Zermatt mountain area is probably best to be differentiated from the other great Alpine groups by the almost uniform magnificence and relative equality of its chief peaks. It resembles some splendid Venetian oligarchy as contrasted with monarchical Mont Blanc. The nobles of the Pennine Court with their satellites present greater variety, a more elaborate organisation, and a more varied historical record. Each seems worthy to be chief when beheld from a selected vantage point. Seen from elsewhere, each subordinates itself to some other. This is the region of large independent glaciers, of deep recesses, of noble passes from place to place. It is also specially rich in minor points of view about 10,000 feet high, and of good sites for hotels some 3,000 feet lower, where each possesses a specially fine outlook of its own, which it shares with no other. The dominant note of the district is grandeur; if it lacks anything, it is charm. This, in fact, is a stalwart group, which must be wandered over and inspected from many sides and along many routes. No "centre" reveals it. It is a place for walkers and climbers in the heyday of their vigour.
Turn we next to the Bernese Oberland, the queen district, if Mont Blanc is the king. The Oberland has always seemed to me to be the most graceful and romantic of the great Alpine masses. The very names of its peaks enshrine the poetry that the peasant-dwellers on their flanks learned from them in days long gone by. The Maiden, the Monk, the Ogre, the peak of Terror, and what not. And then how richly they roll off the tongue—Finsteraarhorn, Lauteraarhorn, Blümlisalp, Strahleck! No other part of Switzerland can rival the Oberland for names—certainly not Zermatt with its Meadow-peak, Red-peak, Broad-peak, Black-peak, White-tooth, and the like feeble designations. Easily first for beauty and prestige among Oberland mountains is the peerless Jungfrau—but you must only see her from the north. Thence she is beheld, a most effulgent beauty, fair among the fairest mountain visions upon earth. The elegance of her form, displayed and emphasised by the white samite of her drapery, and beheld from the lake at her foot, abides in the memory of all who are privileged to behold her. Only one rival does she possess in the district, and that is not a mountain but a glacier, the Great Aletsch, greatest of all in the Alps, beautiful exceedingly to look down upon, beautiful in its middle course, and fairest of all in the wide expanses of its ample gathering ground. It subordinates to itself all the high surrounding peaks and renders them the mere rim of its cup. To a less degree magnificent, yet far finer than the general run of Alpine glaciers, are the other chief ice-rivers of the Oberland district, which thus becomes par excellence the home of long glacier-passes, leading through great varieties of mountain scenery, and connecting centres relatively remote. The longest and finest glacier-traverse in the Alps is that which leads from the Grimsel to the Lötschen valley right through the heart of the range.
LOOKING DOWN THE ALETSCH GLACIER FROM CONCORDIA HUT
Eggishorn peak dark.
Dauphiny, compared with the Pennines and the Oberland, presents to one sensitive to mountain character more contrasts than similarities. For this is an austere region, which gathers itself up together and stands apart, away from natural through routes and the ordinary courses of the human tide. Its valleys are deep, sombre, and stony; its alpine pastures meagre; its forests few and thin. Its peaks hide themselves behind their own knees. He that would know them must search them out. But they reward the search. It is because of the steepness of their bases that they are so recondite, and that very steepness gives them a dignified character all their own. The Meije is their typical representative, a mountain of strangely complex sky-line and irregular shape, that supports its own private glaciers cut-off upon cliffs, and presents the climber with surprises round every corner. Few are the regular pyramids, fewer still the domed snow caps in the tangled complexity of this region, where Nature has impressed her chisel deeply, and has hewn out the great rock masses with unusual ruggedness.
Very different is the remote Engadine group, remarkable for the high level and broad expanse of the floor of its chief valley, where lake beyond lake reflects the summer sunshine and carries the white curtain of winter on its level frozen surface. A region, this, of fine forests and large expanses of rich grazing grounds, of picturesque torrents and smiling flower-strewn slopes. Its snowy group is little more than an appendage of minor importance to the general scenic attractions of the district. Two fine mountain cirques, defining the basins of two picturesque glaciers, are its dominant features, and in each cirque one peak shines forth pre-eminent. The scenery of these cirques, however, is not of any special character that calls for mention as distinguishing it from the scenery of the other great Alpine groups. The note of the Engadine is not sounded there, but rather in the wide, lake-strewn valley itself, where the snow-crests count mainly as the silvery embellishment of its frame.
ASCONIA—ON LAGO MAGGIORE
Climbers who have spent a season or two in each of these five groups may think that they know the Alps, but they will be greatly mistaken. Most of them, indeed, will admit that they cannot afford to neglect the Dolomites, and will at least intend to spend a season amongst them. From a scrambling point of view, if they are rock-climbers, they will be well rewarded, for Dolomite rock-climbing is a thing apart. Dolomite scenery is even more truly unique. Less grand than that of the great mountain groups, it has a distinction all its own. There is nothing forbidding about the precipitance of its cliffs and summits. Their relative lightness of tint and the warm suffusion of the sun-pervaded atmosphere that so frequently envelops them, makes their elevated parts seem almost to float in the sky. The visible traces of the horizontal bedding of the rocks that compose them render the effect of even their slenderest pinnacles less aspiring than that of the flaked and tilted slaty-crystalline spires of older and more rugged formations. Some of the sentiment of Italy hangs about the Dolomites. The airs that are drifted over them seem steeped in Italian colour, even as their names re-echo the music of the Italian tongue. The valleys between them soon dip into the level of chestnut and vine ere yet they forsake the mountains. The chalets are pregnant with suggestions of Italy, and the inhabitants possess more of Italian grace than of Swiss ruggedness. It is, however, colour, and especially atmospheric colour, that the mention of the Dolomites first calls to the mind of the votaries of those hills and valleys. Who that has beheld dawn or sunset on Cristallo or Rosengarten can forget the glorious display of rosy lights and purple shadows? The mountain forms are sometimes fine, oftener picturesque (as Titian knew). They have the rare merit of seeming to group into the happiest of combinations and contrasts as though by exceptional good luck; but the luck is of such frequent recurrence that instead of being an exception it must be counted the rule. In the presence of Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn it is natural to adore. The Dolomites men love.
Such, then, are the six main groups of Alps that the ordinary run of tourists know. They include the most majestic scenery, but are far from including all the finest. There yet remain a bewildering multitude of minor groups and areas, each rich in its own charm. Such are the Maritime Alps, the Cottians around Monte Viso, the Graians led by Grand Paradis and Grivola, the limestone Alps of Savoy, the green hills of north Switzerland and Bavaria, the Lepontine Alps, the hills of the Italian Lakes, the Tödi, the Rhætikon, the Adamello, Ortler, Oetzthal, Stubaithal, and Zillerthal snowy masses, the Hohe Tauern, the Carnic and Julian Alps, and various other mountain groups of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola. How many of us know a tithe of all these? It is impossible here to do more than refer briefly to a few of them.
Amongst the fairest of them all, the Maritimes should assuredly be reckoned, little visited though they be except by Italians. Their eastern and northern valleys, which alone are known to me, must be counted lovely, even judged by the high standard of loveliness that the Italian Alpine valleys set. Any one of them, transported to the midst of a Swiss group of mountains, would be the pearl of the district. What more enchanting resort can be imagined than the Baths of Valdieri, planted amidst umbrageous copses and beside laughing waters? Here all the elements of picturesque landscape group themselves together in the most perfect natural harmony. Nowhere in the opening season are the flowers more rich, the hillsides more verdant, the foliage of the trees more varied. Nowhere do woods climb slopes in more graceful procession. Nowhere are the rocks and lofty snow-peaks set in more fascinating frames of unexpected foreground. It is a valley of endless surprises and delights. Moreover, its waters are clear and glancing. They burst from the hillsides, tumble in crystalline brilliance over clifflets, dance through the meadows, and race-along beneath the shadow of beeches and chestnuts. No ogres, we may be sure, lurk in the fastnesses of these hills, but only the most delicate fairies, glittering with dew. And then the views from the peaks—how memorable they are, how unlike those of the Central Alps! For from these summits you behold always the sea, far stretching, and ever apparently calm. It looks indeed like any other sea, but you know that it is the Mediterranean with all Africa beyond it, away there in the sunny south. On the other side, far, far off to the north, is the great Alpine wall, and at your feet the sea-like Lombard plain. Those sweeps of flatness on either hand, how they tell in the midst of a mountain view! They bring into it a sense of repose. There Nature has finished her work of pulling down, and man can rest upon the fertile soil in peace. Sweet indeed is Valdieri, but it is no sweeter than its neighbouring glens. He that loves mountains in less savage mood than the great giants are wont to bear, let him fly to the Maritimes and he will not be disappointed.
LOCARNO FROM THE BANKS OF THE LAKE
Madonna del Sasso on the slope above.
Proceeding northward, the Cottians and the Tarentaise and Graians present loftier peaks and valleys beautiful, though lacking the richness and luxuriance of the Maritimes. In fact these groups stand between the Pennines and the Maritimes alike in position and in character. From the Pennines the fertile valleys are so far removed as scarcely to enter into the normal scenery of the region. In the Maritimes the chestnut woods are at the very foot of the peaks. They are further away in the Cottians, but not absolutely removed from the Alpine area. You may sleep near a vineyard one night and yet be on the snows next day. The great glory of the Cottians is the fine pyramid of Monte Viso, which so many climbers in the Swiss Alps know from afar off. It stands splendidly alone and commands one of the most superb panoramas in the Alps, wide ranging as Mont Blanc's, but seen as from the top of a tower instead of a slowly curving dome with a large white foreground that hides the depth beneath. From the Viso the sight plunges down and then flies away and yet away over the Lombard plain to peaks so remote as practically to defy identification by unaided skill of recognition.
We cannot linger in the west, for our space is limited and more than half of it is spent. Flying eastward, then, we come next to the Italian valleys of the Monte Rosa group, to which indeed they belong, though I purposely omitted reference to them when writing of that, for in style of scenery they are widely different and frequented by travellers of another sort. Here are mountain centres indeed—Breuil, Gressoney, Alagna, and so forth—whence great climbs may be made. It is not in these centres, however, that the beauty of the valleys culminates, but further down. There are in fact three zones in each valley: the upper, which is purely Alpine though lacking the grandeur of the northern slope; the middle, where on either hand are found peaks that just reach the snow level and rise from luxuriantly afforested bases: and the lower, which in summer time is too hot and fly-infested to be an agreeable resort. The middle zone is the region of fine scenery, of beautiful low passes, and of superb points of view, whence the whole Pennine range to the north is gloriously beheld.
At the lower limit of this zone stands Varallo, in the Sesia valley, a most beautiful resort for one jaded with the austere scenery of the snow and ice world. Here art and nature together claim the traveller's attention. The remarkable lifelike sculptures of the Sacro Monte and the frescoes of Gaudenzio Ferrari well deserve their wide repute, whilst the walk over the Col della Colma to the lake of Orta is one of the most charming known to me the wide world over. Once I beheld from the crest of the pass a cloudless sunrise on Monte Rosa, when the rosy glow of the snows was not more beautiful than the rich and rare violets and purples of the lower foreground hills.
PALLANZA—EVENING
South end of Lago Maggiore. Campanile of the Church of St. Leonardo, mountains of Saas in the background.
By this pass we may well enter the Italian Lake districts, whose fame is known to all. He would be a niggard indeed who should refuse to reckon as Alpine this gem of scenery. Many of us regard, and rightly, a drop down into the land of the lakes as a necessary part of a full Alpine holiday, the contrast between their luxuriance and high Alpine asceticism serving best to display the charms of each. It is indeed the distant prospects of the snowy range that give a finishing touch of utter perfection to the scenery of the lakes, the finest view-point of all for comprehension and perfect composition being, perhaps, the terrace of Santa Catarina del Sasso. The climber, however, will not really learn to know the lakes if he remains, as most do, idly on their shores. Here, if anywhere, he should ascend. Down below, save for the water, the scenery may be matched all round the Italian plain and in many a valley, but up aloft on Monte Mottarone, Monte Nudo, Monte Generoso, and hills of that size, you are in the presence of panoramas nowhere else to be matched. The Rigi, the Niesen, and their fellows offer corresponding but not equal prospects north of the main range; for though lakes and snows and wide stretches of landscape are visible from them, they lack vision of the Lombard plain and the magic opalescence of the Italian atmosphere. The mountaineer who has no experience, or if experienced, no joy in the grass-crowned foot-hills that flank the great ranges is no true mountain-lover. For such persons this book is not written. They have their own kinds of pleasure and reward, pleasures which are not low and rewards well worth the winning, but they are not those that I have sought after or can rightly estimate.
THE MADONNA DEL SASSO, LOCARNO
A Pilgrimage Church, picturesquely situated on a wooded rocky cliff high above the town and Lago Maggiore.
Some of the fair qualities of Italian lake scenery mingle with the bolder forms of the mountains of Ticino, and something of the softness of Maggiore's air tempers the fresh breezes falling from Ticino snows. Here lies the peerless Val Maggia, whose orchard-bearing floor sweeps up between mile after mile of noble cliffs. Here every village church and almost every cottage seems to have been designed and planted for picturesque effect. It is a valley of many gardens, trimly kept, of much emigrant-won prosperity, a home of the vine and the fig-tree, also of trout-streams and other bright-glancing waters. Comfortably habitable and home-suggesting is it; a place to fall in love with, which every visitor hopes to see again, and every native promises himself that he will return to for the evening of his days. Such as it is, such also are its neighbours. Its upper reaches are more splendid than I can suggest. There is a grace in their many waterfalls, a majesty in their great steps and verdant levels, a relative wealth in their vegetation, and a charm about their villages, that must be seen to be understood. Even the Maritimes can boast no more beautiful valley scenery.
The Bergamasque Alps are, I believe, not dissimilar in character, but I know only the mere outskirts of them. What I have seen does not equal Ticino. These carry us by a natural transition to the Adamello group, which yields a remarkable long traverse over high-planted snows commanding a stupendous depth and comprehensiveness of outlook, which culminates in the extraordinary panorama visible from the highest point.
We are thus brought back again to the dominantly snowy groups, whereof a number remain yet uncharacterised. First among these secondary masses the Ortler and its fellows call for mention—a group far better known by our German and Italian colleagues than by ourselves. The chief peaks, though built on a smaller scale, have much of the apparent bulk and grandeur of the greater masses of the Central Alps. Their ice-walls and their glacier scenery in general are of the grand type. Like the great peaks, too, they are withdrawn from southern luxury. When all is said, however, they remain second-rate, nor can I recall any special note of beauty by which this district is distinguished.
The Oetzthal, Stubaithal, and Zillerthal groups, which follow one another to the eastward, are, I think, in better case; though they have lost in charm by the rapid shrinkage of their glaciers since I first knew them almost thirty years ago. The average height of the peaks is small when the large area of glacier they support is considered. Formerly the glaciers were much larger. Several that I knew have utterly vanished, and the largest are greatly reduced. The snow-fields, however, still retain their wide expanse. In consequence of the smallness of the peaks, a greater number of them exist in a given area than elsewhere in the snowy Alpine regions. This makes the foregrounds in the summit views more complex. As the scale does not obtrude itself, the eye magnifies it, and the result is an imposing effect. A similar effect of complexity struck me in Spitsbergen, where the peaks are very much smaller still, and group themselves so closely together that they seem to form a spiny tangle at once puzzling to the topographer and pleasing to the lover of mountain varieties. Owing to the smallness of scale of the Stubai peaks, for instance, you can climb two or three of them in a single day from a high-planted hut, and thus behold in the afternoon a peak you climbed in the morning. Such wandering about at high levels is a new and agreeable experience to mountaineers accustomed to the long scrambles that the greater ranges afford.
The Hohe Tauern, which splits into the two groups, dominated respectively by the Gross Glockner and Gross Venediger, scarcely calls for other remark, from a scenic point of view, than what was said about the Ortler. The panoramas from the two chief peaks are unusually fine, a quality which they share with three or four of the main elevations of the three groups just referred to. The glacier scenery of the northern slope of the Venediger and the southern of the Glockner group is the finest in Tirol, whilst the Glockner itself is built on great lines, has the qualities of a true giant, and affords some climbing of a high order. If the reader, however, will consent to descend from these superior considerations to others of a more practical character, his attention may be called to the fact that, in this many-hutted district, facilities are afforded to a climber which he will not often find equalled elsewhere except in one or two minor Tirolese groups. So numerous and large are the huts, and so well provided with all the necessaries for life and reasonable comfort, that it is almost superfluous to carry food, or for a party of moderately experienced climbers to require the services of a guide. There are huts where you can breakfast, lunch, dine, and sleep at convenient intervals. If this tends to destroy the charm of solitude, which is one of the greatest that the regions of snow usually afford, it enables even the average climber to wander more freely than he can elsewhere, and less burdened with baggage or the often unsympathetic companionship of a guide. The gain more than compensates most men for the loss, and makes this district specially deserving of the guideless amateur's attention.
Of regions further east and south I cannot write, knowing only from personal acquaintance the mountains near the Semmering pass, and the hills between them and Vienna. Here the forest scenery is the great charm. The forest-clad hills and deep hidden lakes of the Salzkammergut, North Tirol, and the Bavarian uplands must at least be mentioned. They belong to what we English may describe as the Scotland of the Alps. No lover of mountains will deny the potent charm of forests, especially in hilly country richly watered. Their sombre gloom matches many a human mood.
Not all scenery is alike grateful to every one, or to any one at all times. It behoves a traveller to know his own mood and to choose a resort that matches it. If he wants solitude, he should not select Zermatt or Chamonix. If he abounds in energy, he should not look to lakes and mild climates for its satisfaction. If he loves variety, he should not plant himself in the midst of a mainly snow-clad region. One district will suit him best in one year, another in another. That will not delight him equally in maturity which enlists the strongest enthusiasm of his youth. But the variety that is in the Alps at large is infinite. There will always be discoverable the right thing for each who cares to search it out.
The habit of constantly returning to the same spot may almost be regarded as a vice to be avoided.
"To give space for wandering is it
That the world was made so wide."
Assuredly the wanderer has most rewards. The more he knows of other regions, the more is the significance increased of the view which he at any moment beholds, and so much the more capable does his eye become of recognising all sorts and varieties of beauty. But this is only true of one who travels with observant eyes and receptive understanding. It is possible to travel far and wide without ever really seeing anything. Such travel is the merest waste of energy. To travel should be to learn; but travelling is only learning when the traveller makes learning his purpose.
Discrimination is the quality that distinguishes intelligence from brutal greed. It differentiates the gourmet from the gourmand. It divides the mountain-lover from the common peak peak-hunter. It is the quality that continues growing longest, whose exercise is never wearisome, whose reward is always increasing. To be able to discriminate between the qualities of different Alpine regions and to appreciate all their varied merits is to know the Alps. All that it has been possible to do in the present chapter is to indicate in briefest terms some of the characteristic charms of the principal regions, known incompletely to the present writer, and by him but feebly grasped. He ventures to hope that even this sketch, slight and falteringly drawn as it is, may yet serve to suggest to some readers a whole world of delights, which, if they choose, they may immediately enter into and possess.
LOCARNO AT SUNSET, AND NORTH END OF LAGO MAGGIORE
By all means visit the famous centres. A true instinct has marked them out and made them widely known as specially calculated to awaken the imagination of the town-dwelling modern world. But do not regard them as the whole Alps; do not start with the assurance that there alone is Alpine beauty to be found in highest perfection. For you, perhaps, the highest Alpine beauty resides in less well advertised localities. Let each seek out for himself that which he can most keenly enjoy. It will be his possession and not another's. Let him take it to his soul. But let him also remember that there are other capacities, which he does not possess or has not yet developed, and that for them also the mountains great and small possess powers of satisfaction as rich and manifold as any he has himself experienced.
CHAPTER V
THE MOODS OF THE MOUNTAINS
MOUNTAINS do not merely vary from district to district, but from time to time. Were it not so, how soon should we tire of any single outlook or the neighbourhood of any one centre! They change from hour to hour with the incidence of sunlight, and from day to day with the passing season of the year. They change also, often from moment to moment, with the inconstancy of the weather. In fact they are never twice absolutely the same. In the heyday of our scrambling enthusiasm, we perhaps regarded this variability of the mountains with less satisfaction than it obtains from us later. We should have chosen an unbroken series of long and cloudless days, with the snow all melted from the rocks, and the summit views all complete in cloudless, transparent visibility. Yet even then we found a singular joy in snatching an ascent in some brief fine interval between two spells of bad weather. Whereas the details of many a featurelessly fine ascent have passed from our minds, which of us does not remember, and recall with a keen delight, climbs accomplished in the teeth of storms, when Nature seemed to stand forth as an antagonist whom we wrestled fiercely with, and joyously overcame?
We may regard mountain moods from two points of view; as experienced by the climber, and as affecting the aspect of mountain scenery when beheld from a greater or less distance. The circumstances of his sport, though in most cases they restrict the climber to one season of the year, fortunately compel him to be on mountains at almost all hours of the twenty-four. Most sports are functions of daylight; the climber must travel by night as frequently as by day. None better than he, unless it be the astronomer, knows the full secrets of midnight beauty. What climber's memory is not stored with priceless recollections of the night and its myriad voices, its noble diapason. By day the eye is supreme; by night the ear. Then it is, when marching along upland valleys, that one hears the full chorus of the rushing torrent, now booming close at hand, accompanied by infinite ripplings and splashings of little waves, now fainter and more sibilant but no less musical in the distance. Then, too, it is that the breezes sing most sweetly among the trees; then that the glaciers are most melodious, the moulins most tuneful; then, too, on the highest levels, that the ultimate silences are most impressive. The hum of a falling stone, the rattle of a discharge of rocks, the boom of an avalanche, the crack of an opening crevasse, all these sounds should be heard framed in the silence of night, when the sense of hearing is most alert and the imagination most easily stirred.
Who does not recall the velvety darkness of the sleeping valleys through which he passed near the midnight hour when just setting forth for some long ascent? How that contrasted with and set off the brilliancy of the star-spangled sky, where Orion, the Alpine climber's heavenly guide, shone over some col or darkly perceptible ridge, and bade him expect the coming of the day. Then, as the trees are left behind and the open alp is reached, while night still reigns in her darkest hour, how sweet are the airs, how uplifting the sense of widening space and enlarging sky, how stimulating the wonder of the vaguely felt glaciers and mountain-presences around!
Oftenest perhaps it is moonlight when the climber starts earliest upon his way; then indeed he beholds glorious scenes and revels in the sight, nor envies his sleeping friends in the valley below. Ah! dearly remembered splendours of full moonshine upon the snow! how gladly we retain the images of you in the very treasury of our hearts! Yet who shall attempt to draw them forth for another, or write down even a faint suggestion of their beauty for those by whom they have never been beheld? Surely at no time are the great snows endowed with more dignity, more of the impressiveness of visible size, more aspect of aloofness, of belonging to another and a nobler world, than when the full moon shines perfectly upon them. And then, too, how the snow-fields glisten over all their wide expanse, yet with a pale effulgence that does not paralyse the eye! What velvet blackness embellishes the shadows! How the rocks are fretted against the snow! How clear are the foregrounds of glacier; how spiritual are the distant peaks; how softly lies the faint light in the deep hollows! Surely Night, the ancient Mother, speaks with a voice which all her children understand.
MOONLIGHT IN THE VAL FORMAZZA FROM THE TOSA FALLS
At such hours and amidst such scenes the mere onlooker oftenest shivers and suffers, so that half the beauty escapes him; but the active mountaineer, keenly awake, with the blood alive within him and a day of hopes ahead, misses no sight that he is capable of seeing, yet dreams, who shall say what visions of beauty that flit before his mind and vanish in swift succession. And then—suddenly—he turns his head and there in the east—always unexpected—is the bed of white that heralds the day. The night is dying. Her rich darks and whites grow pallid. Each moment a layer of darkness peels off. The sky turns blue before one knows it; the rocks grow brown; there is blue in the crevasses, and green upon the swards—all low-toned yet distinct. Faint puffs of warm air come, we know not whence, touch our faces, and are gone. The lantern has been extinguished; we stride out more freely; the day awakens within us also.