Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond

“ Beneath our feet the whole plain of Switzerland lay with a faint purple haze drawn over it like a veil, a few green sparkles just pointing out the Lake of Thun. Nearer, and apparently almost immediately below us, lay the Wengern Alp, and the little inn we had left twelve hours before, whilst we could just see the back of the labyrinth of crevasses where we had wandered so long. Through a telescope I could even distinguish people standing about the inn, who no doubt were contemplating our motions. As we rested, the Chamouni guides had cut a staircase up the slope, and we prepared to follow. ”

“ The wind here was far less trying as we were sheltered by the topmost pinnacle of the mountain. To me the feeling of danger from a gale on a rock peak is due even more to the difficulty of hearing what one’s companions are saying than to the risk of one’s balance being upset. It is extremely disconcerting, when a climber, descending steep rocks and anxious to make a long but perhaps an easy step downwards to good foot-hold, calls for more rope, and is promptly swung clear out into space by an invisible guide above, who has misunderstood his orders. ”

“ First, the snow begins to slide gently down, then it gathers pace and volume, and even miles away the thunder of its fall can be heard as it leaps from ledge to ledge. Covered with a cloud of smoking, powdery dust, it is a veritable Niagara of giant height, and as it descends towards the forests, it carries with it whatever it finds in its path. Trees are mown down with as much ease as the tender grass of spring. Houses are lifted from the ground and tossed far away.
An avalanche is preceded by a blast even more destructive than the masses of snow which it hurls along. ”

“ Something weighed on our minds as we too lay down and tried to sleep. The towering cone of Tetnuld, the distant view of Uschba, Elbruz, and the giant Dych Tau, the rock and snow-slopes, pictured themselves one after another as dissolving views on the white walls of the tent. The expedition was over, but the pleasure and the impressions it had evoked were not. Faster and faster followed the visions as in delirium. I sat up, and in the excitement of the moment dealt a great blow at the nearest object, which, as it chanced, was Andenmatten’s ribs. ”

“ The glacier, starting in its infant purity from some white, unsullied peak, loses, before many years have past, its spotless character. The wintry frosts, gathering [Pg 70] into iron bonds the streams which trickle down the mountain-sides, expand the water in freezing, and shatter the rocks with a force that the most solid cliffs cannot resist. Broken and weathered fragments are washed down from the slopes on every fall of rain, and dropping on to the once unspotted bosom of the glacier, swell the burden which is gradually laid upon it with advancing years. ”

“ An inferior or less daring guide would have hesitated to enter upon the descent in a dense mist; and Croz himself would have done right to pause had he been less magnificent in physique. He acted, rather than said, 'Where snow lies fast, there man can go; where ice exists, a way may be cut; it is a question of power; I have the power—all you have to do is to follow me.' Truly, he did not spare himself, and could he have performed the feats upon the boards of a theatre that he did upon this occasion, he would have brought down the house with thunders of applause. ”

“ There is the time when, flushed with youth and victory, you seem to go on from strength to strength, faster from year to year, more confident in foot and hand, more scornful of the rope which you have seen so often used, not as a means of safety, but as an assistance to the progression of the weaker brethren, until one day your foot unaccountably finds the step too small, or the bit of rock comes away in your hand, or the outraged spirit of the mountains smites you suddenly with a stone, and all is changed. ”

“ A cork, when cast upon a stream near its centre, will move more quickly than when thrown near the side, for the progress of the stream is retarded by its banks. As you and your guide stood together on the solid waves of that Amazon of ice, you were borne resistlessly along. You saw the boulders perched upon their frozen pedestals; these were the spoils of distant hills, quarried from summits far away, and floated to lower levels like timber blocks upon the Rhone. As you advanced towards the centre you were carried down the valley with an ever-augmenting velocity. ”

“ After long and tedious efforts, lasting for a period of time which he cannot now even approximately estimate, he succeeded in his flanking movement, and finally, with great labour and peril, climbed back to the ridge by a slope of frozen snow and ice broken with rocks. It would be difficult to imagine anything more terrible than this lonely climb over ice-covered rocks, the painful cutting of steps up an almost precipitous wall, with a precipice many thousand feet deep at his back, down which the smallest slip would send him to certain death. ”

“ A large glacier is fed by such a gigantic mass of snow that it is in its upper part hundreds of feet thick. Of course when it reaches warmer places it begins to melt. But the quantity of ice composing it is so great that it takes a long time before it disappears, and a big glacier sometimes flows down far below the wild and rocky parts of mountains and reaches the neighbourhood of forests and corn-fields. It is very beautiful at Chamonix to see the white, glittering ice of the Glacier des Bossons flowing in a silent stream through green meadows. ”

“ The winds and storms, too, contribute their share of dust and sand, and as the glacier still flows on, shrunken in size and laden with heaps of earth and rocks, at length it lays itself to rest, a mass of dirty ice and stones, in the valley towards which it has been ceaselessly progressing. ”

“ Looking over, we saw at once that, as we had thought probable, had we been able to get from La Bérarde on to the ridge at the head of the Glacier du Vallon, it would have been impossible to get down on to the Glacier Noir, as the cliffs are almost as precipitous as those down which we were looking. On the right bank of the Glacier Noir towered the dark crags of the Pelvoux, Crête du Pelvoux, and Ailefroide, a most glorious sight, presenting a combination of, perhaps, the finest rock-forms in the Alps; I certainly never saw so long and steep a line of cliffs, rising so abruptly from a glacier. ”

“ It is sad to look back to the terrible ending of Roman's career at a period when he was the best young guide in the Alps. How little, in September 1895, as with the Imbodens, father and son, I stood on the summit of the Lyskamm, did any of us think that never again should we be together on a mountain, and that from the very peak on which we were Roman would be precipitated in one awful fall of hundreds of feet, his companions, Dr Guntner and the second guide Ruppen, also losing their lives. ”

“ Time, nine o’clock on a cloudless evening some years ago; place, the Bär Hotel at Grindelwald; season of the year, the middle of September, the most enjoyable month in the higher Alps, given fine weather, of all the twelve. Grindelwald lies in well-earned repose this lovely night. No more do tourists in their thousands infest village, hotel salons, and dining-rooms. No throng of touting guides and mule-drivers lingers in the courtyard; no crowd of aspiring travellers makes noisy preparation for the morrow’s excursions. ”

“ After some tiring step-cutting on the gentler slopes above the rocks, which, like the west face, were sheathed in ice, we reached at last the south end of the little flat ridge which forms the summit of the Dent Blanche, where a small flagstaff is usually to be seen. Here there was an enormous snow cornice which overhung the eastern side. The little cloud merely clung to the cornice on the ridge, and evidently had no malice in it at all. None of us put down the time at which we reached the top. ”

“ Then there came a short troublesome bit of snow scramble, where the heaped-up cornice had fallen back from the final rock. There we paused for a moment, for the summit was but a few feet from us, and Hartley, who was ahead, courteously allowed me to unrope and go on first. In a few seconds I clutched at the last broken rocks, and hauled myself up on to the sloping summit. There for a moment I stood alone gazing down on Chamouni. The holiday dream of five years was accomplished; the Aiguille du Dru was climbed. Where in the wide world will you find a sport able to yield pleasure like this? ”

“ Never from that hour was the tame chamois seen on the slopes of the Scheideck, but its bell was often heard by the hunters ringing among the wild solitudes of the Wetterhorn.
It is only when the chamois has lost, through disease, that amount of intelligence with which it is gifted by nature that it will abandon its mountain home and seek the haunts of man. ”

“ The great couloir was seamed across with a gigantic crevasse, the angle of the slope being so sharp that the upper half overhung, and we had only crossed in the morning by standing on the lower lip, cutting hand-holes in the upper, and shoving up the leader from the shoulder of the second man: hence, in descending, our position was similar to that of a man on the mantel-shelf who should wish to climb down into the fire itself. We chose the obvious alternative of a jump to the curb, which was, I suppose, about 15 feet below us and made of steep ice with a deep and deceptive covering of snow. ”

“ When one remembers all the facilities for climbing which are found at present in every Alpine centre, the experienced guides who may be had, the comfortable huts which obviate the need for a bivouac out of doors, the knowledge of the art of mountaineering which is available if any desire to acquire it, one marvels more and more at the undaunted persistence displayed by the pioneers of present-day mountaineering in their struggle with the immense difficulties which beset them on every side. ”