“ Those years taught us how meaningless is the cry that the Alps are played out. Railways and cheap trippers, it is said, have robbed Switzerland of all charm. Grindelwald is simply Brighton by the mountains, and so on and so forth. For the railways I agree with Mr. Belloc. ‘They are the trenches that drain our modern civilisation. Avoid them by so much as a quarter of a mile and you may have as much peace as would fill a nose bag.’ Nor need we deny even to the cheap tripper the possible possession of a soul for the beautiful. ”

“ Snow mountains are seldom friendly. Sometimes they seem to smile, but their welcome, for all its glitter, is treacherous and cruel. With lower hills the case is rather different. The rock precipices and windy fells of Cumberland, the spaces of the Yorkshire moors, have an individuality as complete as Mont Blanc, but less overwhelming. Their anger is sullen, their moods more passive. At times they are almost gracious, but the difference is one of degree only. The quality of their emotion sees no variant in glacier and heather. ”

“ Every mountain lover brings something new to the common worship: for each of us spells out a different syllable in the universal message of the hills. So these pages contain an attempt to analyse one aspect of the mountains, that aspect which is caught in childhood and youth.
The thread that binds the scattered memories of seventeen summers and eleven winters in the Alps is the half-belief that in some sense the mountains are not only so many tons of rock and ice, that they are something more than the ruins of chaos, and possess an individuality elusive but none the less very real. ”

“ For to the guide, qua guide, a mountain is not a form of the Idea of Beauty, but a problem in higher mathematics, each possible route an indeterminate equation in terms of glacier, rock, ice, and snow; and the great guide is he who can solve most truly in theory and in practice the daily variations of these and other unknown quantities. A mountain to him may be like a great book made odious by being set as a holiday task. ”

“ But though climbing, even in the British Isles, means all that we have said and more, far more, beside, there is just one grain of truth lurking at the bottom of what Ruskin said. To the rock-climber the pure æsthetic pleasure of contemplation comes in flashes, not in a steady glow. There is so much to distract him—the technicalities of his art, the continuous attention to details, half automatic as it may become, which alone makes climbing justifiable—even the voices and proximity of his companions. ”

“ We still have the animal and the primitive man within us, linking us to the past and the flow of time; and reason, the common gift of all men, keeps always lurking in the background. Yet we still strive after this immediacy of fellowship, but there come times when the snow-peaks and the rocks have fed our appreciation on too strong a draught, when our senses, relying on themselves alone, are over-sated, and there seems a film before our eyes, so that we are no longer ‘alive and drinking up our wonder,’ but the draught stagnates without us and turns to bitterness. ”

“ But life is vital only by contrast, and it may have been that the mountain passion found its strongest ally in a childhood divided between the generous open life of the hills and the sullen gloom of a London Square.
To those days we owe the fascination that even now invests the railway journey to the Alps with a romance that an older school would have us believe vanished with the last stage-coach. Perhaps it did for them. But for those who have been brought up on steam, there can be few things more provocative of wonder than the journey to Switzerland. ”

“ Their moods are the moods of primitive humanity, their spirit, like their form, is unmodified, above and below civilisation. Every climber must, at one time or another, have shuddered before the hatred of an Alpine peak, the hatred of all that is primeval in nature for all that is artificially progressive in man. I remember one evening sitting above the Col de Vosa and watching the glow of the sunset on Mont Blanc. ”

“ To our disgust the summit lay still far off to our left, and to attain it we had to follow a narrow ridge of sloppy snow; on the far side of the peak we found crusted snow, to complete our tribulation. Thus we found both good and evil unexpectedly, and like Christian fell ‘from running to going, and from going to clambering upon hands and knees,’ until we wished ourselves trippers once more.
It is, above all, when the climber passes from one valley to another that the unexpected is liable to occur. ”

“ And as I watched the magic web of twilight creeping up the terrible northern wall of the Matterhorn, and drank in the silence of the upper world—a silence that is something more than a mere negation of sound—I felt that the lasting rewards of the craft are not the exotic moments of difficulty or danger, but the humbler commonplaces of every climb, the dawn breaking the shadows on the snow, the vision of far horizons melting into the roof of heaven, the peace and radiant grace of sunset on the hills. ”

“ We go to the mountains as a refuge from the dull levels of existence. But even for us may come a day when there is no savour in our appreciation of the too familiar outlines, when our eyes are dulled and our senses blunted. For though the contrast between the artificiality of life and the peace and freedom of the hills has never been so marked as it is to-day, the step from the one to the other has never been so short. ”

“ What climber has not known the moment when this has failed him suddenly, and he has realised the impudence of his presence among the mountain sanctuaries and of his trial of strength face to face with the mountain’s bulk; when he either expiates the crime of his intrusion by a great and tranquillising humility, or struggles, only to find all he sees assume a mask of grinning hatefulness? ”

“ In their decay they are laying new foundations. Grain torn from grain of solid rock, boulder from boulder is swept away; layer after layer of grains or boulder is laid—‘well and truly laid’; rock system piled upon rock system; till the time comes, and all this is upheaved into a chain of peaks which, though their every particle were taken from the substance of that older chain, will be like it in being a mountain range, but in that alone. So they have their being, in a different and vaster cycle than man’s, their life only another fragment of that change which is the single fixed reality. ”

“ The mountain pilgrim will have to fight as hard for his peace of mind; he is a prey, as was Christian, to ‘the carnal arguments of one Mr. Worldly Wiseman.’ The latter finds his way, in body as well as in spirit, to the most secluded corners of the Alps. He is certainly what many would call a ‘centrist,’ except that he gave up climbing at an early age. He delights in pointing out the futility of risking an otherwise valuable neck in the pursuit of discomfort and vain glory; in his view, the climber has nothing to lose and everything to gain by shirking all difficulties. ”

“ Perhaps 154 encompassing mists will give place suddenly at the summit to a sunny prospect of some great cathedral range, to take our place in one of those processions and descend to the richness of an Italian land. Or, if it is on the far side that the mists have gathered, and the gateway of the pass is barred by a deep grey veil of nothingness, at least the mists will lift high enough to show the two gentle arms of our mother earth descending to where we are, strong and lit by a strange internal light, ready to hold us up as we take the last step into the grey, where we shall see no more. ”

“ The orthodox climber, however, does not care for romance. His love of the mountains is based, like domestic love, on knowledge and understanding. It is reasoned, almost respectable. But the visions of Byron and of the German Romantics have the magic of first love, passionately adoring what is unknown and out of reach. It is profitless to weigh romance against reason. I can only say that I never loved the mountains better than in those long afternoons when they shone before my spirit, hidden from the eyes of my body. ”

“ Each stream is itself part of the great cycle of water, each is 152 an agent in the mountain cycle, perpetually hurrying the actual fabric of the mountains down to the sea; their voice is never silent even on the summits; they are the lords of the peaks, moulding them slowly to new shapes, and their murmur seems to call the clouds, ‘chased by the hounding winds from distant seas,’ to come and renew their springs for a new course of the never-ending circle. ”

“ Winding away from us up to the skyline goes the pilgrim’s progress, the slow toiling advance upwards to gain the 153 view of things not seen. Many there are, but few together; some on side-tracks; some on the old steep road with its rough stones now overgrown, more on the new smooth driving road which turns about so that they can take their eyes from the goal; some even making a path for themselves, either above on the hillside, steering for some nearer gap on the skyline, which does not cross the main watershed; others below the road, toiling painfully along the stream-bed. ”

“ In the first place, for true appreciation more than a mere acquaintance is necessary. Mountains are reserved. They extend no real welcome even when they do not actively resent familiarity. Only patient perseverance can gauge their real significance. The men of old hated them. Perhaps as they watched from afar the towering army of the Alps, there came to them on the breeze some breath of mountain anger, and they trembled, hardly knowing why. ”

“ This sense of the beauty of his surroundings can never be far from the climber’s consciousness, though sometimes, it is true, the physical side is uppermost. There is the sheer gymnastic joy that comes from the ready response of muscle and nerve to sudden need, the sense of perfect bodily fitness which the Greeks prized among the best things of life. Nowhere else does a measure of strength and skill meet with such a splendid reward as in the mountains. ”

“ Without 218 rope or axe we found our way to the Gleckstein Hut. There we realised the impossibility of any serious attempt on the Wetterhorn itself, and turned aside towards one of the great buttresses below the main peak. By a nasty chimney and an arête which would prove trying to most unroped climbers we reached the top of our little peak. From our feet the great curtain of cliff that overshadows Grindelwald fell away in one curve to the pastures of the Scheidegg. A touch of uncertainty as to our chance of recovering the line of ascent added to the majesty of that compelling precipice. ”

“ If you imagine, you will see in the mind’s eye those same summits, thus continually attacked, gradually shrinking; preserving their beauty to the last, no doubt, like our lovely lake mountains, which though in respect of their former height they be but as roots when the trunk is fallen, yet in themselves show not a trace of decay, and lift their heads as strong and fresh as ever. ”

“ I cannot understand what fixed this bourne, nor yet why a certain slope of scree and slag leading up to a cluster of rock and pine should even now seem laden with brooding fear. So, too, though we did not believe in the ice maiden, we yet felt that certain mountains were, so to speak, healthy and others provokingly sinister. The child in touch with Nature finds his own fairy land, and the mountains are the most potent magicians. ”

“ The cold wind that comes with dawn will waken him as the first thin mists are gathering round the peaks three thousand feet above. As he climbs the steep slopes of heather in the half-light the mists roll down to meet him, till he is the only living, moving thing in a world of whiteness and silence. The heather dwindles, here and there black rock-ridges show for a moment and disappear. As in a dream he takes no count of time or distance, till at last he 174 steps out upon the summit and the sun meets him, shining level with his eyes. ”

“ The important artistic fact in a mountain scene is the intricate rhythm of line and slope, the true relation of curve to curve, and this is obscured and lost in photographic realism, as it is never realised in the scribblings of a child. The mountain artist must grasp every detail, but distinguish what he requires and discard all else. That is why in the early days of landscape-painting the excitement of new beauties inevitably caused overcrowded pictures. ”

“ Each age hears different accents in the mountain voices. To the old mountaineer the riven lines of cliff may speak of failing strength or inevitable decay. For the child the white far gates may hide an unknown kingdom of magic. But active Youth need fear no comparison of strength, need draw no moral from decay. For him the gates that childhood could not pass have opened, and x disclosed a wonderland ‘more real than childhood’s fairy trove,’ a country of difficult romance, and of perpetual challenge to the undying instincts of knight errantry and young adventure. ”