Maritime Alps

“ On the flanks of these mountains, and on the sub-Alpine ranges of hills or plains adjoining them, those appearances which have been so often alluded to, as distinguishing or accompanying the drift, between the 50th and 70th parallels of north latitude, suddenly reappear and assume, in a southern region, a truly arctic development. Where the Alps are highest, the largest erratic blocks have been sent forth; as, for example, from the regions of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa, into the adjoining parts of Switzerland and Italy ”

“ At length the dawn really appeared, brightening the blue of the eastern firmament; at first it was a mere augmentation of cold light, but by degrees it assumed a warmer tint. The long uniform incline of the glacier being passed, we reached the first eminences of snow which heave like waves around the base of the Jungfrau. This is the region of beauty in the higher Alps—beauty pure and tender, out of which emerges the savage scenery of the peaks. ”

“ In a single day almost any of them may be ascended from snout to snow-field, and descended again. To explore their remotest recesses no elaborately equipped expedition is required. Yet they are large enough to be imposing, and penetrate deep enough into the heart of the hills to isolate their votaries completely from the world of human habitation. It is to this medium quality that the Alps owe much of their charm. This, too, it is that makes them an almost perfect mountain playground. ”

“ Writing of his trip from Christchurch to Hokitika, he says:—“The Alps in the Middle Island, 400 miles in length, resemble the Swiss Alps only in name, as their slopes are clothed with luxuriant vegetation, often to the snow level, and their shapes have a picturesqueness and individuality of their own, owing to their crystalline formation as against the great conglomerate beds of the Miocene formation of portions of the Swiss Alps. ”

“ Giant Alps clothed half up their steep sides with evergreen pines,—whose dark forms end abruptly where snow and ice begin,—stand out against a pure sky of more than Italian blue, and only when a cleared saddle is reached can the traveller look down over the wooded hills and vallies rolling away inland before him, or turn his eyes sea-ward to the bold coast with its many rivers, whose wide mouths foam right out to where the great Pacific waves are heaving under the bright winter sun. ”

“ Early in the season the Southern Alps, from Savoy and Cogne almost down to the Mediterranean, make an exquisite wandering-ground, all too little visited. In May and June we can often enjoy among them flowers, clear climbing and free wandering, long before their big northern brothers have shaken off their winter coats of snow and storm. They retain much of the undiscovered charm of the great Alps in earlier days, and a variety of beauty that can challenge comparison with the impressiveness of greater heights. ”

“ They resist our best climbing qualifications and are as inaccessible as the mists above our highest tops. And we prefer, naturally, our talking companions, those who shrink not from the task of ready interpretation.
“The Alps form a book of nature as wide and mysterious as Life,” says Frederic Harrison in his Alpine Jubilee, in one of those clear-cut and well-measured passages of mountain homage, which are balm to the tormented hearts of those who feel themselves afloat on the clouds of mystery. “To know, to feel, to understand the Alps is to know, to feel, to understand Humanity.” ”

“ Another characteristic effect of the High Alps often presents itself when one has been climbing for two or three hours, with nothing in sight but the varying wreaths of mist that chased each other monotonously along the rocky ribs up whose snow-covered backbone we were laboriously fighting our way. Suddenly there is a puff of wind, and looking round we find that we have in an instant pierced the clouds, and emerged, as it were, on the surface of the ocean of vapour. ”

“ Better acquaintance has led to the discovery of all the beauties and benefits the Alps offer to those who seek them in a proper mood. We have learnt thoroughly to appreciate the variety imparted to all nature by the accidents of hill scenery, to know and love the thousand forms of peaks, the changing charm of lakes and forests, the rush of the grey Swiss torrent under the upright pines, and the blue repose of the Italian stream under the beech shadows. ”

“ Men paint best as a rule the scenery of their own homes. Perugino gives us Umbrian hills and the lake of Thrasimene; Cima and Titian Venetian landscapes and colours; Turner loves most English seas and mists. It is useless, except for a rare genius, to go once to Switzerland and paint one or two pictures, for in the mountains knowledge is especially needed. The first view of the Alps is in most cases a disappointment. Our expectations have been unconsciously based on the great mounds of cumulus cloud which roll up against lowland skies. ”

“ Great glaciers, miles in extent, put a chill into the air that makes you shudder. The gap that I thought half a mile wide is a space nearly six times that distance across; we feel dwarfed amid the immensity and stupendous grandeur of the scene, and, as we unconsciously become silent, are struck with the unbroken, awful stillness of the Alps.
We are above the murmur of brooks and the [401] rush of waterfalls; no bird or insect chirrups here; there is not even a bush for the wind to sigh through. ”

“ As the line of sunrise runs directly across their highest peaks, the effect is startling. The greatest elevations are about 12,000 feet. The observer's eye is instantly caught by a great valley, running like a furrow through the center of the mountain mass, and about eighty or ninety miles in length. The sealike expanse south and southeast of the Alps is the Mare Imbrium, and it is along the coast of this so-called sea that the Alps attain their greatest height. ”

“ The vivid hue of pasturages and broad-leaved trees is belted by the heavier shade of pine-woods, and both are capped by a dazzling snow-crown, producing an effect to a painter's eye crude and unmanageable. The Alps have, in common with most great natures, rough and rugged places, such as are not found in more everyday lives or landscapes. ”

“ The effect of both straits and channels is best imagined by picturing a Switzerland into whose valleys and gorges the sea has been let in; above tower snow-clad peaks, while below precipices, clothed with beautiful verdure, go straight down to the water’s edge. The simile of a sea-invaded Alps is indeed fairly accurate, for this is the tail of the Andes which has been partially submerged. The mountains do not rise above 5,000 feet, but the full benefit of the height is obtained as they are seen from the sea-level. ”

“ As a wild, magnificent sea of ice-covered mountain tops, the Alps have no parallel in America. As a far-reaching system of splendid lofty ranges clothed in the green of dense forests and surmounted by towering, isolated summits of snowy volcanoes, the Cascades are wholly without their equal in Europe. This is the testimony of famous travelers and alpinists, among them Ambassador Bryce, who has written of our Northwestern mountain scenery:
We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or in the Pyrenees. ”

“ Instinctively we summon up recollections of the Alps for comparison with the mountains we are leaving. And the comparison is not found to be entirely a sacrilege. The Alps are first and preeminent among European mountains; the repose of their immensity, the sense of power, the indefinable, spell they exert, lesser ranges cannot in general features attempt to rival. But this is not to say that a lesser range, is a wholly inferior range,—that even in this effect of immensity, of power, it may not at certain points bear almost full comparison. ”

“ The Alps are very rich in lakes and streams. Among the chief of the former are the Lakes of Geneva, Constance, Zürich, Thun, Brienz, on the north side; on the south Maggiore, Como, Lugano, Garda, &c. The drainage is carried to the North Sea by the Rhine, to the Mediterranean by the Rhone, to the Adriatic by the Po, to the Black Sea by the Danube.
In the lower valleys of the Alps the mean temperature ranges from 50° to 60°. Half-way up the Alps it averages about 32°—a height which in the snowy regions it never reaches. ”

“ If hours of thoughtfulness and seclusion are necessary to the development of a true love for the Alps, it is no less essential to a right understanding of their beauty that we should pass some wet and gloomy days among the mountains. The unclouded sunsets and sunrises which often follow one another in September in the Alps, have something terrible. They produce a satiety of splendour, and oppress the mind with a sense of perpetuity. I remember spending such a season in one of the Oberland valleys, high up above the pine-trees, in a little châlet. ”

“ On the surface of the earth, we find that the precipitous sides of all great mountain-ranges face the sea. The terrestrial Alps, for example, have their steep side towards the Mediterranean. Those who have crossed the Alps by the pass of the St Gothard, will remember the long, gradual ascent from Fluelen, through the Canton of Uri, and the sudden descent and terrific zig-zags down the Val Tremola to the plains of Italy. All the ranges in the moon have their steep sides, in like manner, towards the so-called seas. ”

“ Alp was still piled on Alp, but we had reached the summit of the pile. The only valleys we saw were fearful scars in the mountain flank, half filled with eternal snow, and the crumbling skeletons of dead Alps. No sound—no herdsman's jödle—no cowbell's tinkle ever reached to half way up our [Pg 349] rocky perch: we were far above the vulture and the chamois. We were alone with the rock, and snow, and sky! It seemed profanity to whisper—and yet there was Joseph, after a glance round, and a short "schöne panorama!" ”

“ Even in the sternest scenery of the Alps some sign of vegetation lingers; and I remember to have found a tuft of lichen growing on the only rock which pierced through the ice on the summit of the Jungfrau. The absolute solitude, the intense stillness of the upper Alps is most impressive; no cattle, no pasturage, no bird, nor any sound of life,—and, indeed, even if there were, the rarity of the air in these high regions is such that sound is hardly transmissible. ”

“ Indeed, all these Alps are in shape more abrupt and fantastic than any I ever saw.
I wish I could by my imperfect words bring before you not only the grander features, but every minute peculiarity, every varying hue, of this matchless scene. The progress of each day brings with it its appropriate change. When I rise in the morning and look out, our own side is bathed in sunshine, and we see the opposite mountains raising 68their black masses in sharp relief against the eastern sky, while dark shadows are flung by the abrupt precipices on the fair lake beneath. ”

“ Many people and animals inhabit them, and almost every metal is dug out of the Alps, especially silver. 'Mid such charms as these men live among the mountains, and Nature blooms as if Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres reigned there. No one who saw the Alps from afar would believe what a delicious Paradise is to be found amid the eternal snow and mountains of perpetual winter and never-melting ice.'
Very limited praise only extended to the valleys! ”

“ On the plain all is monotony. Summer and winter, the same landmarks, the same sky, the same sounds, surround the man. But around the dweller in the mountains,—and especially such mountains as these,—all is variety and grandeur. Now the Alps are seen with their sunlight summits and their shadowless sides; anon they veil their mighty forms in clouds and tempests. The living machinery of the mist, too, is continually varying the landscape, now engulphing valleys, now blotting out crags and mountain peaks, and suspending before the eye a cold and cheerless curtain of vapour ”

“ But if we confine the meaning of the term Alps to those parts of the chain that are what is commonly called “Alpine,” where the height is sufficient to support a considerable mass of perpetual snow, our boundaries to the west and to the east must be placed at spots other than those mentioned above. To the west the limit will then be the Col de Tenda (6145 ft.) ”

“ The Pyrenees form a chain of nearly three hundred miles long, and upwards of fifty broad—a province of mountains, intersected by valleys of romantic beauty and exuberant fertility. But the Alps, from their position between the two most brilliant nations of the Continent—France and Italy—and from the extraordinary series of memorable events of which they have been the theatre, since the earliest periods of European history, are the most celebrated range of mountains in the world. ”

“ A geologist who has been trained among the scenery of Britain finds his first view of the Alps to be the beginning of a new chapter in the Book of Nature, but a visit to America more like the beginning of a new volume. There almost everything is on a colossal scale—rivers, lakes, forests, prairies, distances, such as cannot be matched, at any rate in the more accessible parts of Europe. ”

“ For those with means and time sufficient to indulge their love of climbing among the great Alps, the old snow ways of the mountains still remain sufficient in number and in sensation. But for the ever-increasing number of men whom circumstances limited to the lesser hills of our own islands or to the lower alpine ranges, the grass and snow ways began to prove too unexciting as their novelty became exhausted, and the rock peaks and the sheer rock faces of the Lake Fells, Skye or the Dolomites offered a new temptation. ”