Alpine

“ Every now and then we caught beautiful glimpses of the distant Alps, abruptly rising from the green level of the valley, beyond the hills clad with the dark verdure of the pine forests, piled curiously one over another, which run the whole length of the plain, forming the first steps, as it were, of those mighty Alpine mountains which rear their magnificent heights, shrouded in eternal glaciers, behind these graduated ranges. ”

“ As I stroll about these hills, more leisurely, more thoughtfully than I used to do of old in my hot mountaineering days, I have tried to think out what it is that makes the Alpine landscape so marvelous a tonic to the spirit—what is the special charm of it to those who have once felt all its inexhaustible magic. ”

“ The countless mountain lakes, the wild fiords—from whose deep recesses one but rarely sees the sun—the shady solitudes, so painfully still that one shudders with a chilling sense of loneliness, and the easily-approached glaciers and waterfalls—many with a plunge of over a thousand feet, that amaze the Alpine traveller—thrill and fill the beholder with astonishment. ”

“ If you are fortunate, and have one of the bright, soft afternoons that sometimes show the Alps in their full beauty, as you descend the slope of the Jura, from which you command the whole panorama of the opposite range, you may see, as the day dies, the last shadow pass with strange rapidity from peak to peak of the Alpine summits. ”

“ Moreover, Alpine climbing has revealed the wonders of the kingdom of frost and snow. The imprisoned colours of glacier ice, the ruin of its fantastic towers and tottering minarets, the splendour of its fretted and icicle-hung caves are no longer familiar only to Arctic travellers. The overpowering height of some peak soaring majestically heavenwards can never have been felt as it is by those who understand through experience the dimensions and meaning of each rock and patch of snow on its ridges. ”

“ I have been in Alpine villages where, at the end of every squalid alley, there towered up a great, pure, silent, white peak. That is what our lives may be; however noisome, crowded, petty the little lane in which we live, the Alp is at the end of it there, if we only choose to lift our eyes and look. ”

“ The grandeur and sublimity of the Alpine scene is to some extent compensated for by the broader expanse of undulating waters, the larger sweep of productive valleys and verdant slopes, “set with the homes of men,” breathing the air of freedom, whose heritage is liberty under law. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Before such enthusiasm who dares to urge that the Alpine dawn may be as well seen from a point to which the railway will take you? Or that the climber's penalty before the dawn is night in a hut which has but elementary ventilation to counteract the fumes of lamps, stoves, and steaming clothes? Going to the Alps, climb most certainly if you can climb. But supposing want of ability or inclination to climb, it is yet possible to enjoy most of their beauties. ”

“ If a man who has climbed for thirty years cannot pump up something more lively as his final summary of Alpine joys, what reply can we make to Ruskin’s contention that “the real beauties of the Alps are to be seen and to be seen only where all may see it, the cripple, the child, and the man of grey hairs”? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The nearest thing I can liken it to on earth is the view of the Alps from some of the Swiss mountains. I have seen something a little like it when I rested once on the summit of Jungfrau, and looked upon the chains of Alpine peaks,–on Eiger, the Wetterhorn, and far-off Mont Blanc. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The extensive Alpine valley through which rushed a considerable stream lay far in the depths of the mountain-range, so secluded and lonely that it might have been entirely shut off from the world and its turmoil ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [100] 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. ”

“ When the next great ice-cap shall sweep down from the north pole upon these beautiful alpine flowers they will have to travel somewhere. There is manifestly as much necessity for them to get out of the way as for the rest of the flora. How will they manage to get down the mountains into the lowlands, and traverse uncongenial plains and deserts, to find other and far-distant alpine homes? ”

“ Though not high, as heights go in the European Alps or in the Himalaya, they are imposing mountains. It is only within comparatively recent years that passes have been discovered between the lakes and the sounds; and although these passes do not lead the traveller beyond the sub-Alpine heights, they take him through scenery that is no less remarkable for its beauty than for its grandeur—a fitting introduction to those greater marvels in the heart of the Southern Alps. ”

“ The gradual approach of winter is very lovely in the high Alps. The valley of Davos, where I am writing, more than five thousand feet above the sea, is not beautiful, as Alpine valleys go, though it has scenery both picturesque and grand within easy reach. ”

“ But Alpine exploration is mental as well as physical, and concerns itself with the adventures of the mind in touch with the mountains as well as with the adventures of the body in contact with an unclimbed cliff. The story of the gradual discovery of high places as sources of inspiration has its place in the history of Alpine exploration, as well as the record of variation routes too often expressed in language of unvarying monotony. ”

“ In common talk, indeed, we are accustomed to attribute fancifully to this mountain masculine ruggedness, to that feminine grace, to another qualities of terror. Some mountains attract to themselves a kind of human affection; others repel; yet others bore, or, on the contrary, interest without charming. In the present chapter, therefore, I intend to discuss the characters of mountains, especially of the great Alpine peaks, from this point of view, considering so far as space permits the characters and dispositions of all sorts and conditions of Alps. ”

“ Somewhat the same difficulty interferes with any accurate summary of more elementary signs to be looked for in reconnoitring,—signs whose discovery is, or should be, part of our daily alpine routine. Every mountaineer should know at a glance, in the right conditions of light, new snow from old snow, ice from crusted snow surface, open glacier from firn or névé. ”

“ Yet there are some who refuse to believe that sun, frost, and water have played an important part in modelling the Alps, and hold it as an article of their faith that the Alpine region "owes its present conformation mainly to the action of its ancient glaciers"! [13] ”

“ NOTES. Three lectures for young people were delivered in January in behalf of the Royal Geographical Society, by Douglas Freshfield, President of the Alpine Club, on Mountains. The special subjects were a brief general description of the structure and features of a mountain region; the steps by which the High Alps have gradually been discovered, conquered, and converted to human uses ”

“ 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. ”

“ The most useful bibliographies of Alpine book that are accessible to the general reader are contained in Ueber Eis and Schnee, by Gottlieb Studer (1869-1871) , and Swiss Travel and Swiss Guide Books, by the Rev. W. A. B. Coolidge (1889) .
Perhaps the most thorough book on every phase of the Alps, sporting, social, political and historical is The Alps in Nature and History, by the Rev. W. A. B. Coolidge (1908) . ”

“ It is well-known, that in whatever region travellers ascend mountains, they find the vegetation at every successive level altering its character, and gradually assuming the appearances presented in more northern countries; thus indicating that the atmosphere, temperature, and physical agencies in general, assimilate, as we approach Alpine regions, to the peculiarities locally connected with high latitudes. ”

“ It would be impossible within our limits to furnish even a moiety of the details and evidences by which the intricate structure of the Alps has been so successfully unraveled, and the arrangement of nature in the due order of superposition so persistently maintained. We shall simply advert to the equivalents of the English strata which have been satisfactorily ascertained, and shall then consider some of the more interesting phenomena connected with the age, elevation, erratic blocks, and glaciers of this Alpine country. ”

“ Sometimes, when on the Alpine rose
The golden sunset leaves its ray,
So like a gem the floweret glows,
We hither bend our headlong way;
And, tho' we find no treasure there,
We bless the rose that shines so fair. ”

“ Be that as it may; be fog, wind, and cloud and driving rain and sleet a luxury in which we should revel—or not; of all places in the world in bad weather, the Alps at springtide and at the altitude at which we are now studying them, are probably among the most interesting and absorbing. Let an everyday world, or as much of it as can, come and judge for itself. ”

“ Hence, to the foot of the cañon, the metamorphic slates give place to granite, whose nobler sculpture calls forth expressions of corresponding beauty from the stream in passing over it,—bright trills of rapids, booming notes of falls, solemn hushes of smooth-gliding sheets, all chanting and blending in glorious harmony. When, at length, its impetuous alpine life is done, it slips through a meadow with scarce an audible whisper, and falls asleep in Moraine Lake. ”

“ They will remember that in comparing civilized man with the animal world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the mountains soaring into the sky and can hardly discern where the deep shadowed crags and roseate peaks end, and where the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the awe-struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he refuses to believe the geologist, who tells him that these glorious masses are, after all, the hardened mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of subterranean furnaces—of one substance with the dullest clay, but raised by inward forces to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory. ”

“ But the pine rises in serene resistance, self-contained; nor can I ever without awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff, far from all house or work of men, looking up to its companies of pines, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it—upright, fixed, spectral, as troops of ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other, dumb for ever. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them: those trees never heard human voice; they are far above all sound but of the winds. ”

“ I had never before realized the great depth of feeling that a mountain range is capable of evoking. The Alps are majestic beyond description. They awe the observer to a sense of his own utter insignificance as he gazes upon that glistening majestic sky-line, and feels the overwhelming influence of those mighty mountains upon him. ”