Alpinism

“ THOUGH the faithful climber is, in his essence, a thoroughly domesticated man and rarely strays from his own home, the Alps, a spirit of unrest occasionally takes hold upon him and drives him forth to more distant regions. Seized with such a fit of wandering, the first days of July, 1888, found me camped on the right bank of the Berzingi glacier, where, in the cool air of the snow fields, on slopes white with rhododendron and with the silent unclimbed peaks above, I could rest from the rattle and roar of trains, the noise of buffets and the persecutions of the Custom-houses. ”

“ To the hunter, the real lover of and dependent upon the chase, there can be no comparison between the mighty Alps and the huge Rocky Mountain Barrier of the American Prairies. The one is destitute of animal life while the other bears a teeming population of the choicest game known to the swift-leaden messenger of the white man's rifle. He who wishes to behold in the same gaze, beautiful valleys, highly cultivated by a romantic and interesting race, in rich contrast with wonderfully moulded masses of earth and stone, covered with a medley of green foliage and white snow, let him go to the Alps. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The snow-peaks did not hold themselves aloof, in aristocratic reserve; they nestled close around, in a friendly, sociable way; guides, with the ropes and axes and other implements of their fearful calling slung about their persons, roosted in a long line upon a stone wall in front of the hotel, and waited for customers; sun-burnt climbers, in mountaineering costume, and followed by their guides and porters, arrived from time to time, from breakneck expeditions among the peaks and glaciers of the High Alps ”

“ The ascent is not one long pull, like the ascent of the Alps, but by a succession of hills, one beyond another, with many a deep valley between, so that we go alternately up hill and down dale. The hills are very steep, so that the post-carriage, which is as heavy and lumbering as a French diligence, has to be drawn up by buffaloes. Thus it climbs slowly height after height, and when it has reached the summit, goes thundering down the mountain, and rolls majestically along the road. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those few who dare the big peaks are perforce worthy, and the bold ski-runners who challenge the hazards of the long, high courses are themselves, like the birds, almost a part of the mountain life. The Alps, as a whole, retire into their ancient splendour.
Yet their winter moods hold moments of tenderness as well, and of colour, too, that at first the strong black and white might seem to deny. The monotony of the snow-world comes to reveal itself as a monotony of surface only, thinly hiding an exquisite variety. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mountaineering in the ’fifties and ’sixties was in many ways far more arduous than it is to-day. Club-huts are now scattered through the Alps. It is no longer necessary to carry firewood and sleeping-bags 138 to some lonely bivouac beside the banks of great glaciers. A sudden gust of bad weather at night no longer means that the climber starts at dawn with drenched clothes. The excellent series of Climbers’ Guides give minute instructions describing every step in the ascent. ”

“ As we wearily climb, in this survey, from expenditure to expenditure, from waste to waste, we seem to pass beyond the region of ordinary calculation; Alps on Alps arise, on whose crowning heights of everlasting ice, far above the habitations of man, where no green thing lives, where no creature draws its breath, we behold the cold, sharp, flashing glacier of War. ”

“ And now we are present at the last struggle where, under a pall of cloud through which the parent peaks shine down a far-off farewell, the glacier makes its fatal plunge into the valley, for it a valley of death, and we see its end amid the earth and rock-heaps of the terminal moraine. But from under the muddy ruin springs out of a 'dusky door' a new and fuller life, and the mountain stream dashes off on its happy course through the new world of the fields and orchards. ”

“ Higher still than the pine are the larches, a wood highly valued; and at last comes the creeping pine, struggling against the wind and cold: it is the highest climber among Alpine trees, and is the immediate neighbor of the glacier.
The perils of wandering in the high Alps remain terribly real, and are only to be met by knowledge, courage, caution, skill, and strength; for rashness, ignorance, carelessness, the mountains still leave no margin, and to these three-fourths of the catastrophes which shock us are to be traced. Mountaineering without guides is not a thing to be encouraged. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The magnificent school of foreign rock climbers which has of late years grown up in the regions of lesser peaks north, east and south of the Alps, and which, with some notable exceptions, has little conception of what independent mountaineering on the great peaks means, accepts the performance and narration of these tourists in the big Alps as typical of ‘guided climbing,’ and very justly condemns it for its obvious lack of many of the features which constitute the pleasure or merit of their own mountaineering. ”

“ It is certain that the productive mould of the Alps, swept off by the increasing violence of that curse of the mountains, the torrents, is daily diminishing with fearful rapidity. All our Alps are wholly, or in large proportion, bared of wood. Their soil, scorched by the sun of Provence, cut up by the hoofs of the sheep, which, not finding on the surface the grass they require for their sustenance, gnaw and scratch the ground in search of roots to satisfy their hunger, is periodically washed and carried off by melting snows and summer storms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When every mountain has been climbed by every conceivable route, the material at the disposal of the objective writer is fortunately exhausted. There are few great Alpine routes that remain unexplored. There are a thousand byways in the psychology of mountaineering that have never been touched, and an excellent book might have been written on this subject alone. Every mountaineer brings to the mountains the tribute of a new worshipper with his own different emotions. “Obtain an account of the same expedition from three points on the same rope, and you will see how different. ”

“ In a humbler sphere, too, among men in daily contact with the Alps, such as guides and chamois hunters, there was till lately an absolutely ineradicable belief that the Alp peaks would oppose almost insuperable obstacles to those bold enough to grapple with them under winter conditions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For a most varied climb, requiring every kind of mountain craft, the traverse of the Aiguille du Plan is to be recommended, from the Glacier des Pèlerins over the summit, down the Glacier du Plan, and back by the Glacier du Géant. Again, without doubt, the finest snow and ice climb in the Alps, surrounded the whole time by superb scenery, is from the Montanvert to the hut behind the Aiguille du Midi, thence over Mont Blanc du Tacul and the Mont Maudit to the summit of Mont Blanc, and down to the Grands-Mulets. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In the Alps there are none such left to conquer, though there is at least one whereon, though sometimes climbed, the foot of man has never stood. The mountaineer thirsting for fame is reduced to forcing new paths by forbidden routes up or down the oft-climbed peaks. ”

“ With the night, the dream-like landscape, and the maledictory harangues which had haunted me during the darkness, passed away, and the morning found us nearing the mountains. The Alps open upon you by little. One who has never climbed these hills imagines himself standing at their feet, and looking up the long unbroken vista of fields, vineyards, forests, and naked rocks, to the eternal snows of their summit. Not so. They do not come marching thus upon you in all their grandeur to overwhelm you. ”

“ Between the lofty peaks which rise skyward into the very vault of heaven, as it seems to the wayfarer at their feet, stretch lovely, winding Alpine valleys, often well-wooded and with turf of a most delightful greenness strewn with myriads of Alpine blossoms. Through valleys sweet with the odours of pinewoods and flowers run rushing torrents or more quietly flowing streams, which often have their origin in tiny, dark-blue Alpine lakes set amid environing pine forests, in whose tranquil waters are reflected the towering rocks and secluded woods which surround them. ”

“ Those who have spent an exhilarating holiday among these enchanting hills will know the freshness of the pure air, the stillness of the vast solitudes—home of the eagle and chamois—also the comfort of the rude huts provided by the Alpine Club, where one may shelter and find warmth and food, paying as he deems right; they will remember days spent on the glittering glaciers with their treacherous slopes, in183 view of the ever-changing ever-new outlines of the tempestuous peaks in their grotesque formations. ”

“ 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. ”