Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

know why he should be less so, he has opened new avenues of access between the scenery and his mind. He has learnt a language which is but partially revealed to ordinary men. An artist is superior to an unlearned picture-seer, not merely because he has greater natural sensibility, but because he has improved it by methodical experience; because his senses have been sharpened by constant practice till he can catch finer shades of colouring, and more delicate inflexions of line; because, also, the lines and colours have acquired new significance, and been associated with a thousand thoughts with which the mass of mankind have never cared to connect them. The mountaineer is improved by a similar process. But I know some sceptical critics will ask, does not the way in which he is accustomed to regard mountains rather deaden their poetical influence? Doesn't he come to look at them as mere instruments of sport, and overlook their more spiritual teaching? Does not all the excitement of personal adventure and the noisy apparatus of guides, and ropes, and axes, and tobacco, and the fun of climbing, rather dull his perceptions and incapacitate him from perceiving

The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills?

Well, I have known some stupid and unpoetical mountaineers; and since I have been dismounted from my favourite hobby, I think I have met some similar specimens amongst the humbler class of tourist. There are persons, I fancy, who "do" the Alps; who look upon the Lake of Lucerne as one more task ticked off from their memorandum book, and count up the list of summits visible from the Görnergrat without being penetrated with any keen sense of sublimity. And there are mountaineers who are capable of making a pun on the top of Mont Blanc-and capable of nothing more. Still I venture to deny that even punning is incompatible with poetry, or that those who quote the pun can have no deeper feeling in their bosoms which they are perhaps too shamefaced to quote.

The fact is that that which gives its inexpressible charm to mountaineering is the incessant series of exquisite natural scenes, which are for the most part enjoyed by the mountaineer alone. This is, I am aware, a round assertion; but I will try to support it by a few of the visions which are recalled to me by these Oberland cliffs, and which I have seen profoundly enjoyed by men who perhaps never mentioned them again, and probably in describing their adventures scrupulously avoided the danger of being sentimental.

Thus every traveller has occasionally done a sunrise, and a more lamentable proceeding than the ordinary view of a sunrise can hardly be imagined. You are cold, miserable, breakfastless, have risen shivering from a warm bed, and in your heart long only to creep into bed again. To the mountaincer all this is changed. He is beginning a day full of the anticipation of a pleasant excitement. He has, perhaps, been waiting anxiously for fine weather to try conclusions with some huge giant not yet scaled. He moves out with something of the feeling with which a soldier

goes to the assault of a fortress, but without the same probability of coming home in fragments; the danger is trifling enough to be merely exhilaratory and to give a pleasant tension to the nerves; his muscles feel firm and springy, and his stomach, no small advantage to the enjoyment of scenery, is in excellent order. He looks at the sparkling stars with keen satisfaction, prepared to enjoy a fine sunrise with all his faculties at their best, and with the added pleasure of a good omen for his day's work. Then a huge dark mass begins to mould itself slowly out of the darkness; the sky begins to form a background of deep purple, against which the outline becomes gradually more definite; and then the peaks catch the exquisite Alpine glow lighting up in rapid succession like a vast illumination; when at last the steady sunlight settles upon them, and shows every rock and glacier, without even a delicate film of mist to obscure them, he feels his heart bound, and steps out gaily to the assault-just as the people on the Rigi are giving thanks that the show is over and that they may go to bed. Still grander is the sight when the mountaineer has already reached some lofty ridge, and, as the sun rises, stands between the day and the night-the valley still in deep sleep with the mists lying between the folds of the hills, and the snowpeaks standing out clear and pale white just before the sun reaches them, whilst a broad band of orange light runs all round the vast horizon. The grandest of all such sights that live in my memory is that of a sunset from the Aiguille de Gouté. The snow at our feet was glowing with rich light, and the shadows in our footsteps green. Beneath us was a vast horizontal floor of thin level mists, spreading over the boundless landscape, and tinged with every hue of sunset. Through its rents and gaps we could see the lower mountains, the distant plains, and a fragment of the Lake of Geneva lying in a more sober purple. Above us rose the solemn mass of Mont Blanc in the richest glow of an Alpine sunset. The sense of lonely sublimity was almost oppressive, and although half our party was suffering from sickness, I believe even the guides were moved to a sense of solemn beauty.

These grand scenic effects are occasionally seen by ordinary travellers, though the ordinary traveller is for the most part out of temper at 3 A.M. The mountaineer can enjoy them, both because his frame of mind is properly toned to receive the natural beauty, and because he alone sees them with their best accessories, amidst the silence of the eternal snow and the vast panoramas visible from the loftier summits. And he has a similar advantage in most of the great natural phenomena of the cloud and the sunshine. No sight in the Alps is more impressive than to see the huge rocks of a black precipice suddenly frowning out through the chasms of a storm-cloud. It is grand as we see it from the safe verandahs of the inn at Grindelwald, but far grander in the silence of the central Alps amongst the savage wilderness of rock and snow. Again, I have been climbing for two or three hours, with nothing in sight but the varying wreaths of mists that chased each other monotonously along the rocky ribs whose snow-covered backbone we were laboriously climbing. 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. Beneath us stretches for hundreds of miles the level fleecy floor, and above are standing out clear in the eternal sunshine every mountain, from Mont Blanc to Monte Rosa and the Jungfrau. Or, again, I look down from the edge of a torn rocky parapet into an apparently fathomless abyss, where nothing but what an Alpine traveller calls a "strange formless wreathing of vapour" indicates the storm-wind that is raging below us. I might go on indefinitely recalling the strangely impressive scenes that frequently startle the traveller in the waste upper world; but language-even if I had the eloquence of Mr. Ruskinis feeble indeed to convey even a glimmering of what is to be seen to those who have not seen it for themselves, and to them it can be little more than a peg upon which to hang their own recollections. These glories, in which the mountain Spirit reveals himself to his true worshippers, are only to be gained by the appropriate service of climbing, at some risk, though a very trifling risk if he is approached with due form and ceremony, into the furthest recesses of his shrines. And without seeing them, I maintain that no man has really seen the Alps.

The difference between the exoteric and the esoteric school of mountaineers may be indicated by their different view of glaciers. At Grindelwald, for example, it is the fashion to go and "see the glaciers "— heaven save the mark! Ladies in costumes, heavy German professors, Americans doing the Alps at a gallop, Cook's tourists, and other varieties of a well-known genus, go off in shoals and see-what?—a gigantic mass of ice, strangely torn with a few of the exquisite blue crevasses, but defiled and in dirt and ruins. A stream foul with mud oozes out from the base: the whole concern seems to be melting fast away; the summer sun has evidently got the best of it in these lower regions, and nothing can resist him but the great masses of decaying rock that strew the surface in confused lumps. It is as much like the glacier of the upper regions as the melting fragments of snow in a London street are like the surface of the fresh snow that has just fallen in a country field. And by way of improving its attractions, a perpetual picnic is going on, and the ingenious natives have hewed a tunnel into the ice, for admission to which they charge certain centimes. The unlucky glacier reminds me at his latter end of a wretched whale stranded on a beach, dissolving into masses of blubber, and hacked by remorseless fishermen, instead of plunging at his ease in the deep blue water. Far above, where the glacier begins his course, he is seen only by the true mountaineer. There are vast amphitheatres of pure snow, of which the glacier known to tourists is merely the insignificant drainage, but whose very existence they do not generally suspect. They are utterly ignorant that from the top of the ice-fall which they visit you may walk for hours on the eternal ice. After a long climb you come to the region where the glacier is truly at its noblest; where the surface is a spotless white; where the crevasses are enormous rents sinking

to profound depths, with walls of the purest blue; where the glacier is torn and shattered by the energetic forces which mould it, but has an expression of superabundant power, like a full stream fretting against its banks and plunging through the vast gorges that it has hewn for itself in the course of centuries. The bases of the mountains are immersed in a deluge of cockneyism-fortunately a shallow deluge-whilst their summits rise high into the bracing air, where everything is pure and poetical.

The difference which I have endeavoured to indicate is more or less traceable in a wider sense. The mountains are exquisitely beautiful, indeed, from whatever points of view we contemplate them and the mountaineer would lose much if he never saw the beauties of the lower valleys, of pasturages deep in flowers, and dark pine-forests with the summits shining from far off between the stems. Only, as it seems to me, he has the exclusive prerogative of thoroughly enjoying one-and that the most characteristic, though by no means the only element of the scenery. There may be a very good dinner spread before twenty people; but if nineteen of them were teetotallers, and the twentieth drank his wine like a man, he would be the only one to do it full justice; the others might praise the meat or the fruits, but he would alone enjoy the champagne: and in the great feast which Nature spreads before us (a stock metaphor which emboldens me to make the comparison) the high mountain scenery acts the part of the champagne. Unluckily, too, the teetotallers are very apt, in this case also, to sit in judgment upon their more adventurous neighbours. Especially are they pleased to carp at the views from high summits. I have been constantly asked, with a covert sneer, Did it repay you?—a question which involves the assumption that one wants to be repaid, as though the labour were not itself part of the pleasure, and which implies a doubt that the view is really enjoyable. People are always demonstrating that the lower views are the most beautiful; and at the same time complaining that mountaineers frequently turn back without looking at the view from the top, as though that would necessarily imply that they cared nothing for scenery. In opposition to which I must first remark that, as a rule, every step of an ascent has a beauty of its own, which one is quietly absorbing even when one is not directly making it a subject of contemplation, and that the view from the top is generally the crowning glory of the whole.

It will be enough if I conclude with an attempt to illustrate this last assertion; and I will do it by still referring to the Oberland. Every visitor with a soul for the beautiful admires the noble form of the Wetterhorn-the lofty snow-crowned pyramid rising in such light and yet massive lines from its huge basement of perpendicular cliffs. The Wetterhorn has, however, a further merit. To my mind-and I believe most connoisseurs of mountain-tops agree with me-it is one of the most impressive summits in the Alps. It is not a sharp pinnacle like the Weisshorn, or a cupola like Mont Blanc, or a grand rocky tooth like the Monte Rosa, but a long and nearly horizontal knife-edge, which, as seen from either end, has of

course the appearance of a sharp-pointed cone. It is when balanced upon this ridge-sitting astride of the knife-edge on which one can hardly stand without giddiness-that one fully appreciates an Alpine precipice. Mr. Wills has admirably described the first ascent and the impression it made upon him in a paper which has become classical for succeeding adventurers. Behind the snow-slope sinks with perilous steepness towards the wilderness of glacier and rock through which the ascent has lain. But in front the ice sinks with even greater steepness for a few feet or yards. Then it curves over and disappears, and the next thing that the eye catches is the meadow-land of Grindelwald, some 9,000 feet below. I have looked down many precipices, where the eye can trace the course of every pebble that bounds down the awful slopes, and where I have shuddered as some dislodged fragment showed the course which, in case of accident, my own fragments would follow. A precipice is always, for obvious reasons, far more terrible from above than from below. The creeping, tingling sensation which passes through one's limbs-even when one knows oneself to be in perfect safety-testifies to the thrilling influence of the sights. But I have never so realized the terrors of a terrific cliff as when I could not see it. The awful gulf which intervened between me and the green meadows struck the imagination by its invisibility. It was like the view which may be seen from the ridge of a cathedral-roof, where the eaves have for their immediate background the pavement of the streets below; only this cathedral was 9,000 feet high. Now, any one standing at the foot of the Wetterhorn may admire their stupendous massiveness and steepness; but to feel their influence enter into the very marrow of one's bones, it is necessary to stand at the summit, and to fancy the one little slide down the short ice-slope, to be followed apparently by a bound into clear ice and a fall down to the houses, from heights where the eagle never ventures to soar.

This is one of the Alpine beauties, which, of course, it is beyond the power of art to imitate, and which people are, therefore, apt to ignore. But it is not the only one to be seen on the high summits. It is often said that these views are not "beautiful "-apparently because they won't go into a picture, or, to put it more fairly, because no picture can in the faintest degree imitate them. But without quarrelling about words, I think that even if "beautiful be not the most correct epithet, they have a marvellously stimulating effect upon the imagination. Let us look round in imagination from this wonderful pinnacle in mid-air and note one or two of the most striking elements of the scenery.

You are, in the first place, perched on a cliff, whose presence is the more felt because it is unseen. Then you are in a region over which eternal silence is brooding. Not a sound ever comes there except the occasional fall of a splintered fragment of rock, or a layer of snow; no stream is heard trickling, and the sounds of animal life are left thousands of feet below. The most that you can hear is some mysterious noise made by the wind eddying round the gigantic rocks; sometimes a strange flapping

« ZurückWeiter »