ALPINE CLIMBING
Though Switzerland does not contain within its borders more than
one-third of the Alps, and the greatest height of the Alpine range
(Mount Blanc) is wholly within France, the Alps are always associated
with Switzerland in the popular mind; and with good reason, for the
country is particularly and almost wholly Alpine in its character, and
its national existence has been largely shaped by the mountain ranges
which have given people differing from one another in racial origin,
in language, and in religion a bond of unity.
The most famous mountain range of the world historically, the Alps are
far from being the greatest in height, and they are by no means the
oldest of the world's mountains, though they are older probably than
the Himalayas, older certainly than the _parvenu_ peaks of the South
Seas, some of which were born amid thunders and lightnings only
yesterday, considering Time in geological periods. The form of a
mountain range and its height give usually some surface indications of
its age. New mountains, like those of the South Seas, are very sharp
and jagged in their outlines. Old mountains have been usually smoothed
down by erosion. The oldest mountains probably of the world, the
Australian Alps, are near neighbours of the youngest, the fiery
volcanoes of the Straits of Sunda.
[Illustration: SUNSET ON MONT BLANC FROM GENEVA.]
A mountain's first birthday is marked by a movement towards old age.
As soon as it begins to live it begins to die. If it is of volcanic
origin its term of life is usually short; it comes to being suddenly
with a wild upheaval of the Earth, and at once the eating rain, and
the splitting frost, and the destroying wind set to work to cut away
its peak and pull it down to the level of the plain again. If the
mountain is of more slow creation, the result of a gradual
up-wrinkling of a crease of the Earth as she readjusts her surface to
the cooling of her bulk, the mountain may go on growing whilst also it
goes on dying. From below inward forces are pushing it higher towards
the sky. From above the rains and snows and winds are chiselling away
its rocks and bearing them to the plains. In time the process of
pushing up ceases; the process of grinding down goes on remorselessly,
never pausing for a moment.
So the mountains are eternal only in the figurative sense. Actually
their term of existence is strictly finite. Once the Australian Alps
had their tremendous peaks, and hills of unmelting ice. To-day they
have been ground down to below the line of perpetual snow, and along
the gentle grades of the chief peak it is possible to drive a carriage
to the very summit. The European Alps are being subjected to-day to
the same process of softening of outline and lowering of height.
But for many generations yet they will lift white peaks to the skies.
This though it is clear that the ice area upon them is steadily
dwindling. This is a result, however, not of erosion, but of a warming
of the climate of Europe, indeed of the whole northern hemisphere.
Some measurements in 1912 by the Swiss Alpine Club confirm the
recession of the Swiss glaciers. The largest of the glaciers,
"L'Aletsch," had retreated 10 feet, following on nearly 60 feet in
1911, and rather more than that in 1910. The Rhine Glacier had gone
back 34 feet, in addition to the 70 feet lost in the previous two
years. An exception to the general rule appeared at first to be
furnished by the two glaciers of Grindelwald, which had increased
since last year; but the advance did not compensate for the loss of
the previous year, and since 1893 the two glaciers have lost nearly a
quarter of a mile. Their temporary advance is attributable solely to
the inclement weather during 1912. Nearly all the smaller glaciers,
out of the fifty-two surveyed by the Alpine Club, show some retreat,
and the largest loss appears to be that of the Palu Glacier, near
Bernina, which is losing regularly 70 feet a year.
This dwindling is not confined to Swiss glaciers. A survey of Canadian
glaciers which was made five years ago shows that other glaciers in
the northern hemisphere are retreating. The Victoria Glacier is doing
so; and the only slight exception appeared at that time to be the Yoho
Glacier, which was retreating, but not nearly so fast as it had been
in previous years. M. Charles Rabot asserts that the glaciers in
Argentina are also retreating, and surmises, from data perhaps not so
well established, that there has been a general retreat of glaciers
during the last half of the nineteenth century throughout Spitzbergen,
Iceland, Central Asia, and Alaska. He suggests that the cause is a
present tendency towards equalisation of the earth's temperature.
Others more boldly affirm that the Swiss glaciers, as well as other
great ice masses existing on the globe, are remnants of the last Ice
Age, and are all doomed to disappear as the cycle works round for the
full heat of the next Warm Age. But the disappearance, if it is to
come, will not come quickly, and the doom of ice-climbing in
Switzerland is too remote a threat to disturb the Alpinist.
To the inexpert a glacier is a glacier all the world over, but the
expert knows that the glaciers of different mountains have the same
variations of character as the streams of different countries. Sir
Martin Conway describes Swiss Alpine glaciers as
of the medium type, lying as they do half-way between the
Arctic and tropical extremes. They have not the rapid flow of
the Arctic nor the dry rigidity of the tropical sort. Their
walls are not silent as in the Central Andes, nor thundered
over by continual avalanches like those of the upper Baltoro.
They are of medium size also. 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. Were they but a little
smaller, how much they would lose that is most precious! Were
they larger, how many persons that now can afford the cost and
the strength to explore them would have to linger at their
gates wistfully looking in. In area, too, they are large enough
for grandeur and yet small enough for easy access. No part of
them is beyond the range of a summer holiday, yet a commanding
view of them is as apparently limitless as is the view from the
greatest Asiatic peaks which, thus far, have been climbed. They
are the only range of snow-mountains in the world thus blessed
with moderation.
The Alps to-day attract geologists and meteorologists from all parts
of the world, but their first earnest student was a Genevan, Horace de
Saussure, whose writings about his native mountains have a charm from
their style as well as from their record of exact observations. Born
in 1740, he was appointed at the age of twenty-one Professor of
Philosophy at Geneva University. He ascended Mount Blanc in 1760 at
the age of forty-seven, and spent all his leisure before and after
that date in geological exploration of the various peaks.
"The one aim," he writes in his journals, "of most of the
travellers who call themselves naturalists is the collection of
curiosities. They walk, or rather they creep about, with their
eyes fixed upon the earth, picking up a specimen here and a
specimen there, without any eye to a generalization. They
remind me of an antiquary scratching the ground at Rome, in the
midst of the Pantheon or the Coliseum, looking for fragments of
coloured glass, without ever turning to look at the
architecture of these magnificent edifices."
This pioneer of geology died in 1799. There had been before him some
few Alpine climbers, and there were after him some few more; but the
twentieth-century tourist to Switzerland--who is chiefly interested in
the Alps as difficult mountains to climb, presenting great problems of
ice and cliff traverses, seasoning the joy of difficult achievement
with a pronounced spice of danger--follows a sport so modern that
there are men now living who were born before the passion for Alpine
climbing came to birth. Certainly the Alps were traversed of old. But
strictly not for pleasure. The most accessible passes, not the most
difficult peaks, were sought out; and the burdens and terrors of the
passage, not the joys of it, were uppermost in the minds of
travellers. There is not extant any expression of pleasure from
Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Suwarow, or any other of those famous
conquerors of this mountain barrier. If any references at all to the
crossing of the Alps come down from past times they are of complaint.
An English monk of the Middle Ages, for example, writes to his
brethren of Canterbury:
Pardon me for not writing. I have been on the Mount of Jove--on
the one hand looking up at the heaven of the mountains, on the
other shuddering at the hell of the valleys, feeling myself so
much nearer heaven that I was more sure my prayer would be
heard. Lord, I said, restore me to my brethren, that I may tell
them, that they come not into this place of torment. Place of
torment indeed, where the marble pavement of the stony ground
is ice, and you cannot set your foot safely; where, strange to
say, although it is so slippery that you cannot stand, the
death (into which there is every facility to fall) is certain
death. I put my hand in my scrip that I might scratch out a
syllable or two to your sincerity--lo! I found my ink-bottle
filled with a dry mass of ice; my fingers too refused to write,
my beard was stiff with frost, and my breath congealed into a
long icicle. I could not write the news I wished!
In the days, nearer to our own time, of the _salons_ of Coppet and
Ferney, no one of the distinguished writers and thinkers who visited
Switzerland gave a thought to mountain-climbing as a pleasure. Indeed
all seemed insensible that there was any particular charm in the
mountains' grandeur. The first of the great company of hill-climbers
for pleasure, so far as I can discover, was that very typical
Englishman, Mr. Albert Smith, who in 1851 climbed Mount Blanc, and
devoted six years of profitable life afterwards to describing how he
did it, to audiences at the Egyptian Hall, London. A nation which had
already invented Arctic exploration was quick to seize upon Alpine
climbing as an outlet for superfluous energy and love of danger. Mr.
Albert Smith was the forerunner of a great herd of climbers from this
country and--the fashion spreading, as all English fashions do, to
Europe--from many other countries: though truly I suspect that the
Continental mind approves at heart more thoroughly the spirit of that
amusing satire, _Tartarin de Tarascon sur les Alpes_, than the solemn
records of the Alpine Club.
Switzerland has not so far raised a national memorial to Mr. Albert
Smith, nor do Swiss hotel-keepers make pilgrimages to his grave in
Brompton Cemetery. But he has his monument surely in Mount Blanc, the
mountain which he "invented," according to the sober pages of the
_Dictionary of National Biography_. Sir Leslie Stephen, of whom it was
said "He walked from Alp to Alp like a pair of one-inch compasses over
a large map," systematised, though he had not invented, Alpine
climbing. He was one of the leading spirits of the Alpine Club, which
encourages, records, and organises the climbing of Alps.
[Illustration: THE PALUe GLACIER.]
So firm a hold on the British imagination has this sport of creeping
over slippery ice-masses and fly-crawling along the face of precipices
in pursuit of peaks, that the Swiss Alps do not give sufficient scope
for their energies. Ascents of the Andes and the Himalayas are
attempted. Every year quite a number of travellers cross to Canada to
encounter the dangers of the Rockies and the Selkirks there. To
far-off New Zealand the Alpinists go; and I have encountered in Sydney
an enthusiastic English lady who had climbed peaks in all corners of
the earth and had come to Australia for the conquest of the Australian
Alps. On learning of their contemptible height, and that it was
possible to drive up to their very summit in a carriage, she took the
first boat away, convinced that a country without dangerous
mountain-climbing was utterly unworthy of any attention.
What is the chief charm of this mountain-climbing? The joy of the
scenery? The exaltation of the keen high air? These are factors no
doubt, but not essential nor even the chief factors. The chief appeal
it makes is to the joy of combat and the pride of achievement. Some of
the peaks which once were difficult have now been made easy: funicular
railways run to spots which were once inaccessible except to keen
mountaineers. These spots the mountain-climber shuns. It is not the
wish to see the dawn from this peak or the sunset from that point
which spurs him on, but the sense of danger and difficulty to be
overcome, the urging of his human pride to show that he can conquer
the obstacles which Nature has put in his path.
The motive of the mountain-climber is one that lends itself easily to
ridicule. But _au fond_ it is the motive of human progress, the spirit
which spurs man on to explore the sea, and the depths beneath the sea;
the land, and the air above the land. And perhaps there comes to
the climber a keener, finer sense of the beauties of the scenery which
he has come to see with so much effort and danger. So Sir Martin
Conway (_The Alps_, A. & C. Black) insists, describing dawn on the
Alps as it comes to the "active mountaineer, keenly awake, with the
blood alive within him and a day of hopes ahead." He writes:
[Illustration: WINTER SUNRISE IN THE ENGADINE--CRESTA: CELERINA AND
SAMADEN.]
The night is dying. Her rich darks and whites grow pallid. Each
moment a layer of darkness peels off. The sky turns blue before
one knows it: the rocks grow brown: there is blue in the
crevasses, and green upon the swards--all low-toned yet
distinct. Faint puffs of warm air come, we know not whence,
touch our faces, and are gone. The lantern has been
extinguished; we stride out more freely; the day awakens within
us also.
Now is displayed in all its magnificence the daily drama of the
dawn. While the mists yet lie cold and grey in the deep
valleys, they glow against the eastern horizon, where all the
spectrum is slowly uprolled, more and more fiery beneath, as it
tends to red, and cut off below by the jagged outline of
countless peaks, looking tiny, away off there on the margin of
the world. Low floating cloudlets turn to molten gold. The
horizon flames along all its fretted eastern edge, a narrow
band of lambent light, a smokeless crimson fire. The belt of
colour grows broader; it swamps and dyes the cloudlets crimson.
Long pink streamers of soft light strike up from where the sun
is presently to appear. The great moment is at hand. All eyes
rove around the view. At last some near high peak salutes the
day; its summit glowing like a live coal drawn from a furnace.
Another catches the light and yet another. The glory spreads
downwards, turning from pink to gold, and from gold to pure
daylight, and then--lo! the sun himself upon the horizon! a
point of blinding light, soon changing to the full round orb.
The day has come, and the long shadows gather in their skirts
and prepare to flee away.
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.