Many of us in America know little of one of the great subjects of
thought and endeavor in Europe. We are occasionally surprised by
hearing that such a man fell into a crevasse, or that four men were
killed on the Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and others elsewhere,
and we wonder why they went there. The Alps are a great object of
interest to all Europe. I have now before me a catalogue of 1,478
works on the Alps for sale by one bookseller. It seems incredible. In
this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a
single mountain, and that not the most difficult. There are
publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology,
botany, and one volume of _Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont
Blanc_. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The
summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but
two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends
folded over.
It is the habit, of the Germans especially, to send students into the
Alps with a case for flowers, a net for butterflies, and a box for
bugs. Every rod is a schoolhouse. They speak of the "snow mountains"
with ardent affection. Every Englishman, having no mountains at home,
speaks and feels as if he owned the Alps. He, however, cares less for
their flowers, bugs, and butterflies than for their qualities as a
gymnasium and a measure of his physical ability. The name of every
mountain or pass he has climbed is duly burnt into his Alpenstock, and
the said stock, well burnt over, is his pride in travel and a grand
testimonial of his ability at home.
There are numerous Alpine clubs in England, France, and Italy. In the
grand exhibition of the nation at Milan the Alpine clubs have one of
the most interesting exhibits. This general interest in the Alps is a
testimony to man's admiration of the grandest work of God within reach,
and to his continued devotion to physical hardihood in the midst of the
enervating influences of civilization. There is one place in the world
devoted by divine decree to pure air. You are obliged to use it.
Toiling up these steeps the breathing quickens fourfold, till every
particle of the blood has been bathed again and again in the perfect
air. Tyndall records that he once staggered out of the murks and
disease of London, fearing that his lifework was done. He crawled out
of the hotel on the Bell Alp and, feeling new life, breasted the
mountain, hour after hour, till every acrid humor had oozed away, and
every part of his body had become so renewed that he was well from that
time. In such a sanitarium, school of every department of knowledge,
training-place for hardihood, and monument of Nature's grandest work,
man does well to be interested.
You want to ascend these mountains? Come to Zermatt. With a wand ten
miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks. Europe has but one higher.
Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents
into the little green valley. Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more
difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more
difficult than either or both. A plumbline dropped from the summit of
Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt. You
first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred
double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles. In the
afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the
Riffelhouse. It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs
of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your
house--only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the
house. This takes three hours--an hour to each hundred stories; after
the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have
reached the first floor. The next day you go up and down the Görner
Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a
view unequaled in Europe. Ordering the guide to be ready and the
porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the
glorious revelations of the morrow.
The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the
question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad." There is
plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live
thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly
near. We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent. The
lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and
the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct. Was the
storm over? The guides would give no opinion. It was their interest
to go, it was ours to go only in good weather. By three o'clock I
noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that
has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an
inch upward. I gave the order to start. The other parties said, "Good
for your pluck! _Bon voyage, gute reise_," and went to bed. In an
hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier.
The sky was brilliant. Hopes were high. The glacier with its vast
medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long,
was crossed in the dawn. The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks
with glory, and we shouted victory. But in a moment the sun was
clouded, and so were we. Soon it came out again, and continued clear.
But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear
weather." Men get pious amid perils. I thought of the aneroid, and
felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his
servants.
Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain. Six hours and a
half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight. I have no
fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do
the ascents. They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and
enjoy, but to boast. We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty
feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow
of ice below. We scramble up the rocks of the mountain. Hour after
hour we toil upward. At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all
four roped together. There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred
feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them. If a man drops in
the rest must pull him out. Being heavier than any other man of the
party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my
ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay
of dangling by a rope in a chasm. The beauty of these cold blue ice
vaults cannot be described. They are often fringed with icicles. In
one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the
bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an
apparently reversed condition. We passed one place where vast masses
of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start
a new avalanche. We were up in one of nature's grandest workshops.
How the view widened! How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened
the effect in the valley below! The glorious air made us know what the
man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive. Some have
little occasion to be thankful in that respect.
Here we learned the use of a guide. Having carefully chosen him, by
testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only
generally, but step by step. Put each foot in his track. He had
trodden the snow to firmness. But being heavier than he it often gave
way under my pressure. One such slump and recovery takes more strength
than ten regular steps. Not so in following the Guide to the fairer
and greater heights of the next world. He who carried this world and
its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time into such
firmness that no man walking in his steps, however great his sins, ever
breaks down the track. And just so in that upward way, one fall and
recovery takes more strength than ten rising steps.
Meanwhile, what of the weather? Uncertainty. Avalanches thundered
from the Breithorn and Lyskamm, telling of a penetrative moisture in
the air. The Matterhorn refused to take in its signal flags of storm.
Still the sun shone clear. We had put in six of the eight hours' work
of ascent when snow began to fall. Soon it was too thick to see far.
We came to a chasm that looked vast in the deception of the storm. It
was only twenty feet wide. Getting round this the storm deepened till
we could scarcely see one another. There was no mountain, no sky. We
halted of necessity. The guide said, "Go back." I said, "Wait." We
waited in wind, hail, and snow till all vestige of the track by which
we had come--our only guide back if the storm continued--was lost
except the holes made by the Alpenstocks. The snow drifted over, and
did not fill these so quickly.
Not knowing but that the storm might last two days, as is frequently
the case, I reluctantly gave the order to go down. In an hour we got
below the storm. The valley into which we looked was full of brightest
sunshine; the mountain above us looked like a cowled monk. In another
hour the whole sky was perfectly clear. O that I had kept my faith in
my aneroid! Had I held to the faith that started me in the
morning--endured the storm, not wavered at suggestions of peril, defied
apparent knowledge of local guides--and then been able to surmount the
difficulty of the new-fallen snow, I should have been favored with such
a view as is not enjoyed once in ten years; for men cannot go up all
the way in storm, nor soon enough after to get all the benefit of the
cleared air. Better things were prepared for me than I knew;
indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and
held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of
darkness and storm.
I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and
softened snow, and said to the guide, "To-morrow I start for the
Matterhorn." To do this we go down the three hundred stories to
Zermatt.
Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree
profitable. Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination,
has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed.