opposite to us like a great shadow. Monte Rosa was very faintly lighted
by the approach of dawn. The mighty pyramid of the solitary Matterhorn
had yet no touch of red fire upon it. And presently one of the guides
said "Look!" and looking at the Matterhorn we presently perceived that
two parties were climbing it from the Zermatt side; we saw their
lanterns moving with almost intolerable slowness. And far across the
great ice river of the Gorner Glacier we saw other and nearer and
brighter lanterns going from the Bétemps Hut on the Untere Plattje. One
party was going for Monte Rosa, another for the Lyskamm Joch. We knew
that they could see us too. But these little lantern lights upon the
vast expanse of snow looked very strange and lonely and very human. We
seemed small ourselves, we were like glow-worms, like wounded fire-flies
crawling on a plain. And still we saw these little climbing lights upon
the Matterhorn. One party was close to the lower hut, another was
beginning to near the old hut, twelve thousand feet high. Then and all
of a sudden the lights went out. There was a strange red glow upon the
Matterhorn, a glow which most people, as victims of tradition, call
beautiful. As a matter of fact the colour of dawn upon the rock of the
Cervin is not truly a beautiful colour. It is a hard and brick-dusty
red, very different from the snow fire seen on true snow peaks. Yet the
scene was fine and majestic, and cold and dreadful, solitary and
non-human. This fine inhumanity of the mountains is their chief quality
to me. The sea is always more human; it moves, it breathes, it seems
alive. I have been alone at sea in the Channel and yet never felt quite
alone. The human water lapped at the planks of my boat. I knew the sea
was the pathway of the world. But on the mountains nothing moves at
night. There even stones do not fall; there are no thunders of
avalanches; no sudden and awful crash of an ice-fall. Even when the sun
is hot and the mountains waken a little these motions seem accidents.
And the perpetual motion of a glacier has something about it which is
cruelly inevitable, bestial, diabolic. No, upon the mountains one is
swung clear of one's fellow-creatures; one is adrift; it is another
world; it gives fresh views of the warm world of man.
Now we plunged downwards towards the Gadmen, whence the Monte Rosa track
branches off. We went along rock, now in daylight, till we came on ice,
and went forward to the Stocknubel, a little resting-place at the base
of the Stockhorn. Here the guides made us rest and eat. Swiss guides
are, when they are good, the best of men, and ours were of the best. The
two young Pollingers of St Niklaus, Joseph and Alois, are known now by
all climbers. I am pleased to think they are my friends. I wish I was as
strong as either and had as healthy an appetite. As we sat on rock and
ate cold meats and other horrible and indigestible matters, washed down
by wine and water, we saw another party come after us, an old and ragged
guide with two strange little figures of adventurous Frenchmen, clad in
knickerbockers and carrying tourist's alpenstocks, bound for the Cima di
Jazzi. It must be confessed that our own party looked more workman-like.
For we had our faithful ice-axes, and our lower limbs were swathed with
putties, now almost universally worn by guides and climbers alike. I
fancied our guides looked on the other guide with some contempt He was
not one of those who do big ascents. And though we were on an easy task,
the Cima di Jazzi is very easy indeed, so easy that most real climbers
have never climbed its simple mound of easily rising snow.
Then we went on and soon after roped, as there might be some crevasses
not well bridged, and presently I perceived that we had indeed a long
snow-grind before us, and I got very gloomy at the prospect and swore
and grumbled to myself. For there is no pleasure to me in being on the
mountains unless there is some element of risk, apparent or real matters
not. For, after all, with good guides and good weather there is little
real danger. The main thing is to get a sensation out of it; the
feeling of absorption in the moment which prevents one thinking of
anything but the next step. A snow-grind is like a book which has to be
read and which has no interest. I can imagine many reviewers must have
their literary snow-grinds. And so we crawled along the surface of the
snow with never a big crevasse to enliven one, and the sun rose up and
peered across the vast curves of white and almost blinded us. On our
left was the great chain of the Mischabel, of which I had once seen the
real bones and anatomy from the Matterhorn, and then came the
Rimpfischorn and Strahlhorn. I once asked a guide what had given its
name to the Rimpfischorn, and he answered that it was supposed to be
like a "rimf." When I asked what that was he said it was something which
was like the Rimpfischorn. And to our right were the peaks of Monte
Rosa, Nordend and Dufourspitze, black rock out of white snow, and the
ridge of the Lyskamm, and the twin white snow peaks, Castor and Pollux.
And some might say the view was very beautiful, and no doubt it was
beautiful, though not so to me. For I hate the long snow-fields, the
vast plains of _névé_ with their glare and their infinite infernal
monotony. Sometimes when I took off my snow-goggles the shining white
world seemed a glaring and bleached moon-land, a land wholly unfit for
human beings, as indeed it is. And though things seem near they are very
far off. An hour's walk hardly moves one in the landscape. A man is
little more than a lost moth; such a moth as we found dead and frozen as
we crawled over the great snow towards the Strahlhorn. We sat down to
rest, and I fought with my friend O---- about the beauty of the
mountains, and horrified him by denying that there is any real
loveliness above the snow-line. He took it quite seriously, forgetting
that I was rebelling against so many miles of dead snow with never a
thing to do but plod and plod, and plod again.
And then we came to the top of the pass where rocks jutted out of the
snow, and a few minutes' climb let us look over into Italy, and down the
steep south side of Monte Rosa, under whose white clouds lay Macugnaga.
We sat upon the summit for an hour and ate once more, and argued as to
the beauty of things, and the wonder and foolishness of climbing, and I
own that I was very hard to satisfy. The snow-grind had entered into my
soul as it always does. It is duller than a walk through any flat
agricultural country before the corn begins to grow.
And yet below us was the other side of our pass, which certainly looked
more interesting. Right under our feet was a little snow _arête_ with
slopes like a high pitched roof. It was quite possible to be killed
there if one was foolish or reckless, and the prospect cheered me up. It
is at anyrate not dull to be on an _arête_ with a snow slope leading to
nothing beneath me. And I cannot help insisting on the fact that much
mountaineering is essentially dull. Often enough a long day may be
without more than one dramatic moment. There is really only five minutes
of interest on the Schwartzberg-Weissthor. We came to that in the
_arête_, for after following it for a few minutes we turned off it to
the left and came to the _bergschrund_, the big crevasse which separates
the highest snows or ice from the glacier. By now I was quite anxious
that the guides should find the _schrund_ difficult. I had been bored to
death and yearned for some little excitement. I even declared sulkily
(it is odd, but true, that one does often become reckless and sulky
under such circumstances) that I was ready to jump "any beastly
_bergschrund_." My offer was no doubt made with the comfortable
consciousness that the guides were not likely to let me do anything
quite idiotic. But there was no necessity for any such gymnastics. The
_schrund's_ lower lip was only six feet lower than the upper lip, and
the whole crevasse was barely three feet across, though doubtless deep
enough to swallow a thousand parties like ours. Somewhat to my
disappointment we got over quite easily, and struck down across the
glacier, passing one or two rather dangerous crevasses by crawling on
our stomachs. The only satisfaction I had was that both the guides and
O---- declared that the way I wished to descend was impossible, whereas
it finally turned out to have been easy and direct. I said I had told
them so, of course, and then we got on the lower glacier and on an
accursed moraine. It was now about noon. We had been going since two in
the morning. We came at last into a grassy valley, and presently stood
on the steep _débris_ slope above Mattmark. It was a steep run down the
zigzag path to the flat, which is partly occupied by the Mattmark Lake,
and at last we got to the inn. There we changed our things and had
lunch, and I and O---- once more fought over the glacier of the upper
snows, and the question as to whether we should climb on æsthetic or
gymnastic grounds. And though we did not reach the hotel at Saas-Fée
till the evening, that argument lasted all the way. But when he and I
get together, as we usually do when climbing comes on, we always quarrel
in the most friendly way upon that subject. But for my own part I
declare that I will never again do another pure snow-grind such as the
Schwartzberg-Weissthor for any other purpose than to fetch a doctor, or
to do something equally useful in a case of emergency. If climbing does
not try one's faculties as well as one's physique it is a waste of
labour.
ACROSS THE BIDASSOA
I came out of London's mirk and mist and the clouds of the Channel and
the rollers of the Bay to find sunshine in the Gironde, though the east
wind was cool in Bordeaux's big river. And then even in Bordeaux I
discovered that fog was over-common; brief sunshine yielded to thick
mist, and the city of wine was little less depressing than English
Manchester. But though I spent a night there I was bound south and hoped
for better things close by the border of Spain. And truly I found them,
though the way there through the Landes is as melancholy as any great
city of sad inhabitants.
The desolation of the Landes is an ordered, a commercial desolation.
Once the whole surface of the district bore nothing but a scanty
herbage. The soil is sand and an iron cement, or "hard-pan," below the
sand. Here uncounted millions of slender sea-pines cover the plain; they
stand in serried rows, as regular as a hop-garden, gloomy and without
the sweet wildness of nature. And every pine is bitterly scarred, so
that it may bleed its gum for traders. When the plantations are near
their full growth they are cut down, stacked to season slowly, and the
trees finish their existence as mine timbers deep under the earth.
After seventy miles of a southward run there are signs that the Landes
are not so everlasting and spacious as they seem. To the south-east, at
Buglose, where St Vincent de Paul was born, the Pyrenees show far and
faint and blue on the horizon. And then suddenly the River Adour
appears, and a country which was English. Dax was ours for centuries,
and so was Bayonne, whose modern citadel has had a rare fate for any
place of strength. It has never been taken; not even Wellington and his
Peninsular veterans set foot within its bastions.
This is the country of the Basques, that strange, persistent race of
which nothing is known. Their history is more covered by ancient clouds
than that of the Celts; their tongue has no cousin in the world, though
in structure it is like that of the North-American Indians. I met some
of them later, but so far know no more than two words of their
language.
The wind was cool at St Jean de Luz, but the sun was bright and the sea
thundered on the beach and the battered breakwaters. To the east and
south are the Pyrenees--lower summits, it is true, but bold and fine in
outline. The dominant peak, being the first of the chain, is Larhune (a
Basque word, not French), where English blood was spilt when Clauzel
held it for Napoleon against the English. Further to the south, and
across the Bidassoa, in Spain, rises the sharp ridge of the Jaisquivel,
beneath which lies Fuentarabia. Yonder by Irun is the abrupt cliff of
Las Tres Coronas, three crowns of rock. Here one is in the south-east of
the Bay, where France and Spain run together, and the sea, under the
dominion of the prevailing south-westers, is rarely at peace with the
land. To the northward, but out of sight, lies windy Biarritz; to the
south is blood-stained, battered and renewed San Sebastian, a name that
recalls many deeds of heroism and many of shame. The horrors of its
siege and taking might make one cold even in sunlight. But between us
and its new city lies the Bidassoa. Here, at St Jean de Luz, is the
Nivelle flowing past Ciboure. The river was once familiar to us in
despatches. The whole country even yet smells of ancient war. For here
lies the great western road to Spain. And more than once it has been the
road to Paris. It is a path of rising and falling empire.
During my few days at St Jean de Luz I had foregathered with some exiled
friends, walked to quiet Ascain, and regretted I lacked the time even to
attain the summit of so small a mountain as Larhune, and then, desiring
for once to set foot in Spain, took train to Hendaye. This is the last
town in France. Across the Bidassoa rose the quaint roofs and towers of
old Fuentarabia, the Fontarabie of the French. I hired an eager Basque
to row me across the river, then running seaward at the last of the ebb.
The day was splendid and mild. There was no cloud in the sky, not a
wreath of mist upon the mountains. The river was a blue that verged on
green; its broad sand glowed golden in the sun; to seaward the
amethystine waters of the Atlantic heaved and glittered. On the far
cliffs they burst in lifting spray. The hills wore the fine faint blue
of atmosphere; the wind was very quiet. This seemed at last like peace.
I let my hands feel the cool waters of the river and soaked my soul in
the waters of peace.
And yet my bold Basque chattered as he stood at the bows and poled me
with a blunted oar across the river shallows. He told me proudly that he
had the three languages, that he was all at home with French and Spanish
and Basque. He was intelligent within due limits; he at anyrate knew how
to extract francs from an Englishman. That generosity which consists in
buying interested civility as well as help or transport with an extra
fifty centimes is indeed but a wise and calculated waste. It occurred to
me that he might solve a question that puzzled me. Were the Basques
united as a race, or were their sympathies French or Spanish? After
considering how I should put it, I said,--
"Mon ami, est-ce que vous êtes plus Basque que Français, ou plus
Français que Basque?"
He taught me a lesson in simple psychology, for he stopped poling and
stared at me for a long minute. Then he scratched his head and a light
came into his eyes.
"Mais, monsieur, je suis un Basque Français!"
My fine distinction was beyond him, and it took me not a little
indirect questioning to discover that he was certainly more French than
Basque. He presently denounced the Spanish Basques in good round terms,
and incidentally showed me that there must be a very considerable
difference in their respective dialects. For he complained that the
Spanish Basques spoke so fast that it was hard to understand them.
He put me ashore at last on a mud flat and accompanied me to the Fonda
Miramar, where a bright and pretty waitress hurried, after the fashion
of Spaniards, to such an extent that she got me a simple lunch in no
more than half an hour. My Spanish is far worse even than my French, but
in spite of that we carried on an animated conversation in French and
English, Basque and Spanish. At lunch my talk grew more fluent and
Mariquita went more deeply into matters. She desired to know what I
thought of the Basques, of whom she was one, and a sudden flicker of the
deceitful imagination set me inventing. I told her that I was a Basque
myself, though I was also an Englishman. She exclaimed at this. She had
never heard of English Basques. How was it I did not speak it? This was
a sore point with me. I assured her of the shameful fact that the
English Basques had lost their own tongue; they were degenerate. I had
some thoughts of learning it in order to re-introduce it into England.
As soon as Mariquita had mastered this astounding story she hurried to
the kitchen, and as I heard her relating something with great
excitement, I have little doubt that a legend of English Basques is now
well on its way past historic doubt. Leaving her to consider the news I
had brought, I went out with my boatman to view the old town. I found it
quaint and individual and lovely.
A man who has seen much of the world must hold some places strangely and
essentially beautiful. My own favourite spots are Auckland, N. Z.; the
upper end of the Lake of Geneva; Funchal in Madeira; the valley of the
Columbia at Golden City and the valley of the Eden seen from Barras in
England. To these I can now add Fuentarabia, the Pyrenees and the
Bidassoa. I stood upon the roof of the old ruined palace of Charles Le
Quint, and on every point of the compass the view had most peculiar and
wonderful qualities. Beneath me was the increasing flood of the frontier
river: at my very feet lay the narrow and picturesque street canyons of
the ancient town; to the south was Irun in the shelter and shadow of the
mountains; east-south-east rose the pyramidal summit of Larhune; the
west was the sharp ridge of the brown Jaisquivel which hid San
Sebastian; to the north was the rolling Bay; and right to the south the
triple crown of Las Tres Coronas cut the sky sharply. Right opposite me
Hendaye burnt redly in the glow of the southern sun. In no place that I
can remember have I seen two countries, three towns, a range of
mountains, a big river and the sea at one time. And there was not a spot
in view that had not been stained with the blood of Englishmen.
But now there were no echoes of war in Fuentarabia. Peace lay over its
dark homes and within its ancient walls.
ON A VOLCANIC PEAK
I had seen Etna, Vesuvius and Stromboli, but had never yet climbed any
volcano until I stood upon the summit of the Peak of Teneriffe, Pico de
Teyde, home of the gods and devils as well as of the aboriginal Guanches
of the Canary Islands.
The wind was bitterly cold, more bitter, indeed, than I have ever felt,
and yet, as I stood and shivered upon the little crater's brink, fumes
of sulphurous acid and smoke swept round me and made me choke. The edge
of the crater was of white fired rock; inside the cup the hollow was
sulphur yellow. Puffs of smoke came from cracks. I dropped out of the
wind and warmed myself at the fire. I picked up warm stones and danced
them from one hand to another. And overhead a wind of ice howled. For
the Peak is twelve thousand feet and more above the sea. An hour before
I had been cutting steps in the last slopes of the last ash cone of the
volcano which still lives and may burst into activity at any fatal
moment.
To stand upon the Peak and look down upon the world and the sea gives
one a great notion of the making of things. Once the world was a
crucible. The islands are all volcanic, all ash and cinders, lava and
pumice. But I perceived that the Peak itself, the final peak, the last
five thousand feet of it, was but the last result of a dying fire--a
mere gas spurt to what had been. The whole anatomy of the island is laid
bare; the history and the growth of the peak are written in letters of
lava, in wastes of pumice and fire-scarred walls. The plain of the
Canyadas lies beneath me, and is ten miles across. This was the ancient
crater; it is as big as the crater of Kilauea, in the Hawaiian Islands.
But Kilauea is yet truly alive, a sea of lava with many cones spouting
lava. Such was the crater of Teneriffe before the last peak rose within
its basin. Now retama, a hardy bitter shrub, grows in these plains of
pumice; the flats of it are pumice and rapilli, white and brown. But the
ancient crater walls stand unbroken for miles, though here and there
they have been swept away, some say by floods of water belched from the
pit.
From the last ash-peak of fire, as I stood on the crater walls in smoke
and a cold wind, I saw no sign of Teneriffe's fertility. The works of
man upon the lower slopes below the pinyon forests were invisible. The
slopes by Orotava lay under cloud, the sea was hidden almost to its
horizon by a vast plain of heaving mist. All I could see plainly was the
old crater itself, barren, vast, tremendous, with its fire-scarred walls
and its fumaroles. To the west some smoked still, smoked furiously. But
though I stood upon the highest peak, another one almost as high lay
behind me. Chahorra gaped and gasped, as it seemed, like a leaping,
suffocating fish in drying mud. Its crater opened like a mouth and
around it lesser holes gaped. On the plain of the old crater there rise
two separate volcanoes--one, the true peak, rising 5000 feet from the
Canyada floor (itself 7000 feet above the sea), and Chahorra, nearly
4000. But so vast is the ancient crater that these two peaks, one yet
alive and the other dead, seem but blisters or boils upon its barren
plain. To the north, miles from the edge of my peak, I could see the
crater cliff rise red. To the west and east the wall has broken down,
but the Fortaleza, as the Canary men call it, stands yet, scarred into
chimneys, shining, half glassy, half like fired clay. And further to the
east, beyond the gap called the Portillo, the cliffs rise again as one
follows the trail over that high desert to Vilaflor. White pumice lies
under these cliffs, looking like a beach. Once perhaps the crater was
level with the sea. It may even be that the crater walls were broken
down by outer waters, not by any volcanic flood.
None knows at what time the peak of Chahorra and the great peak were
truly active. But obviously the final peak itself was the result of a
last great eruption. Perhaps the old crater had been quiescent for
thousands of years, and then it worked a little and threw up El Teyde.
At some other time Chahorra rose. At another period, in historic times,
the volcano above Garachico, even now smoking bravely, sent its lava
into Garachico's harbour and destroyed it. But the last peak as it
stands is the work of two periods of activity at least. The first great
slope ends at another flat called the Rambleta. Here was once an ancient
crater. Then the fires quietened, and there was a time of lesser
activity. It woke again, and threw up the last weary ash-cone of a
thousand feet or near it.
All things die, but who shall say when a volcano has done its worst? A
quiet Vesuvius slew its thousands: Etna its tens of thousands. Some day
perhaps Teneriffe will wake again, either in earthquakes or lava-flow,
and cause a Casamicciola or a Catania. The cones over against Garachico
seemed much alive to me, and had I not warmed frozen hands at the very
earth fires themselves? I broke out hot sulphur with the pick of my
ice-axe. Icod of the Vines, or Orotava itself, port and villa, might
some day wake to such a day as that which has smitten St Pierre in fiery
Martinique.
Once all the quiet seas were unbroken by their seven islands--Hierro,
Palma, Gomera, Teneriffe, Grand Canary, Fuerteventura, and Lanzarote lay
beneath the waters of the smiling ocean. Even now they smell of fire and
the furnace; in the most fruitful vineyards of Grand Canary the soil is
half cinders. In all the islands vast cinder heaps rise black and
forbidding. Lava streams, in which the poisonous euphorbia alone can
grow, thrust themselves like great dykes among fertile lands. The very
sands of the sea are powdered pumice and black volcanic dust. One of the
greatest craters of the world holds within itself great parts of wooded
Palma. On dead volcanoes are the petty batteries of Spain over against
Las Palmas. There is something strange and almost pathetic in the
thought of guns raised where Nature once thundered dreadfully in the
barren sunlit Isleta.
But of all the islands and of all parts of them, the Peak, shining over
clouds and visible from far seas, is the king and chief. I left its
fiery summit with a certain reluctance. It attracted me strangely. It
represented, feebly enough, I daresay, the greatest of all elemental
forces. Yet its faint fires and its smoke and sulphur fumes had all the
power of a mighty symbol. By such means, by such a formula, had the very
world itself been made. Though snow lay upon its slopes and ice bound
ancient blocks of lava together, it might at any hour awake again and
renew the terrors which once must have floated over the seas in a gust
of flame.
SHEEP AND SHEEP-HERDING