BY

JULIAN S. HUXLEY

(Balliol)

II. OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF A CHAMOIS: AND INCIDENTALLY OF SOME OTHER

MATTERS

Those who know Rosenlaui will also know that finely pointed little

peak, an outlying spur of the Wetterhorn, that looks straight down

into the front windows of the hotel--the Dossenhorn. That was my first

climb. I confess that it was nothing very thrilling, though I enjoyed

it thoroughly. We had a guide--an aged, aged man, whose downhill,

bent-knee walk was if anything slower than his very slow but quite

automatic and invariable upward pacing. We had a rope, which appeared

to me perfectly unnecessary, and was a great nuisance to the airily

independent spirit and body of the novice. Two ice-axes lent to our

party (of five) an air of considerable distinction. Very little of

the day’s happenings have remained to me. I still remember how very

easy the rocks of the last arête were; how fine the Wetterhorn looked

across the snow plateau; how I wondered why my uncle, a considerable

climber in his day, wore trousers instead of knickerbockers; how I ran

down most of the way home after unroping; and how, in my innocence,

I plunged my face, scarlet from its exposure all unvaselined to the

snow-fields, into a basin of cold water--with what results those know

who have tried it. Among all this intolerable deal of bread, however,

we had a halfpenny worth of something more intoxicating. There is a

long snow slope to be crossed slantingly before the col and the hut are

reached. It is not at all steep, sloping up to the lower border of the

rock pile that forms the pyramidal top of the mountain; but the old

guide had ordered the rope, and so there we were plodding diagonally

upwards in single file.

All of a sudden there was a rattle, and then a stone leapt off the

rocks above to bound down the snow slope some four hundred yards ahead

of us. The old guide looked round, and said: ‘Chamois.’

This set us all agog--two or three had never seen the chamois on his

native heath. However, the brown coat of the chamois is a good piece of

cryptic colouring; he--or they--remained absolutely invisible against

the brown rocks. But we had startled him, and he went on moving--for

some reason towards us, as we soon discovered when a second stone

came down. The third alarmed us a little, for it crossed our path not

fifty yards ahead of the leader; so we resolved to halt and keep our

eyes open for the next. This was not long in coming; it came with a

bound off the rocks, and seemed to be heading for the gap between the

last two on the rope. It must have been going at a great pace, for

it devoured that snow slope in great hungry leaps, clearing eighty

or a hundred feet at a bound, though never rising a yard above the

snow; it hummed as it came, with a deep buzzing sound. Altogether

it was extremely alarming (I was one of the two hindermost), and it

was a considerable relief to see, after it was half-way to us, that

it had a slight curl on it, and an outward curl, which caused it to

hum past five or six yards behind the tail of our procession. The

chamois passed, still invisible, on his way, and we on ours, discussing

what would have been the best thing to do supposing his aim had been

straighter.

It was that scene that came into my head years later. I had been

trying to master some of the rudiments of geology, of which science I

was lamentably ignorant, and had at least begun to get into my head

the idea of denudation--how the shapes of mountains as we see them

are as much due to cutting away as to heaving up--and was grasping

the strength of the denuding forces that would go on thus cutting and

cutting until nothing was left but one flat plain, did they not thus

once more liberate the forces of upheaval. In my textbook there were

examples given of the many and various activities working together

this work of destruction--wind and sun, rain and frost, sand, rivers,

little plants--‘and chamois!’ came suddenly into my mind. A little nail

will serve to hang a large picture; and so the whole idea of denudation

was fixed in my brain by that one Bernese chamois.

It perhaps, more than any other single thing, taught me to see the

transience of the hills. For here, as so often elsewhere, the judgments

of the natural man must be unlearnt. ‘The hills stand about Jerusalem,’

says the natural man,--‘The Eternal Hills!’ They are not eternal; they

are as transitory, as much slaves of Time, as anything with life. The

title is but one more witness to the arrogance, the unimaginativeness

of man, who thinks that everything is of the same order of magnitude as

he himself; and if he does not notice the hour hand move while he trips

along some fraction of the circumference of the seconds dial--why,

then, it must be motionless!

But man possesses also a brain, and therein an intelligence, a logical

faculty, by means of which he discovers presently that things are not

always what they seem; and one of these apparent contradictions is

that the mountains must be changing, rising up and wearing down, even

though he cannot perceive it directly; and yet even though he can prove

that it must be so, it is still very difficult for him to realise it

happening.

Our intelligence, indeed, although it thus transcends the senses’

immediate judgments, has to go back to them and ask their aid if it is

to attain to fullest knowledge. It is a very imperfect instrument, so

built up on the foundations of the five senses that if we cannot feel,

hear, taste, smell or, more particularly, see what there is to be dealt

with, but only reason about it, we may _know_ quite well that reasoning

has led to the only right conclusion, but yet do not _feel_ fully and

unquestioningly the rightness of it. We all believe the moon to be

a globe; but I must confess that on my first sight of her through a

telescope, I experienced a veritable shock of surprise and pleasure to

realise, as I saw the craters passing from full face in the centre to

profile at the edge, how globular she really was. With the mountains

no such ocular demonstration is possible to us. I say to us, for to our

descendants it may be. You have but to take a series of photographs

of some peak from exactly the same spot at intervals of fifty years

or so; then, putting these together in their order, run them through

a cinematograph, and you would see your everlasting citadel crumble,

shrinking before your eyes like a pricked balloon. Such a condensation

of events has already been practised to render such slow processes as

the growth of twigs or the complex unfolding of the egg more patent

and striking; and there is no reason why it should not be applied to

matters of centuries instead of days.

To-day we cannot have the change rendered thus visible to us. We have

only indirect methods to help us, methods which demand reflection

and imagination. Imagination and reflection, however, are processes

demanding more mental energy than the average man is willing to expend,

for the average man is mentally of extreme laziness. So the mountains

remain eternal, to the average man.

But there is no harm in trying to exercise powers of reflection and

of imagination, if I may persuade you to it. Stand on the bridges at

Geneva and look at the Rhone slipping down from the lake, clear and

blue with a wonderful and almost unreal blue. Then walk down to the

junction of the Rhone and the Arve, and see that other river, turbid,

greyish-white, a regular glacier stream; identity and name may be taken

from it in the union, but it still has strength to rob the robber of

his own especial beauty. That discolouring flood--what is it? As you

walk back again, the top of Mont Blanc comes gradually from behind

the Grande Salève into sight. If you reflect, you will know that

those white waves were white from carrying away what only yesterday

had been a part of those famous mountains; to-day it is dust, and

nameless; to-morrow it will be laid down upon the ocean floor, there

to be hardened, kneaded, and baked into the bricks that shall build

other, as yet unchristened, hills. If you imagine, you will see in the

mind’s eye those same summits, thus continually attacked, gradually

shrinking; preserving their beauty to the last, no doubt, like our

lovely lake mountains, which though in respect of their former height

they be but as roots when the trunk is fallen, yet in themselves show

not a trace of decay, and lift their heads as strong and fresh as ever.

Yet they dwindle, and will in the end be mountains no more; they will

no more have form and shape, no more be named and almost live, endowed

with that strong appearance of vivid and obvious personality; mere

undulations, they will no more exercise the mountain power upon the

mind of man.

What else will help you to see the transience of the hills? Go and

stand by a mountain stream where it runs in quick swishing rapids; as

I have done by the Drance de Bagnes, and heard sounds as of groaning

and muffled giant hammering--great boulders grinding each other in the

press of the current, and moving always downwards. Go and look at the

enormous moraines that wind down into Italy--each would be a range of

hills in England. Had not the Alps another aspect before these were

heaped up? And yet, say the geologists, great cenotaphs of the ice were

raised in but a fraction of the time since the Alps were born. Try to

tackle a rock-and-ice gully with strong sun on it, or (preferably) stay

on one side and watch the stones come down: down they come like that

every sunny day.

Look at the Matterhorn, and be told how like it is to Strasburg

Cathedral; but rock spires are not built upwards like ones of stone

and mortar; they are monoliths, cut out of the solid rock. The stony

layers of the rock, once lying flat and soft upon the sea-bottom, then

hardened, then gripped and crumpled by the ageing earth like so many

sheets of wet paper, now are cut through, and show their free edges on

the steep flanks of the mountain. Fixed long ago in waves and curves,

now they are immobile, but they treasure within themselves the forms

which the ice and the sun are to reveal. As if the sculptor were to

have but half the shaping of his work, and the block of marble almost

of itself disclose its hidden Oenus, or turn a Hercules planned into

a Hylas accomplished, so the rock masses contain within themselves

no infinite possibility of forms--there is, to start with, a quality

of mountain concealed in the rock, so that the aerial sculptors

may work as they please, and never find a Dent du Midi in the Mont

Blanc range, or fashion a Weisshorn from the Dolomites. But that is

another story. Even though the rocks thus decree that the instruments

of their destruction shall be as well instruments to reveal their

hidden beauties, yet destruction none the less it is. How gigantic a

destruction those cut, upcurving layers of rock can testify.

But in the same way as our mind can know and yet not feel the

mutability of the mountains, so it may know and yet not grasp their

size and its extent. Here again the new lesson is hard to be learnt

by brain alone: ‘Everest 29,002, Mont Blanc 15,786, Scawfell Pike

3210’--the figures convey but a part. The hills must take the mind by

assault through the breaches of sense.

Those moments come but rarely. I have seen the west face of Skiddaw

once, and once Schiehallion from the Struan road, towering as high

as any Alpine peak might do; and Donkin’s famous photograph of the

Weisshorn gives one something of the true feeling. But the most

complete revelation came to me at the head of the Swiss Val Ferret.

We had already begun to appreciate the bigness of things, but rather

through our own littleness than for any unusual grandeur revealed in

them. As you walk up the deep, close valley, you have on your right, in

contrast to the monotonous dry ridge of even middle height to the left,

a succession of broad bluffs or buttresses that sustain the east end

and guard the eastern glacier gateways of that great Cathedral of Three

Nations, the massif of Mont Blanc. There is one below and one above the

end of the Saleinaz glacier, and on the side of each a lesser bluff,

an inward, forward-projecting pillar that narrows the gateway to a

mere postern, with only glimpses of the broad aisle above. Both these

doorposts bear the same name--Tita Moutse or Tête Moutze; a very good

name, certainly, but you would think that the dwellers at Proz-de-Fort,

just between the two, might find it confusing, even though on Barbier’s

map one is printed black and upright, the other thin and in italics. It

is difficult to render these distinctions in speaking--and perhaps they

have not all got Barbier’s map. However, that is not our concern at

present. Farther up is another big buttress (rejoicing in the name of

Treutze Bouc), and another, and then the Glacier de la Neuvaz, with the

Châlet Ferret on the other hand, and feather beds for weary travellers.

These buttresses, and especially the Treutze Bouc, are calculated to

annoy the walker. There they stand, looking no bigger than a buttress

of Snowdon or Saddleback; there as here the mountain torrents cut away

the ground in the same way, and the same broad-faced bluffs are left.

As with bluffs, so with ships: it is almost impossible to grasp the

size of a big liner out at sea, her build is the same as that of any

other steamship, and there is no standard of comparison. Here in the

Val Ferret one learns by bitter experience and blistered feet. The

road winds on and on, across torrent-beds, through alder-woods, along

hot slopes--and the summit of Treutze Bouc is not yet opposite. After

this lengthy demonstration of the disadvantages and unpleasantnesses

of size, the mountains at last relent and show the other side of the

picture.

I shall never forget the impression of colossal grandeur that showed

itself at a turn of the road opposite the gate of the Glacier de la

Neuvaz. Nothing was lacking in the chain. In the foreground, below a

grassy bank, flowed the Drance de Ferret--only a smallish stream, but

big enough and swift enough unbridged to stop such a small animal as

man from gaining its other side. Across it lay a fallen pine; and from

this, better than from the standing trees, you realised to what a

height the pine-trunks grow. Of these there was a thick wood filling up

the level bottom left by the receding glacier; the green sea extended

back and back until the tops of the separate trees were not to be made

out, and the whole wood tapered away in perspective like a band of

clouds towards the setting sun. In the end it turned a corner to the

right--a thin green line beyond the grey terminal moraine. This corner

filled a little indentation in the hill behind. The eye travelled up

naturally from the green line of trees to the green slope, and saw

that slope as part of a great rounded hill, rather like a bit of the

Downs in general appearance; but had it been hollow you could have

gone on pouring your Chanctonburies and Sinoduns and Beachy Heads and

Hogs backs into it, and they would have rattled about like small-shot

inside. The stream of trees let you see how big it was, as hills on

the horizon show the greatness of the setting moon. I think the hill

was nameless. Beyond it, in another plane of distance, rose another

peak--this one brown, of bare rock, and rather jagged; the vegetation

had ended on the part concealed behind the green hill. Up and up the

eye travelled, and was amazed to find that if the green had been but

a spur of the brown, so the brown was but a spur of the white. Mont

Dolent arose from, behind it like the pursuing peak in the _Prelude_.

All its rocky middle and its snowline were in their turn hidden by the

brown spur before them; only the white slanting chisel edge of the

summit soared up to sight. Stream--tree--wood--mountains: one, two, and

three ... each formed a stepping-stone to the one beyond, making it

possible for the whole grandeur of the peak to slip down, as it were,

and find place within the narrow limits of the brain waiting at the

other end.

There it was able to take up its station beside that other thought

which entered there, not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, but by

the swift chamois and the mountain torrents. The two, holding mutual

colloquy, together tell what Wordsworth learnt in another fashion, that

the mountains are

‘Huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men.’

But live they do, in their own way--not only in their form and

individuality, but in the constant cycle of their changeableness.

They approach to being closed systems, independent in some degree

of the rest of the world; partial individuals, they have a share in

determining their future selves. Once raised to mountains, they contain

within themselves the germs of their own destiny; and if not possessing

such power as true life possesses of blossoming into a predetermined

form, scarcely to be altered by all the efforts of the outside world,

yet at least marking down beforehand the limits beyond which the

outer influences cannot mould them, preordaining the main succession

of their future history, and the essential quality of the forms they

are to take. And again, though they have not the true vital property

of reproducing their kind by means of a mere particle of their own

substance, that grows, and in its growth takes up the atoms of outer

matter and moulds them to its will, they have a kind of reproduction

scarcely less strange, where like generates not like, but unlike. In

their decay they are laying new foundations. Grain torn from grain of

solid rock, boulder from boulder is swept away; layer after layer of

grains or boulder is laid--‘well and truly laid’; rock system piled

upon rock system; till the time comes, and all this is upheaved into

a chain of peaks which, though their every particle were taken from

the substance of that older chain, will be like it in being a mountain

range, but in that alone. So they have their being, in a different

and vaster cycle than man’s, their life only another fragment of that

change which is the single fixed reality.

And what is the moral of all this? You may well ask; for I do not

know that I know myself. Proceed to the fact that our mountains are

but crinkles on the rind of a small satellite of one star among the

millions, and we deduce the littleness of man: which has been done

before. Point out how, in spite of all their size and their terrors,

they fall one by one to the climber, and we with equal facility prove

his greatness: which also others have successfully attempted. Insist

on their mutability, and it merely takes us back to Heraclitus and his

πάντα ῥεῖ. Perhaps one moral is that feeling as well as reasoning,

reasoning as well as feeling, is necessary to true knowledge; a

conclusion which would appeal to followers of M. Bergson, but hardly

falls within the scope of this book.

The chief moral is, I expect, that the mountains can give the climber

more than climbing, and will do so if he but keep his eyes open. From

them there will come to him flashes of beauty and of grandeur, light in

dark places, sudden glimpses of the age, the glory, and the greatness

of the earth.

THE MOUNTAINS IN GREEK

POETRY