CHAPTER V

THE BERNESE OBERLAND FROM END TO END

The Oberland circuit--My appointment with Arnold

Lunn--An Anglo-Swiss piece of work--An unbelieving

public--Switzerland and Britain--Geographical--Practical--We

start from Beatenberg--The Jungfrau ice-slabs--New

Year’s Day at Kandersteg--In the Gasterenthal--On the

Tschingelfirn--Foehn-effects on the Petersgrat--The Telli

glacier--The Kippel bottle-race--A church door--Theodore

Kalbermatten--The Loetschen pass--Burnt socks--Roped

ski-ing--The Concordia breakfast-table--Why we did not ascend

the Jungfrau--The Concordia huts--The Grünhornlücke--On snow

“lips” and cornices--An afternoon snooze--The Finsteraarhorn

hut--A guideless party--Ascent of the Finsteraarhorn--Our

next pass--A stranded runner--The Grimsel--Home life at

Guttannen--Our sleigh run to Meiringen--A comparison of winter

and summer work--Memories and visions--Table of levels--How

to form a caravan--The pay of the men--Side-slip and

back-slip--Future railway facilities.

This the Oberland “circuit.” We left Beatenberg on December 31, 1908,

passed through Interlaken, went on to Kandersteg, crossed the Petersgrat

to the top of the Loetschenthal, traversed the Aletsch glacier between

the Jungfrau and the Concordia hut, ascended the Finsteraarhorn, reached

the Grimsel hospice, and came back to Interlaken and Beatenberg, where we

were again comfortably quartered on the night of January 8, 1909.

This traverse was made into an event and marks a date in the history of

Swiss mountaineering. The telegraph and news agencies announced it far

and wide. It was the object of press articles and flattering references

in most countries in which interest is taken in mountaineering feats. It

has been lectured on, and related in periodicals over and over again.

The reception given to a trip of this kind obeys the laws of pictorial

perspective. Maybe, however, shorn of the benevolent element so kindly

contributed by the public, our expedition is still worth describing in

its true relief, in the light of the impressions of the two explorers who

carried it out.

This expedition, the first of its length at such altitudes at that time

of the year, was an Anglo-Swiss piece of work. It was performed in

company with Arnold Lunn.

We met by appointment at Beatenberg, which his father was then opening

up for the first time as a winter station. Arnold Lunn is as keen a

mountaineer as was ever born under the skies of Britain. His poetic and

adventurous mind is endowed with an exceptional facility for imaging

forth in words Alpine scenery, and for communicating to others the

manly joy which overtakes him in such scenery. He has the soul of a

propagandist and missionary. He is a striking example of how, with

climbers, performance goes before propaganda, unless one would belong to

those who are deservedly marked out as hangers--on to the exploits of

others. There are only too many such loitering about the Alps nowadays.

[Illustration: KANDERSTEG--FINSTERAARHORN--GRIMSEL.

(Reproduction made with authorisation of the Swiss Topographic Service.

26.8.12.)

To face p. 114.]

Can there be a more noble spectacle than the sight of one, who having

met young with an extremely serious accident in climbing, which to all

appearance, and according to cool reason, should confine him to the part

of an armchair propagandist and pen-wielding missionary, yields again to

the irresistible call of the Alps, and ascends the Dent Blanche in spite

of the lameness consequent upon the accident in North Wales in which his

right leg was broken in two places, under such conditions that it has

continued ever since to be a source of daily suffering?

Last winter, on the Eiger, battling with a terrifying snow and wind

storm, my lame friend was three times thrown out of his steps. He had

with him Maurice Crettex, one of the most powerful rock and snow men, I

believe, of the present day among Swiss guides. The situation would have

been frantically impossible but for him. But what a picture! Two men,

side by side, one, all physical strength and professional devotion to

duty, the other, all spiritual energy and moral force.

It is particularly gratifying that a Swiss and an Englishman should have

been united in showing to ski-runners that the way across the Bernese

Oberland was open from end to end and that the most magnificent mountain

scenery that ever wasted its sweetness upon the desert air was awaiting

them. These were spectacles for which I was quite prepared, having

already moved, like many of my country men, amid the glories of High Alp

winter scenery, ever since some of the sections of the Swiss Alpine

Club (that of Geneva leading the way), had instituted for their members

and friends, the expeditions known under the name of _Grandes Courses

d’hiver_.

It is, however, one thing that the Swiss should favour such expeditions,

and quite another thing that strangers to Switzerland should entertain

the idea. I understand that when the first accounts of my winter ascents

of the Aiguille du Chardonnet and the Grand Combin were read, in London,

in the pages of the Alpine Ski Club Annual, there came upon the lips of

many competent readers a smile which partly betokened admiration--which

I certainly did not deserve--and, partly, incredulity--which I certainly

expected in some measure.

Even in Geneva I had at first some hesitation in making known my

Bagnes-Entremonts-Ferret circuit. When I did make up my mind to send an

extremely short and compendious notice to the _Journal de Genève_, the

editors let my scrap of paper lie six weeks before they printed it. It

was unkind of me to laugh in my sleeve while this long pause lasted. I

did not fare much better after my ascent of the Dent Blanche. I slipped

a word about it into a local but widely read halfpenny paper, to whose

information people “in the know” are wont not to attach much importance.

In fact, some busybodies had already forestalled my note with a few

warning lines to the effect that any attempt to cross in a consecutive

trip the Pennine Alps, in January, from Mont Blanc to the Simplon pass,

would be too hazardous to prove anything but fatal. And here was a

gentleman who not only had got from Bourg St. Pierre to Zermatt, but

asseverated he had ascended the Dent Blanche.

Some of my colleagues in the Geneva section, desirous of protecting

the good name of their club, and anxious to exonerate one of the older

and more respected members from any charge of senile self-complacency,

explained gravely that it was a printer’s mistake, and that surely I had

written Tête Blanche in my hastily scribbled manuscript note.

The reader must be told at this juncture that the Tête Blanche is an

insignificant little bump of snow on the Col d’Hérens, of which those

good colleagues of mine, with their knowledge of my climbing powers,

could well trust themselves to say that I might have reached its summit,

without putting too great a strain on my powers. Even now, another of

my young disciples, Marcel Kurz, whose circuits on ski in the Bernina

and Mischabel districts may be followed in two of the maps appended to

this volume, writes me that he is pleased to hear of its approaching

publication, because it may conduce to the enlightenment of disbelievers,

across isolated specimens of whom he still occasionally comes.

Arnold Lunn, too, has met with ultra-sceptical folks, and a boastful

trait has been read by some into his ardour.

For my part, I am content to look upon our mountaineering fellowship

as a pleasant little incident in the history of Anglo-Swiss relations.

These I much take to heart. There is every reason in the world wherefore

they should be frequent, numerous, and close. Sometimes, in the flush of

after-dinner speeches, I have spoken of the Swiss as the navigators of

the Alps and of the English as the mountaineers of the sea. There is some

similarity in the risks incurred.

It would be a truism--in fact the repetition of a truism--to say how

English climbers of the middle of the nineteenth century helped the Swiss

in introducing into mountaineering the wholesome element of risk. “On ne

fait pas d’omelettes sans casser des œufs.”

It should not be hidden from the present generation of English climbers,

however, that the example of their forerunners has perhaps been more

thoroughly taken to heart in Switzerland than among themselves. There is

hardly a family or friendly circle in Switzerland that does not count one

of its members in the ring of those whose life was sacrificed for love of

the Alps.

The motives for associating here Swiss and English in my mind are not

solely sporting. It has hitherto been little realised how much Swiss

neutrality and national integrity are one of the bulwarks of the freedom

of Britain’s movements in Europe.

Every effort is being made to join Switzerland more closely to the

economic system of central Europe. In a century in which economics are

considered to offer a more effective political weapon than the open use

of military force, the tightening of the ties of fellowship between two

nations, neither of which can possibly aim at political encroachments

upon the other, may usefully serve to counteract a less innocent set of

tendencies. What with military roads, tunnels, and railways, the Alpine

barrier between the Baltic and the Mediterranean is being worn very thin.

It needs, probably, no further insistence to show that sentimental

Anglo-Swiss relations may be attended by practical consequences of some

immediate utility. In this network of associations an important function

devolves upon winter mountaineering. The English have no sporting

winter. They have already, in large numbers, adopted the Swiss winter

as what they want to supply home deficiencies. May this continue and an

ever wider bridge of Swiss and British ski be thrown over the Channel.

That this book, among others, might serve this purpose was one of the

motives that impelled the writer when he put together, for publication in

England, such accounts as that which follows.

At first sight, the title I have given to this chapter may appear

exaggerated. But it will not bear out any such unfavourable construction,

if the reader will charitably recollect that he has already travelled

with me from the western extremity of the Bernese Alps, visiting from end

to end the Diablerets, Wildhorn, and Wildstrubel range, as a prelude to

this excursion beyond the Gemmi to the east.

Geographically and technically the euphemistic title of this chapter

is not without excuse. The Oberland is theoretically taken to include

not only a western, but also an eastern wing, on to the Galenstock and

Dammastock. Popularly, the name Oberland is understood to apply to the

great range which is cut off on the east by the Grimsel and Haslithal, on

the west by the Gemmi and Kanderthal. Classical literature agrees with

the popular definition, the main point about which is, for ski-runners,

that between those two depressions there is no pass that does not lead

across glaciers.

The Oberland shows, between its extreme points, two parallel rows of

peaks. The northern row overlooks the lakes of Thun and Brienz. The

southern row overlooks the valleys of Loetsch and of Goms (in French

Conches), leading up to the Furka pass. Of those parallel rows the

northernmost, facing somewhat to the west, comprises the Blümlisalp and

the Lauterbrunner Breithorn. The southernmost, drawing to the east,

culminates in the Bietschhorn and Aletschhorn, and includes the summits

which, under the names of Wannehorn, Galmihorn, &c., look down upon the

glaciers of Fiesch and Oberaar, while the northern row, curving round the

Lauterbrunnen Valley from the Breithorn, is crowned by that magnificent

cluster overlooking both Scheideggs: the Jungfrau, Mönch, Eiger,

Wetterhorn, &c., with the Schreckhorn and Finsteraarhorn somewhat in the

rear.

Between those two rows a high glacial basin takes the form of an

elongated trough. From distance to distance this trough shows transversal

lips (cross-bars or threshholds, if one so prefers to style them),

which are the upper Tschingel glacier with the Mutthorn hut (9,700

feet), the Loetschenlücke, with the Egon von Steiger hut (10,515 feet),

the Grünhornlücke, between the Jungfraufirn and the glacier of Fiesch

(10,840 feet), and at length the Oberaarjoch (10,800 feet), between

the Oberaarhorn to the north and the Oberaar-Rothhorn to the south.

One sees from the figures quoted that those glacier passes all reach

to an altitude exceeding 9,000 feet. The top of the arc--to speak like

Euclid--would pass over the Finsteraarhorn at an altitude of 14,035 feet.

This high level is, in the opinion of Sir Martin Conway, who followed

it in his journey through the Alps from end to end, the very finest

snow-field in the Alps. It passes at the head of the greatest ice

stream, and is sufficiently remote from the Italian border to escape

the unfavourable influence which the Rhaetic, Lepontine, and Pennine

faces of the Alps have to endure from the hot atmospheric currents and

inordinately violent action of the sun.

“Two things were necessary for the success of this trip,” says Arnold

Lunn in one of his printed accounts; “good weather and immunity from

accidents. We could reduce the chances of accidents to a minimum by a

careful scrutiny of our kit, and we could reasonably expect fair play

from the weather by judiciously choosing the moment to begin our attack,

though, of course, the weather is always the most fickle factor in

determining the success of an expedition.

“As regards kit, I carried two pairs of gloves, one made of reindeer skin

lined with sealskin, the other a thick pair of woollen gloves, a woollen

scarf, a silk scarf, and a woollen helmet. A spare suit of underclothing

and two pairs of stockings completed the list of extra clothing. I wore

laupar boots and goat’s-hair socks on my feet, with a pair of crampons in

my sack for rock and ice-climbing. And here, incidentally, let me remark

that the ordinary crampon-nails which are fixed into the sole of the boot

soon spoil laupars. The only practical kind are those which are sold in

summer to be strapped on under the boots.

“I think I have at last found the ideal ski-binding for mountain work. It

is made by a Geneva firm, and was given me by Professor Roget. It never

gave any trouble; it was strong and tough. It did not vary in tightness

with the temperature, and, most important of all, it could be put on and

taken off at a moment’s notice. This is really essential, as one may meet

with short stretches on which it pays to ‘take up one’s ski and walk.’

“I tried, for the first time, a pair of sealskins, and found them answer

admirably. They reduced the labour of climbing by 20 per cent., weighed

hardly anything, and could be taken on and off without any trouble. An

extra ski-tip, a pair of Canadian rackets, ‘climber’s guides,’ maps, &c.,

completed our kit.”

[Illustration: KANDER GLACIER.

To face p. 123.]

My intention was to use Kandersteg as a starting-point, to land on the

high level, at 9,000 feet, by means of the Kander glacier gradient,

to go down to Kippel, in the Loetschenthal, by the Petersgrat; to pass

through the Loetschenlücke, to drop thence into the basin formed by the

Aletsch _névés_ (the Jungfraufirn and Ewig Schneefeld of German maps);

to rise again to the Grünhornlücke, to skid down upon the _firn_ of the

Fiesch glacier, to overtop this network of ice-mountains by the ascent

of the Finsteraarhorn, to go round the Finsteraarhorn group on its south

side, to return to the north as far as the Oberaarjoch, to descend the

Oberaar glacier to the Grimsel hospice, to follow thence the posting

road and to enter Guttannen as knights-errant, mounted and spurred--that

is, in our case, on trusty ski and shod with nailed boots, the attire in

which we would leave Kandersteg.

Thanks to the absence of any unpleasant incident, thanks also to a

most obligingly long spell of unbroken weather, the precautions we had

taken enabled me and my companions to carry out this programme without

interruption and without inconvenience. The “stripling,” Mr. Arnold Lunn,

gave proof of remarkable staying powers. Though our Bernese porters

seemed at first to believe that they were being “let in” for harum-scarum

adventures, by which they discreetly hoped the party might be brought

to a standstill after a few hours’ march, before it could run its head,

beyond hope of escape, into the dangers of this raid, they laid no

visible claim to being wiser than ourselves. They proved themselves to be

good and reliable fellows to the end, and came out of their trials with

beaming countenances, grateful for the lessons they had received in High

Alp ski-running.

We got into training at Beatenberg, where a snowfall delayed our

start for three days, if three days spent on the running slopes above

Beatenberg may be looked upon as a delay. Then, one morning, the sun,

bursting through the snow clouds, showed us the great peaks of the

Oberland looking down on a scene newly painted white. Our hopes rose

high, and making our rucksacks proportionately heavy, we skied down to

Interlaken, losing a bottle of whisky on the way. Carefully laid on the

top of my pack, with its nozzle looking out upon the world, it flew out,

on Arnold’s calling a sudden halt, and broke its nose against the wall

by the roadside. Thus was our expedition christened straight away, as a

launched ship that leaves the stocks.

On reaching Kandersteg, the gossamer banner of ice-dust blowing off the

Blümlisalp showed plainly enough that the gale from the north, which had

brought the fine weather, was still in full swing. My sympathy went out

to any young men who might be then battling up there with the raging

wind, for at Christmas and New Year’s tide the Alpine huts are much

visited by holiday-makers. Indeed, I saw later from an account published

in the Swiss periodical _Ski_, by Mr. Tauern, and by Mr. Schloss in the

Alpine Ski Club Annual, that those gentlemen were actually at the time

on the Aletschfirn. They had hoped to ascend the Jungfrau. Under the

circumstances the prospect lost its charm.

As I write, the Jungfrau has not yet been ascended in winter. The Swiss

papers gave out last year that my young friend Fritz Pfeiffer had

succeeded in reaching the top. It was a misapprehension. Within two

hundred yards of the ice-cap that crowns the Jungfrau, Mr. Pfeiffer, who

was accompanying an officer of the St. Gothard troops, was compelled to

fall back before the heap of slabs of solid ice, with which the combined

action of wind and sun had strewn the way. On these the two distinguished

mountaineers were unable to gain footing. The slabs slipped away from

under their feet, or bore them down in such a manner that they could not

have had better toboggans. Toboggans, however, were not the thing wanted,

nor even such trays or pieces of board as children are fond of using, for

the sake of amusement, in sliding down grass slopes nearer home.

The formation of these ice-slabs on exposed summits of suitable shape

opens up an interesting, and as yet unsolved, question in the history

of natural phenomena. What clearly happens is this. Snow, driven by a

tearing wind, falls against an ice buttress. Then the sun shines with all

its winter power upon the snow that sticks to the rugged ice. Exposed to

the action of two physical agents of great force, namely, to the heat

produced by the sun and to the impetus of the wind sweeping now with

perhaps still greater violence across a clear sky, the amorphous but

plastic mass is cut up and divided by a process which may be compared,

though the analogy is merely superficial, to what happens to dough in an

oven when a hot blast is driven through it. The dried-up dough breaks up

into flakes.

When I first came across that winter phenomenon--I have never met with

it in summer--I was led to compare those piled-up ice-slabs to the stone

slabs of like shape and size which lie on the bare crests of so many

mountains. The supposition lies near that these, too, may be due to some

combined action of pre-existent heat and supervening wind impetus, in

those geological ages when we have a fancy for imagining that the still

plastic earth-crust was blown about in huge billows by the liquid and

aerial elements.

Be this as it may, I hope I may never be uncharitable enough to desire,

for ski-ing parties, an encounter with those ice-slab pyramids.

The caretaker who in winter keeps watch over the Schwarenbach Hotel had

just come down to join in the New Year festivities. He announced that

there was on the heights a fresh layer of snow 30 inches deep. Stoller,

a guide of some reputation, whose advice we applied for, was of opinion

that we should put off our departure till the 2nd of January. The advice

might be sound, but I did not like it because I knew how badly the men I

might be about to engage were likely to spend their time on New Year’s

Day. As a matter of fact, when we did enter the Gasternthal, we found

nothing like the amount of snow that we were told would impede our way.

From Stoller, who had just returned from a week’s engagement to teach

the rudiments of ski-ing to a Swiss club, we heard that all guides with

first-class certificates were away climbing, and that he, having only

just returned, would not be available. We engaged three men, under his

advice and under that of Egger, for whom Arnold Lunn had a valuable

letter of introduction from his father. One of these men had a guide’s

certificate, the other two were porters.

I took three men because I wanted to carry sufficient commissariat for

six days, which the raid was supposed to last, with a margin in case of

a check being put on our progress by a change in the weather or some

accident that could not be foreseen. I hoped to force my way through

without touching any inhabited spot before we reached Guttannen. We went

down to Kippel, because our progress was so smooth and easy that it would

have been a pity to sleep in a chalet at Guggi just for the pleasure of

not stopping in a decent hotel.

None of our men had been beyond the Aletsch glacier. This I did not mind,

having previously gone over the whole route in summer. Provided those men

carried their loads from hut to hut, we should be satisfied.

Arnold Lunn says in the _Isis_ that we arrived in Kandersteg just in time

for a fancy dress ball, and aroused considerable curiosity as to what we

were supposed to represent. At dinner he sat next to a man who, lost to

all sense of local colour, had come dressed as a nigger minstrel. This

was on New Year’s Eve.

Next day we pottered round Kandersteg, one of us receiving much useful

advice as to how to fix on his ski, from a lady who was under the quite

pardonable impression that she was addressing a novice, while the other

was considered enough of an expert to instruct another lady who had the

good taste not to be so sure of her own knowledge.

We left Kandersteg on the morning of January 2nd. As usual in those early

starts, we had plenty of time, the five of us, to try and find out of

what stuff each and every member of the party was made. It was my first

expedition with Arnold Lunn. I was entitled to think he would take my

measure as curiously as I was about to take his. Two of our men turned

out to be quite satisfactory, but the third was destined to become the

butt of our satire. I am not prepared to say that he had spent New Year’s

Day in those excesses which I dreaded, because I have since been told by

old Egger that Adolf--as we shall agree to call him--was in bad health

when he undertook to serve us. Whatever might be the cause, whether

excusable or not, he showed himself throughout in the colours in which

he is painted--maybe somewhat to the amusement of our readers--by Arnold

Lunn and myself.

Those who mountaineer for sport are very much like schoolboys, or they

become schoolboys for the nonce. The printed records of mountaineering

are to a great extent records of the kind of humour that overgrown and

elderly boys--if I may so describe those of us who have gone through

public school-life and wish to preserve some of its characteristics

in a sphere where these may be as harmless to others as comforting to

themselves--would be expected to cultivate.

For us, in the course of a constant fellowship of seven days, Adolf soon

represented quite a definite and rather objectionable specimen of the

human kind. We found him lazy, slow, clumsy, ever ready to take undue

advantage. Some one, who had evidently made a close study of political

types, dubbed him the Socialist, and the title stuck. For my part,

anxious to secure for him a place among types ranking in a higher class,

I placed him, under the name of Thersites, in a gallery of classical

portraits in which I allotted to Arnold the part of fiery Achilles, and

to myself that of the worldly-wise and cunningly cautious Ulysses.

Our course lay up the Gasternthal, one of the wildest and most impressive

valleys in the Alps, utterly desolate in summer. From its rugged floor

rise some of the sternest precipices in Switzerland. On our way we had

plenty of time to examine the superstructure of the shafts which were

then being driven through the floor of the valley to ascertain the depth

of the gravel-bed that formed it. Our readers may remember that, in

1908, the Italian workmen engaged in excavations on the north front of

the Loetschberg tunnel were suddenly overwhelmed by an inrush of water,

gravel, and mud. The progress of the boring was stopped till it could be

known to what extent it would be necessary to divert the tunnel, in order

to keep in hard rock.

It is a bit of a reflection upon the forethought of engineers--and

geologists--that, before working their way from beneath across

Gasternthal, they had not sunk that shaft which was now to supply them

with an information that would still be opportune from the engineer’s

point of view, but which was belated in regard to safeguarding human life.

Three hours after starting, we reached a rustic _café_, or summer

restaurant, which we discovered it was Adolf’s summer occupation to

preside over. It was a pretty place with a fenced orchard about it,

whose trees now stood out barely from amid the coverlet of snow which

contributed to enhance the attractiveness of the spot. But a dreadful

doubt crossed our mind. Was Adolf a _bona-fide_ mountaineer or was he a

professional tavern keeper?

On reaching the doorstep of his property, he angrily dropped to the

ground his burden, produced the key of his cellar, and contrived to give

us the impression that he expected us to call a halt of some duration and

indulge in the delights of his Capua. We were suddenly confronted with

the thought of the temptation put by Circe before wary Ulysses and his

simple-hearted companions. Thersites, as a mental picture, was outdone.

The vision conjured up before us was that of five days to be spent in

plenty in this winter-bound Abbey of Thelema. We would empty the larders.

We would clear the bottle shelves. We would rifle the cigar boxes, under

the watchful, but encouraging eye of this male Circe, who would fill his

pockets with sweet-scented coin, instead of bruising his shoulders any

longer with that dreadful pack. We commend the trick to those who may

have the face to play it on the public. Nothing is easier. Switzerland is

full of those concealed Canaans flowing with milk and honey.

[Illustration: GASTERNTHAL.

To face p. 130.]

Shortly after leaving Adolf’s pavilion, a bend in the valley disclosed

the ice-fall of the Tschingel glacier. The moraine up which we had

to pass came into sight. It was three in the afternoon--and we had

distributed some of Adolf’s packages amongst the other two guides--before

we caught our first glimpse of the sun, which flashed out triumphantly

behind the Hockenhorn, only to disappear in a few minutes past the

Balmhorn. A steep slope of snow led from the moraine to the glacier.

Out of laziness, we did not fix up our ski with carrying straps. We might

have paid dearly for the mistake, as a sharp wind caught us half-way

across, and a dropped ski would have taken hours to recover. It is always

wise to have at hand in one’s pockets the short straps which serve to

tie together the ski at each extremity, and to make use of them whenever

one has to carry ski across an unskiable piece of ground. It is also

better to be provided with ski-slings wherewith to carry them across both

shoulders. The wind is the ski-runner’s treacherous enemy. When you are

on your ski it may drive you out of your direction, and when you carry

your ski it may try to wrench them from you and blow you off your balance

by weighing upon them.

The last three hours of our walk lay along the _névé_ of the Tschingel

glacier, a snow valley bounded on the north by the cliffs of the

Blümlisalp, on the south by the gently rising Petersgrat.

“The last lingering rays,” writes Arnold Lunn, “faded from the snows,

but the sunset was soon followed by the rise of the full moon, a moon

undreamt of in our English skies, so bright that I read with ease a page

of my note-book. Those who have only seen her ‘hurrying with unhandsome

thrift of silver’ over English landscapes have little idea of her real

beauty. Before we reached the hut we had been climbing fourteen hours

uphill, loaded with heavy sacks. Yet such was the mysterious fascination

of the moonlit snows that we made no attempt to hurry. Again and again we

stopped, lost in silent wonder.

“Straight ahead, the Jungfrau, backed by the slender cone of the Eiger,

rose above a sea of shadows. The moonlight slept on her snowy terraces,

steeping in silentness her cliffs and glaciers, and revealed the whole

as a living monument of incarnate light. A hut stood in a _cirque_ of

snow. Here the wind had played strange havoc, torturing the billows and

cornices into fantastic shapes. Anything more weirdly beautiful than the

glancing sheen of this hollow I cannot conceive. Its colour could only be

compared, if at all, to the fiery blue of Capri’s grotto.”

The writer of the above lines, whom we shall not tire of quoting in this

chapter, does not overpaint the picture. What could be more beautiful,

more entrancing, than the Tschingel terrace, by moonlight, in the middle

of winter? Standing on a balcony little less than 10,000 feet high, we

were able to read our maps, after ten o’clock at night, as plainly as at

noonday.

To the furrowed and broken ribs of the Blümlisalp clung several small

glaciers, suspended in the couloirs like swallows’ nests in the eaves of

a ruined castle. The sharp pyramid of the Eiger shone beyond the white

cupolas of the airy Jungfrau, as though they had been the distant walls

and minarets of an Oriental city. The snows about us were alive with a

smooth and soft radiance. The sky was transparent, and as yet hung about

with light veils. Silver clouds fluttered about the peaks, and when they

floated into the moonlight from behind them, they flashed forth like

fishes when the sun plays upon their scales. Layers of purple and crimson

haze rested upon one another along the horizon. The play of light and

shade upon the black patches and white spots of the visible world showed

them, according to whither you looked, wreathed in smiles or puckered up

in frowns. Buttresses, cliffs, abysses swam in a bluish mist, in which

the twinkling rays of a million stars danced as sparkling dust.

It is a law of this world that what is unbecoming--τα ου δεοντα of Greek

comedy--must ever come to underline and show off the most beautiful

sights by giving them a contradictory background. For Arnold and myself,

the last three hours of that day were spent on one of the most beautiful

walks we can remember. But Adolf had been completely knocked up long

before. During the self-same last three hours he experienced a great

desire for sleep, and the burden of his refrain was not, “How grand!

How beautiful!” but “Very, very tired!” Sometimes he dozed; sometimes

he half uttered swear-words, which issued from his throat like stones

rattling down a mountain gully. I had to send one of the other men to his

help. Whether we shouted to him Thersites or Circe, or the Socialist,

he cared not. What went to his heart, and as it were broke his wind,

was that we had left his tea-house far behind and would not take him

back across the beloved threshold. A miserable Alpine hut awaited his

tottering footsteps. He staggered through the doorway and collapsed on

the mattresses, sleeping at last when to sleep was decent. What was it to

him that every curve in the swelling snows, every crag and buttress of

the Blümlisalp cliffs was lit up by the mellow rays of the mountain moon?

Of the night spent in the Mutthorn hut nothing need be said, except that

it seemed to us a perfect night. At 5.30 the alarum went off, and, if

Arnold Lunn’s story be trusted--and it must be, in the absence of any

other accountable person, as I was asleep at that moment--the ring of the

bell was accompanied by an ill-sounding German epithet. A guide stumbled

to the door, threw it open, and muttered in more parliamentary language:

“Abscheuliches Wetter.” Arnold says--and I must trust him in this again,

for I was still asleep--that a sense of sickening disappointment, such

as climbers know so well, fell upon the waking inmates of the hut,

a definition which must be taken to exclude Adolf and myself. Arnold

stepped outside and discovered heavy grey clouds blowing up from behind

the Eiger, sniffed a gust of south-westerly wind, laid his finger on

sticky snow, and, in thus feeling the pulse of the weather, became aware

of a high temperature.

He says: “We sulkily despatched our breakfast and started up the slope

leading towards the Petersgrat. Suddenly Professor Roget caught sight,

through a gap beyond the Blümlisalp, of the still lake of fog hanging

quite undisturbed over the plain of Switzerland and above lake Thun.

I should like to say that he gave a cry of surprise, but, alas! the

professor has his emotions under strict control, and was content to

rapidly communicate to us his analysis of the apparent bad weather. These

unauspicious phenomena were merely local disturbances, which would vanish

after dawn. The westerly breeze was only a glacier wind, the grey clouds

only the effect of the intense solar heat collected the day before and

blending throughout the night with the cold air from the snows. As long

as the _Nebelmeer_ remained undisturbed, no bad weather need be feared.

Every sign of evil actually vanished an hour after sunrise.”

On the Petersgrat we could fancy ourselves on the top of the globe. We

were standing on the highest point of a curved surface, shaped like a

balloon, and on all sides it seemed to fall away into immensity. Beyond,

rose in gigantic outline the summits of the Alps and, still further, in

long sinuous lines curving in and out of sight, the Jura, the Vosges,

and all that distant girdle that hangs loosely about the outskirts of

Switzerland. The winter fog filled up the intervals. Afar, there was not

a breath of wind, not a whirl in the air.

The phenomenon that alarmed my party was that which is well known under

the name of _Foehn_, a phenomenon which may assume almost any dimensions,

sometimes general enough to embrace the whole of the Alps, and sometimes

so closely circumscribed that you might almost compare it to the motion

in the air produced by a small top spinning round on the palm of your

hand.

The phenomenon is as follows: Masses of air of varying density and

temperature are pushed up the Alps and are dropped down, as it were,

upon the other side. Or else, as this morning on the Petersgrat, it is a

layer of hot dry air formed aloft that forces its way down, in corkscrew

fashion, on a given spot, through the nether air.

With us the phenomenon lasted an hour and was as a water spout in the

middle of a still ocean. The universal quietude of the elements impressed

itself again upon the spot on which we stood, doubting, like Thomas, but

ready to believe, if a sign would but be given. By 8.30 the sun gilded

gloriously the whole Pennine range, towards which our eyes were eagerly

turned.

As we reached the sky-line, that distant host of old friends greeted

us beyond the morning shadows, but what held us most was the wonderful

pyramid of the Bietschhorn. The sharp-shouldered giant, sprinkled with

snow from head to foot, through which showed his jet-black armour,

stood forth before us, as within reach of the hand, strangely resembling

the view of the Weisshorn from above Randa, but how much grander in his

winter cloak with jewel-like crystals!

This second day was to be a day spent in idling down glacier slopes and

in lounging above the forest zone of the Loetschenthal. We knew now

that we could count on the sun till its proper time for setting in the

evening. We knew that on his decline and fall the moon would take his

place, as the night policeman succeeds the day policeman upon the common

beat. The winter God was full of gentleman-like consideration. The rules

of meteorology might have been purely astronomical and mathematical for

any chances we might see of their being upset by the weather fiend.

The snow was hard and crusted as we entered upon the southern slopes of

the Petersgrat. After forty minutes running, or thereabouts, the guides

advised us to take off our ski while we descended the steep bits on the

Telli glacier. The fact is that those men were not quite sure of their

ground. I asked the party to proceed in close formation and to move

with studied care till we should reach the bottom of the Telli glacier,

considering that it would be wiser to cope with any difficulties it might

put in our way than to ski down the Faffleralp, as to whose condition in

winter I had not the faintest indication. The ordinary summer route might

prove dangerous from avalanches. On the Telli glacier, the hardness and

comparative thinness of the snow layer cemented to the ice, allowed of

crevasses and depressions being easily recognised. It would be a piece of

summer mountaineering in midwinter, and to this, for safety’s sake, there

would be no valid objection.

I kept my people close in, to the eastern edge of the glacier, so as to

pass under the buttress on which were supported the masses of snow over

which I would not ski. The descent of the deep gully proved the right

solution to our difficulty and procured for us for some twenty minutes

the distinct pleasure of being thoroughly occupied with a serious job.

A run over some extremely broken ground, then some cuts and capers in a

wood led us to a chalet, where we decided to have a feed and a rest.

“This confession,” says Arnold Lunn, “lays us open to the scorn of those

who imagine that mountaineering is a kind of game, the object of which

is to spend the minimum of time on a peak consistent with reaching its

summit. Our party fortunately belonged to the leisurely school that

combines a fondness for wise passiveness with a strong dislike to reach

one’s destination before sunset.

“Thus understood, mountaineering on ski is the purest of all sports. The

competitive and record-breaking elements are entirely eliminated. Those

who go up to the hills on ski are then actuated by the most elemental

motives, the desire to explore the mountains in the most beautiful of all

their aspects, and to enjoy the most inspired motion known to man.

“To me the ideal form of ski-ing is cross-country mountaineering.

One thus approaches nearest to the methods of the pioneers to whom

mountaineering meant the exploration of great ranges, not the exhausting

of all possible climbs from one small centre. Nothing is more delightful

than to penetrate into the remote Alpine valleys in the winter months.

The parasite population that thrives in summer on the tourist industry

has disappeared. One meets the genuine peasant, ‘the rough athletic

labourer wrestling with nature for his immediate wants.’

“Those who travel first class and stop in the best hotels do not know the

real Switzerland. It is in the third-class carriages and small inns that

one sees the most characteristic types. Nothing is more enjoyable than to

escape for ten days from conventionality and dress clothes, wandering,

kit on one’s back, from club hut to club hut, and descending at rare

intervals to remote recesses in winter-bound valleys.”

The conclusion of this is that neither of us could describe in strenuous

language the lazy afternoon we spent on the upper fringe of the woods

above Blatten and Ried. We had a quiet repast, smoked our pipes, or

cigars--and watched the shadows creeping up the Loetschenlücke. Having

heaps of time, we sailed down to Kippel, as merry as finches, piping like

blackbirds, and as fresh as new-laid eggs. Would we have been in such a

happy predicament if we had not been on narrow boards about six and a

half feet long and half as many inches broad, of Norwegian origin, which

were used primarily as a means of crossing deep snow, and have lately

been adopted as an aid to winter mountaineering?

The hotel we landed at was quite an ordinary eating and sleeping house

of the ugly type which too often disfigures Swiss villages. How is it

that dwellers in the Alps who, when left to themselves, show such good

taste in the plainness of their dwellings and in their primitive church

architecture, are, when they build for townspeople, such utter strangers

to the most spontaneous suggestions of the artistic instinct?

At table we chanced to have as neighbours three members of the Swiss

Alpine Club, whose native language was the Germanic. They were on their

way from the Grimsel and had just completed that section of our route

upon which we were to enter on the morrow. We sat with them after

dinner, and here fiery Achilles behaved most wisely. With high hopes

he went quietly to bed at a reasonable hour. Then Ulysses, seeing his

opportunity, thought he would like to unbend for a while. He sat up with

the Swiss party and sacrificed to good fellowship a few hours of rest and

the contents of a few fragile flagons.

As midnight came on, the moon suddenly peeped indiscreetly upon the

carouse, showing through the casement a seductive vista of most

beautifully slanting slopes round the foot of which roared the river

Lonza. Cunning Ulysses, beside himself with a naughty idea, sent the

empty bottles flying through the window. Immediately the blood of the

young Swiss was up. They rose, strapped on their ski in a trice, and down

they went along the slope to the bank of the Lonza. The bottles were

by then floating on the swirl of the stream. But, in the case of each

pursuer, a timely Christiania swing brought him round up the bank again.

There was a swish, a spray of snow, and three young men were saved to

fight again for their country.

On returning to the hotel, they and I found a jolly old villain in

possession of the tap-room. He was in the early stages of inebriation.

Seeing from the costumes of the party that he had to do with town-bred

mountaineers only, he drew from the depths of his imagination the longest

bow that was ever harboured by a genuine mountaineer in his armoury. With

him the humour was transparent. But it is not always so, unfortunately.

Some of the Swiss peasantry, brought into contact with the foreign

_clientèle_, are in the habit of being so pampered by sentimental,

gullible people that they quite overstep the bounds of any liberty that

may be permissible in resenting such treatment.

On the whole, the winter life led in the high Swiss valleys is not

altogether wholesome. When they are visited in summer, the people are

seen in the busiest time and appear in the most favourable light. The

domestic establishments of the hotels, and the few individuals who

benefit from the presence of strangers, such as mule drivers, casual

dealers in cut flowers, in carved bears and rock crystals, are merely

parasitic and as temporary features in the landscape as those whose

passage called them into being.

The evils inherent to winter seclusion are more serious. This old man was

an example, for he could be seen there day after day, spending his time

in idle talk and throwing into the till his earnings of last season.

But stop: is Ulysses acting up to his reputation for wariness in

moralising at the present moment to a weaker brother’s detriment? Has he

forgotten that on the next day, Monday, January 4th, the little company

turned out into the night at six o’clock without him? Was it a fair

excuse, that, on the eve, he had engaged Theodore Kalbermatten to carry

his kit for him to the next hut?

Having once more sworn allegiance to his usual beverage, milk, the best

friend of the young and the old, he marched out last, but in good order,

to join the troop over which he held command. As the dawn broke he found

them waiting for him before a church in the Upper Loetschenthal, built

six hundred years ago. Arnold had time to examine it. He says:--

“The church door was carved by the hand of some long-forgotten genius,

carved with a delicacy of execution surprising in this remote corner of

the Alps. We stopped for breakfast in some cheese-making chalets high

up in the valley. Here we exchanged some remarks on cows and kindred

subjects and gently chaffed the cheese-makers on the proverbially high

stature of the men of Ried. But one realised throughout the barrier

which one could never pass. We could form little or no conception of the

world as seen through their eyes. To them these mountains must seem a

waste by-product, an inexplicable freak on the part of the Creator. They

regarded us and our ski with that amused tolerance that everyone extends

to those idiosyncrasies which are not personally annoying.

“This rugged conservatism is nowhere so accentuated as among those who

are shut off by mountain barriers from the ‘sick, hurry, and divided

aims’ of modern life. Theirs is the spirit so gently satirised in Utopia.

These things they say pleased our forefathers and ancestors: would God we

might be as witty and wise!

“For six hundred years their forefathers had worshipped in the little

church we had passed, sheltered by the hills from all breath of modern

scepticism, apparently undisturbed by the thought that beyond them

existed spirits who recklessly doubted the priest’s control over

the economy of nature in such modest details as harvest rains. The

Loetschenthal still possesses the strange pathetic beauty of those

secluded Catholic valleys whose inhabitants seem to live a life as old as

the hills themselves, and in which one poor priest and one little church

stand forth as the only help, the only symbol of the world outside, and

of ages not absolutely prehistoric.”

Arnold Lunn relates that after leaving the chalets he had an amusing talk

with Theodore Kalbermatten, whom I had engaged to carry my sack up to the

club hut. A fine-looking fellow, he showed a touch of that not ungraceful

swagger which one notices in many guides and in which Lunn rightly sees

nothing more than the unsophisticated pride that humble and well-meaning

men take in the achievement of good work. But business is business. Lunn

says very wittily that the conversation concluded with the inevitable

production of a card, coupled with the caution that, though there were

many Kalbermattens, there was but one Theodore Kalbermatten.

Anyhow, we were soon great friends with Theodore. The day was indeed

long enough--like the glacier on which we were wandering--to make and

undo friendships several times over. Circumstances lent themselves so

well to mere strolling--think what it is to be able to cross the Bernese

Oberland without once having one’s foot brought up against a stone--that

we pressed our pace no more on this third day than on the preceding.

We might have been Egyptian sages walking up and down in conversation

outside the porticoes of Thebes with the hundred gates. Had we been told

that what we stirred up with our ski were the burning sands of Africa

which we mistook for Alpine snow, because our eyes were under the spell

of _mirage_, it would have been ungracious on our part to pretend to know

better, so much did we long for the coolness of the evening, for sea

breezes and the dew at dusk, as Arabs might, returning upon their tired

steeds to the secrecy of the oasis, after a raid in the desert.

All said and done, we found that we had spent twelve hours in reaching

the summit of the Loetschenlücke pass. Arnold’s poetic gift found at

every step fresh sustenance. He had discovered the _beau ideal_ of a

pass. “It was,” he says, “the only opening at the head of the valley,

visible, with the whole length of the glacier, during the entire day.

For twelve hours a little gap backed by blue sky told of a wonderful new

world that we should see from the summit. Above us we caught sight of our

goal, the Egon von Steiger hut, bearing the name of a Swiss climber who

perished on the Doldenhorn, and built in his memory. This is the real

ungrudging spirit of mountain lovers, the attitude which Mummery sums up

so well. ‘The great mountains,’ he writes, ‘sometimes demand a sacrifice,

but the true mountaineer would not forego their worship even though he

knew himself to be the destined victim.’

“We had the whole day,” says Lunn, “to reach the hut, and without being

lazy, were wise enough not to hurry, and, indeed, there was no temptation

to rush on. The time was all too short to take in the wonders of the Anen

glacier on our left, the stern beauty of the Sattelhorn cliffs on our

right. Slowly the distant ranges climbed higher into the sky. Peacefully

the morning merged into the afternoon, and the afternoon into the

evening. We paused below the final slope to watch the glow creeping down

the snows of Mont Blanc. Even the guides were impressed by the strange

stillness, as--

‘Light and sound ebbed from the earth,

Like the tide of the full and weary sea,

To the depths of its own tranquillity.’

“I shall never forget the tantalising suspense of that last slope. For

twelve hours a little strip of blue behind the sky-line had been an

earnest of the revelation that was awaiting us. For some six hours we had

been faced by this same long slope in front and above. Now only a few

yards remained. We took them at a rush. At sunset exactly, the sky-line

was beneath our feet and in one moment were set forth before us, backed

by the Finsteraarhorn, the ‘urns of the silent snow’ from which the

greatest of all the Alpine glaciers draws its strength. The rays of the

risen moon mingled with the ebbing twilight and lent an atmosphere of

mystery to our surroundings. For the moment we were no longer of the

earth earthly, for the moment the Loetschenlücke became a magic casement

opening into perilous snows ’mid faery lands forlorn.’

“Thus what, seen from a distance, was obtrusively--almost offensively--a

pass, wore a peculiar fascination for that very reason. It grew upon the

imagination with the magic of those corners one has only turned in one’s

dreams.”

Like the historic gap between the Mönch and Jungfrau, it led to the

solitudes of the Aletsch, which Lunn had never seen save as a white

streak from distant ranges. Like all good mountaineers, who have usefully

wasted hours over a map in keen and eager anticipation, he now could

dwell with gladness upon the reality of the mental picture elaborated

long ago, while contemplating certain white spaces on an old copy of the

Siegfried map.

But the inevitable anti-climax that dogs the flight of all poets was

awaiting us. “On this occasion it took the form of the club hut stove,

and a more effective bathos has never been devised. Amongst the torments

of the damned I am sure the smoking stove holds a proud place.” Some of

last summer’s moisture had remained in the pipe. Our fire might have been

of green wood and wrung from us copious tears.

“The guides for the space of some half-hour, wrestled and fought and

prayed, Kalbermatten meanwhile keeping up a running conversation with

his favourite saint. Adolf, with a wonderful sense of the fitness of

things, chose the moment when supper was on the table to put in a belated

appearance. His contribution to the evening’s work was a successful

attempt to burn my thick socks,” writes Lunn, righteously indignant.

The temperature outside the hut was 8° Centigrade under zero on arriving

and, very naturally, somewhat colder inside. At the Mutthorn hut we had

noted 9° Centigrade under zero in the evening and 10° in the morning.

Our expedition unfolded itself from day to day with the monotony and

exactitude of a scroll. On the 5th, by seven o’clock, an hour before

sunrise, we were again on the slide eastwards. The lie of the land was

nasty. Most of us turned a somersault or two, a performance at which

those will not be astonished who have come down in summer from the Egon

von Steiger hut to the Gross-Aletsch-Firn. Then badly conducted parties

are daily watched from the Concordia huts, with no little curiosity.

They flounder about till they are often heard calling for help, or seen

disappearing in a crevasse, from which moment they are entitled, under

the rules of the game, to a search party.

In his diary Lunn says that the Aletschhorn had shoved its head in

front of the moon. The solitude was almost oppressive. “Never have I

so realised the weakness of the cry that the Alps are played out and

overcrowded. True, some thousands of climbers have explored their inmost

recesses; but substantially they are little changed from the peaks that

looked down on Hannibal:--

“‘Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke

Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.’

And on a winter night one feels more than ever the insignificance of such

trifling excrescences as club huts and mountain inns. The parting _genius

loci_ has, perhaps, been sent with sighing ‘from haunted hill and dale’;

but I strongly suspect that these white solitudes of eternal snow are

still visited by the court of the Ice Queen.”

To tell the truth, I rather hope that the feminine section of that court

leave the Aletsch severely alone, for our remarks that morning would

have stood trimming. Why? Because, fearing concealed crevasses on the

Aletsch-Firn, we roped. It was a miserable experiment. At rapid intervals

Adolf sat down, in the rear, of course, as he never could do anything

else but tail. Four sudden jerks, and four more bold ski-runners bit the

dust. At times, somebody in the front of the train followed suit, an

inspiration which necessitated a rapid swing on the part of those behind.

We swung, of course, in opposite directions, and the tangled skein that

ensued was enveloped in a mist of snow with a few oaths darting about.

No wonder, for such evolutions “excyte beastlie and exstreme vyolence,”

as Lunn found it expressed in his mind, so elegantly stored up with

classical quotations, and we rapidly came to the conclusion that there

was “a good deal to be said for being dead,” oh, much more than for

roped ski-ing with Adolf.

[Illustration: CONCORDIA PLATZ.

To face p. 149.]

Ski-running on a rope is only possible if every member of a party is

a steady runner. I, for one, have always found its utility limited

to providing a merry, rough-and-tumble entertainment, such as the

Wiggle-Woggle, the Whirling Pool, and such-like helter-skelter

performances in which ’Arry delights to jostle ’Arriet.

Meanwhile the quotation runs that:--

“The hunter of the East had caught

The mountain turrets in a noose of light.”

But its author was in far too sulky a condition to appreciate a sunrise.

By nine o’clock, with our troubles well ended, we were all comfortably

seated on the rounded edges of the famous breakfast-table, an erratic

stone in the centre of that wonderful ice _quadrivium_ marked on the maps

as Concordia Platz, in which the stone in question expresses the altitude

in four figures (2,780 metres). Carpeted in the purest white, surrounded

by pyramids in the best assorted white marble architecture, set out with

flying buttresses and domes in jasper, jade, and sapphire, the Concordia

Platz did not betoken the symmetrical designing power of man, but perfect

harmony in the work of Nature’s agents--sun, snow, rock, and ice.

What a perfectly beautiful city for the dead, these precincts and temple

whence the handiwork of man was absent! And what a number of graves were

laid under the pavement of this cathedral! Think of the tears shed for

the many who came here, impelled by the desire to behold in this world

a habitation pure enough for angels, and whose human strength gave way

before the resistance opposed by the cruel guardians of this blissful

abode!

During breakfast we discussed our plans. Our eyes were fixed upon the

Jungfrau, partly because we had vaguely talked of the tempting ascent,

but still more because, having come up here with ice-axes, regulation

ropes, and ten-pronged climbing-irons, it was quite plain that a serious

ascent entered into our programme. If I may put it frankly, pure

adventure was not the purpose that brought me on the Concordia Platz. I

wished to put to the test of reality, in the highest mountain rink of

the Bernese range, the theory forced upon my mind by observations and

experiences elsewhere.

I had learnt conclusively much that was new and interesting about winter

conditions in the forest zone and on the denuded grazings that rise above

them. The comparatively easy slanting and horizontal expanses of the

ice-covered parts of the Alps had yielded some positive information to

the winter pioneers now visiting them for the first time. Now I wanted

to know, with ever-increasing accuracy, how those huge spurs of rock

and ice that are thrown up into the sky from the glacier region behaved

in winter. Hitherto they had been looked at and their condition judged

from a distance. Conclusions come to in that manner were extremely

unfavourable to their accessibility. One might, moreover, safely say that

no scientific men had subjected the winter Alps to the same scrutiny

as, in the years following the middle of the nineteenth century, made

Agassiz, Desor, the Englishmen Tyndall and Sir John Lubbock, famous, and

so many more whose hard and shrewd thinking about the physical complexion

of the Alps has met with general acceptance.

In a humbler sphere, too, among men in daily contact with the Alps,

such as guides and chamois hunters, there was till lately an absolutely

ineradicable belief that the Alp peaks would oppose almost insuperable

obstacles to those bold enough to grapple with them under winter

conditions.

But neither scientific scholars nor practical men could exactly say why

this should be the case. It was one of those vague impressions or beliefs

which are more imperative in proportion as actual first-hand knowledge is

scantier.

Most would tell you, when pressed, that in January the High Alps could

not but be found smothered in the most stupendous quantities of snow that

the frightened imagination could body forth, and that in those masses

rock peaks and ice domes would be buried alike.

Once more, on the Concordia Platz, the notion I had formed as to the

comparative scarcity of snow on the flanks of the leading summits of our

Alps--those exceeding 10,000 feet--was about to be reported upon and

tested by impartial eyes.

Our three Bernese guides could barely trust the testimony of their own

eyes. They expected to see a Jungfrau embedded in snow from head to

foot, stuffed out to a shapeless mass, bolstered out as with the seven

petticoats of a Dutch _belle_. On the contrary, the Bernese Maid was more

slim than they had ever seen her in summer. Almost entirely free from

snow, she turned towards us a shoulder as smooth, bright, and pure as

that of a Greek goddess that might have been clad in a close-fitting suit

of silver armour. One of my men who saw her again last summer (1911), one

of the two hottest recorded since 1830, found her less free from snow

than she appeared on that January day, when she was actually melting

away under the perfect downpour of solar rays towards which her face was

turned.

Thus was an important doubt set at rest by the testimony of practical

men. It would have taken us half the day to cut steps in the sheer

ice that stretched from the Roththal Sattel to the very top. The near

completion of the railway from Grindelwald to Jungfraujoch will make it

quite easy to institute a series of regular scientific observations on

this interesting subject.

So far as we were concerned, after five days of sun and inverted

temperature it was out of the question for us to attempt the top slopes

of the Jungfrau at that hour of the day. It was tacitly agreed to abandon

it for the Finsteraarhorn. The same causes which turned the snow slopes

of the Jungfrau to ice and rendered them impracticable would dry the

rocks of the Finsteraarhorn, clearing them from the excess of snow which

the winter winds might have piled up there. So we pressed on towards the

Grünhornlücke, past the Concordia huts, ski-ing leisurely downwards on

the Aletsch glacier.

The reader may easily picture to himself how much our ski were in tune

with the wonderful surface over which we were passing.

“These rollings of _névé_,” relates Lunn, “are almost unique in the Alps.

On other glaciers one’s attention is diverted to the surrounding peaks.

But, as some one says, on the Aletsch the boundary mountains form an

insignificant cup-lip to the glacier itself, which, to my knowledge, may

be compared to the same on the Plaine-Morte only. The Oberland peaks,

which from Grindelwald or Lauterbrunnen exhibit such a wonderful wealth

of design, are comparatively tame from the basin of the Aletsch. When we

think of the Jungfrau we always think of her as seen from the pastures of

the Wengern Alp. Seen from the Aletsch she is not particularly striking.

One’s whole attention is focussed on the broad, silent reaches of snow.

From the Loetschenlücke, from the Jungfraujoch, from the Grünhornlücke,

three vast ice streams flow down towards the Concordia, rightly so named,

for, there, irresistible forces blend silently in perfect harmony and

move downwards without a break.”

By three o’clock in the afternoon we passed by the huts which now form

quite a township on the rocky spur which supports them. There is the

Cathrein Pavilion, a regular little mountain hostelry, the new Swiss

Alpine Club hut, and the old hut. Stowed away under the rock the

ancestral hut of all might betray its site to curious Alpine antiquaries.

We could have walked straight into the township on that day, the rocks

being dry and swept clean of snow, the effect of the sun only, as I can

easily prove by the testimony of Mr. Schloss who, with his party, had to

take refuge in the Swiss Club hut during the storm that had raged in the

last days of December. He says: “We rammed the ski into the snow at the

foot of these rocks, expecting to reach the hut, some 50 metres above us,

in a few minutes. But the storm made the passage up the narrow path hewn

out of the rock wall very unpleasant. It was covered with ice and snow,

and the wind, blowing in furious gusts from the Jungfrau snow-fields,

threatened every moment to hurl one or the other of us down on to the

glacier below.” Let the reader take warning.

From the Concordia Platz we started up steep slopes to our next pass.

But were they so steep? and did we climb at all? There is in words a

forceful though conventional mendacity. In language the most honest catch

themselves playing the part of gay deceivers. Did we have any occasion

during that week to draw one laboured breath from our tranquil breasts?

Restful and vigorous, we led the æsthetic life.

As on the previous evening, there was a tantalising interest, the same

eagerness to look beyond the sky-line into the new world of snow. This

time the pass revealed the Fiesch glacier and the great pyramid of the

Finsteraarhorn. “Professor Roget,” writes my young friend, whose fancy I

like to tickle by appearing before him in the _rôle_ of an old cynic,

“having been here before, exhibited no indecent haste, and so I had some

time to myself in the pass. The guides--to them also the country was

new--were moved to unwonted enthusiasm on seeing the Finsteraarhorn. They

said, ‘Eine schöne Spitze, die müssen wir morgen machen.’”

Indeed they might on the morrow. There it stood before us such as three

times already I had climbed it in summer. A photograph would hardly show

the difference in the seasons. The Finsteraarhorn could be ranked in the

same category as the Combin de Valsorey and many others 12,000 feet high

and upwards with rocky sides falling away to the south and west. Whenever

they had a northern slope whereby they were accessible in summer, I had

found that by that flank their top could be reached in winter with the

help of ski and ice-axe judiciously blended, and that, on the other

side, they would regale the tourist with the gymnastics of a scramble as

diverting as in summer.

It was about two in the afternoon when our party assembled on the lip of

the Grünhornlücke. This substantive, which has before now enjoyed our

favour, I do not employ as a mere literary phrase. Let me say why.

High Alpine passes are like funnels up which the wind sweeps the snow.

Most passes I describe in this book being parallel to the main range

of the Alps, are most susceptible to winds blowing from the south-west

and to north-easters. When the wind blows from the south-west the snow

driven up the inclined funnel overlaps to the north-east and forms an

overhanging lip in that direction. After a time intervenes a gale from

the north-east. It drives up snow under the curve of the lip and fills

the bend as with plaster. A time comes when, that space being filled up,

the new snow is rolled up over the lip and then bulges out in a hanging

cornice towards the south-west. That in its turn gets reversed, and so

forth throughout the winter. On passes, therefore, cornices are not

fixed. They shift from one side to another of the sky-line.

This may constitute a serious danger, either because the lip is curled

over above you, and then you may have to break through it or even bore

a tunnel, as when a waterpipe, in order to be carried up through the

projection of a roof, is led straight up a wall and an opening pierced

to take it above the roof. At other times it is easy enough to get on to

the lip, because the outside edge of it bends down away from you. But

then the difficulty is how to get off the lip on to the chin below. Here

again, if you go carelessly forward your weight may break off the edge

of the lip. You will fall with it, through the open space underneath, on

to the lower level. Or else you may have to jump, or let yourself down

by means of a rope if the distance is too great or the landing surface

too steep or too slippery or too near an abyss for you to be sure of

getting a safe foothold. It is sometimes the wisest course to dig one’s

way down, as on other occasions you may have dug your way up. These are

the minor incidents that attend every kind of mountaineering. But they

are much more frequent, and sometimes a cause of real peril in winter,

because overhanging hems of snow may be met with, even in the zone of

the grazings, where the snow is usually very deep and much tossed about

by the contrary currents of wind resulting from the extremely broken

character of the country.

High glacier passes are, on the whole, pretty free from cornices because

the wind has free play so near the altitude where all land ceases.

Geography is very much simplified from 9,000 feet upwards. You would be

easily convinced of it if, on a relief model, you sliced off all the

pieces rising above 9,000 feet and separated them from the remainder of

the model by slipping in a tray under them at that altitude. That is why

the High Alp ski-runner is much less concerned with avalanches than his

less ambitious brother who confines himself to lower and more complicated

regions. The reader will now understand better why Lunn and myself are so

perpetually “lounging, strolling, idling” in this raid.

It was actually only two in the afternoon--let us say it again in the

light of these observations--when our party assembled on the lip of the

Grünhornlücke. We looked back towards the Loetschenlücke, once more a

mere dent against the sky, and contrasted our easy journey with the

long, laborious tramp which is there the lot of summer trippers over

slushy, soft sticky snow. How often had I worked my way toilsomely, with

wet feet and perspiring brow, over these extensive fields when they

were mud-coloured and a vast network of puddles! Yet the temperature

throughout had been delightfully mild! Our party lay down on the summit

of the pass as comfortably as on a hot Sunday afternoon, the members of

a boating party on the Upper Thames might choose to land on a dry and

elevated part of the bank--but, alas! in our case quite shadeless--to

boil the kettle and lay the table for afternoon tea.

At 11,000 feet above sea-level we lay about on the white dry floor and

enjoyed a prolonged siesta, and thought how unlikely all this would

seem when we should relate it. But when the sun had set behind the

Aletschhorn, the change was instantaneous. We had now to go down slopes

facing east, whose surface glazed immediately. Our ski seemed alive, and

skimmed over the glaze like swallows skimming the surface of a lake.

We had plenty of room in which to break our speed by curving in uphill

and bending down and round again. I could indulge to my heart’s content

in my favourite amusement on such slopes, which, when you present the

broadside of your ski somewhat upwards and sideways to the concavity of

the surface, let you down at varying rates of speed while you describe a

spiral line to the bottom.

In this case the foot of the pass was indeed the bottom, but it was also

the top of the Walliser Fiescher Firn. Like arrows from a hidden bow,

we shot along the path of the moonbeams and came to a standstill at the

foot of a dreadful black rock, on the top of which the rays of the sun,

before parting, had lit up as a beacon the windows and chimney-pots of

the Finsteraarhorn hut. We left our ski well planted in the snow and

scrambled up with our packs. This hut once stood on the Oberaarjoch,

till it was removed thence and rebuilt in its present position. The

trials of transport may account for its being somewhat loose in the

joints. It is not weather-tight, and the snow on the roof--in summer I

have known it to be rain--trickles through in large drops, sometimes

on the clothes set out to dry on strings all round the stove pipe and

sometimes on the noses of the sleepers in their berths. I understand

that the trickle of water on one’s cranium is one of the most terrible

tortures a man can be subjected to.

Anyhow we had climbed a thousand feet, taken perhaps the wrong way up,

the whole in very good time to allow Adolf his usual extra hour for

joining us round the flowing bowl of hot soup.

“As we were sitting down to supper,” says Lunn, “a party of some six

or seven Swiss came in.” They had just completed the ascent of the

Finsteraarhorn, and were not a little pleased to find the stove lit

and water on the boil. We had noticed on arrival that the hut had the

appearance of being inhabited, and on looking round had soon caught sight

of its denizens slipping and stumbling merrily down the shoulder of the

Finsteraarhorn. A look at the hut guest-book also told us that it had

been lately visited by two Norwegians.

“That night in the hut we were a merry party. The Swiss belonged to the

class that in England divide most of their time between watching football

matches and playing billiards. They made one realise how much the higher

life of a nation was stimulated by a prevailing love of mountains.

For mountaineering is essentially the people’s sport. Climbing tends

more than any other sport to break down artificial barriers between

classes. Snobbery is seen in its true proportion against a background of

mountains. The wealth of enthusiasm which mountaineering inspires among

the artisan classes of Switzerland is a permanent asset to the nation,

lifting all those who come into contact with the hills out of their

narrow ambitions. Shelley felt this truth. The great peaks, he writes,

have a voice to repeal large codes of fraud and woe. One had only to

look at these Swiss to feel how their lives were coloured, their ideals

raised, their views broadened, by their love of their native mountains.”

Lunn likes to speak of the Swiss parties he meets as being “guideless.”

I do not know to what extent this epithet may convey a clear meaning to

others. It hardly does to me. What is a guideless party? Unless it means

a party who undertakes, without the assistance of a professional guide,

one of the ascents for which such a guide is authorised by a binding

tariff to claim payment, the expression is wanting in point. There is

nothing particularly noteworthy in this, that the natives of Switzerland

should explore and climb the mountains of their country without the

assistance of professional fellow-citizens. These form a class which

has been instituted to serve two purposes: (1) To provide them with an

additional economic asset; (2) to give strangers confidence in exploring

the Alps.

Guides seek from their employers certificates of good conduct and

utility. Many of the latter have acquired a taste, in those documents,

for sitting, as it were, at the feet of their guides as though the

positions were reversed. Indeed, it would be more natural that the

guides should give certificates of ability, daring, and endurance to the

amateur mountaineers whom they have in their charge. Under such altered

circumstances a guideless party would be a party in possession of a

certificate to the effect that they had gained sufficient proficiency in

mountaineering to hold a licence as guideless parties. Till things are so

arranged, the epithet is bootless.

Many young Swiss solve the difficulty by going through the official

course of training laid down for professional guides, in the persuasion

that should they, or the party they are with, meet with an accident,

it would not be possible for either the guiding corporation or public

opinion to fairly lay any blame at their door. There was assuredly

no reason why the young men whom we saw on that day should have been

expected to meet with an accident because they had no paid bystander.

“Luxuries had long been devoured, but even soup has a delightful flavour

in a club hut. And no one can really understand the charms of tobacco

who has never smoked in a club hut at the end of a good day’s work. The

mountain pipe has a flavour undreamt of in the plains. Even some horrible

hay-like production purchased in Adolf’s inn seemed inspired with

ambrosial flavour.”

On this 6th day of January it was to be our turn to ascend the

Finsteraarhorn. For the first time in our trip this verb is an apposite

term. It meant work, and our Socialist undertook to prove it. He first of

all swallowed up on the sly the last contents of our pot of honey. If I

wished to be nasty, I should say that he got himself tied at the end of

the rope because he had calculated selfishly that he would be dragged up

and, being first and lowest on the rope when descending, he would be held

up by us.

This little piece of reckoning did not miscarry. Wise Ulysses was too

good natured to let it be seen that he “saw through” this little plot;

fiery Achilles was of too powerful a build to mind a little extra weight,

and the other two Bernese guides were such excellent fellows that they

gave no sign of how much they suffered in their pride on account of their

colleague.

“For once in a way,” says Lunn, “the guides were punctual. I think

Professor Roget was the only one in the party who did justice to the

breakfast. A seasoned mountaineer of thirty years’ standing, he can

eat stale bread and tinned meat at 6.30 in the morning with the calm

persistency of the man who realises that food is a sound insurance

against cold and fatigue. But we were all glad to turn out of the hut,

which we left at 7.15 a.m. The first signs of dawn appeared before the

moon had set, a somewhat unusual phenomenon. Such a sunrise--though one

misses the more dramatic change from the darkest night to the day--is

accompanied by an almost unique depth of colouring. Two hours above the

hut the sun shot out from behind the Oberaarhorn, I should like to add,

like a stone flung out of a sling.”

[Illustration: BREAKFAST ON THE FINSTERAARHORN.

To face p. 163.]

The simultaneous presence, morning and evening, of sun and moon at

opposite ends of the sky, was one of the most interesting pictorial

features displayed before our eyes. I am not aware that painters are ever

likely to succeed in reproducing the cross light effects we witnessed,

silvery and cold at one extremity, golden and warm at the opposite

extremity, meeting on that endless expanse of neutral white, and shot

throughout with the azure of the sky.

The Finsteraarhorn proved itself as accommodating as the Jungfrau was

rebellious: for one and the same cause, as already hinted. The rocky

_arête_ stood up like a lace ruff above its shoulder, as fine as if it

were wrought in muslin, and offering everywhere an easy hold for our

hands. It was free from snow and from ice, owing to the constant action

of the sun’s rays percolating through the superimposed layers of dry air.

Where there was any snow there was so little that we could hardly have

expected less in summer. The _arête_ was warm to our touch.

On reaching the breakfast place, we looked anxiously at the sweep of the

uppermost span into space. Not a suspicion of any wind blowing up there.

The last two hours of the six afforded a delightful scramble along the

edge of that very impressive cock’s comb. For an hour and a half more

we climbed up alongside steep snow slopes, down which we saw the most

alarming ski tracks I have ever beheld.

By one o’clock our ropes were thrown as a noose all about the top of the

Finsteraarhorn, the giant of the Oberland. The Socialist hung on to the

end of the rope like a scorpion’s sting; Achilles led, presenting his

naked torso to the bite of the sun; in the middle bulged the robust frame

of venerable Ulysses, with his grey hair blown about by the wind, and,

filling the gaps between those three important personages, came Gyger

and Schmidt, betraying on their honest, grave countenances their naive

satisfaction at seeing themselves on such a lofty platform. We spent a

wonderful hour on the summit.

The view was perfect, as only a winter view can be, over all the great

ranges mellowed by the winter atmosphere. Beyond them a vast sea of

cloud covered the plains of Switzerland and Italy. We lay about hatless,

coatless, and gloveless. Not a breath of wind even to make the inviolable

quiet audible. Quoth Lunn:--

“‘It seemed as if the hour were one

Sent from beyond the skies,

Which scattered from above the sun

The light of Paradise.’

“Time stood still, or rather the time we passed on that aerial summit,

seemed stolen from the rest of eternity. At such moments the mind becomes

a passive instrument for recording external impressions. Old memories

arose unbidden; old associations lived again. Familiar ridges, the hills

of Grindelwald, the little chalet, just visible, where I had spent so

many happy summers, all lent an element of personal romance to the view,

all helped to awaken memories of ‘far-off things and battles long ago.’

“The view from the Finsteraarhorn is of its kind almost unique. It is

the very hub of vast spaces of eternal winter. Below, the ice-bound

cliffs of the Oberland, scored with the passage of ages, rise from a

waste of glaciers. The Finsteraarhorn is the culminating point of this

rugged chain, and looks defiantly over a host of lesser peaks towards

its great brethren of the Swiss Alps. From the Dolomites to Dauphiny,

from the Vosges to the Apennines, scarcely a peak of any importance was

hid. The winter atmosphere toned down the harsh features whilst rendering

the whole flawless panorama strangely distinct. The mountains were clad

in those wonderful bluish tints peculiar to the winter months, their

crudities had been softened, their barren places made smooth. The keynote

in the panorama was a dreamy, languorous atmosphere.”

The boundless canopy of clouds dragged itself out lazily, like a huge

soft beast, to fill up all the interstices in this rock-bound and

rock-studded vista, shot through with waves of light. There was a superb

suggestion of indolence on the far horizon, turning pale against a sky of

unfathomable blue. Below us the small wooden hut, perched on its rock,

added a touch of human interest to the view.

The guides went to sleep in the snow, while the two educated men of the

party contemplated and smoked, smoked and contemplated.

“Nine long summers I had spent as a small boy in getting to know the

remote bye-ways of the Faulhorn chain. For nine summers we had looked

longingly up to the great cliffs of the Oberland, the peaks of storm and

of dread, the dark Aar peak, the Maiden, the Monk, and the Giant. Vaguely

we wondered if it would ever be ours to penetrate into their recesses.

By the peculiar cussedness of things, I had climbed in other ranges, but

till then had never returned to my first love.

“The force of associations formed in childhood has been insisted on

_ad nauseam_ by Wordsworth and his imitators, but the sentiment is

none the less powerful for being somewhat trite. And even now, as this

early ambition had at last reached the point of realisation, I could

scarce restrain a feeling of regret. Though, in later years, calm reason

convinced me that the terrors in which my childish imagination had clad

the Oberland peaks were almost non-existent, yet the ease with which we

had conquered their monarch had its element of sadness.

“The hour passed like ten minutes. The professor gave the word to return.

We roused Adolf and sadly turned down the _arête_. The weaker brother

led with great deliberation. On this occasion we lacked not æsthetic

compensations for his slowness. It was a unique sensation, sitting

astride that vast cliff, watching the afternoon lights spreading tinges

of an infinite gradation of tones over the boundless canopy of mist.”

We reached again the fantastic little gap of the Hugi-Sattel, overlooking

a sheer cliff that drops down to the Finsteraarhorn glacier. We now

rested in the afternoon where we had breakfasted in the forenoon. We

looked back up the way we had come down. Owing to the ice, we had

been forced off the summer route--which keeps some distance below the

ridge--on to the very _arête_. There is nothing on the Matterhorn finer

than that sheer cliff that falls away to the glacier 3,000 feet below.

Drop a stone, and it falls the entire distance without a bound. The

climbing, however, both up and down, had been easy enough. Good sound

hand and foot-holds--no shadow of an excuse for a slip, not even for

Adolf, who had come up wailing in the forenoon, contributing to the

gaiety of the party by his monotonous: “Ich komme schon, aber nur nicht

so schnell.” With a shudder he beheld the track of the two Norwegians,

who had taken their ski to within a thousand feet of the summit, and, on

their return, appeared to have gaily descended a slope of soft snow lying

on streaks of ice, at an angle of 45 degrees, bridging several yawning

cracks.

Having rested on the Hugi-Sattel--this part of Switzerland recalls

everywhere the names of its explorers and scientific investigators--we

slowly retraced our steps to the hut, reaching it at 5.45.

The merry Swiss boys had left everything in beautiful order. We had

all the room--and all the raindrops--to ourselves. Heated through and

through, the roof was letting the water from the melting snow pass

through the shingles.

Once more a perfect sunset gave promise of yet another day of cloudless

beauty. Our anxieties--we had none others than those which might come

from eagerness to succeed--were at an end. We had done what we had set

out to do. Had we planned to go to the North Pole--or to discover the

Antarctic--and succeeded likewise (as mountaineers would have done long

ago if they had troubled to) our feelings could have differed but

little from those that now passed in our minds. There is a likeness in

all achievements in this. When the past is just putting forward its

forefinger in warning of its readiness to withdraw our deed gently

from our grasp and from the sight of men, we feel a pang that to have

done something means parting with it soon after. Some may have been

so ambitious to reach the North Pole that they set about it in a

dishonest spirit. Some returning from another voyage of joint and mutual

discovery--that generally goes under the name of a wedding tour--carry

home with them a melancholy tinge of regret upon their happiness. So did

we.

Yet there is in simple achievements a satisfaction which nothing else in

the world can give. Most other successes leave something to be desired.

The instability of wealth and health is a platitude. But Lunn rightly

says that every successful expedition is a permanent asset, bringing in

year by year a high rate of interest, an incorruptible treasure in the

memories of the past which nothing can destroy.

“Next day we got away by 7, stumbled down the steep rocks below the hut,

picked up our ski, our faithful boards, standing all bespattered with

snow, and by the light of the moon skied merrily down the Fiesch glacier.

As dawn broke we pushed up the long slopes leading to our next pass, the

Oberaarjoch. Suddenly an expression of pleasure escaped Professor Roget.

Such an unprecedented phenomenon--on the part of the old Cynic--aroused

my attention. I turned and saw what, for an æsthetic mind, was probably

the most striking view of the whole tour--namely, softened and subdued

by the magic of the winter atmosphere, the perfect pyramid of the

Weisshorn flanked by the daring spire of the Matterhorn.

“A little later it was my turn to give vent to some satisfaction, and the

professor looked up to see Adolf walking well at the head of the party

with his pack trim and neat on his shoulders, like those people who,

when approaching the end of their trials, stride forth as if they had

conquered the world.”

We almost reluctantly took our stand upon this the fifth and last

sky-line we were to cut through with the flat of our ski. The last of

our five passes disclosed the long arm of the Oberaar glacier, backed

by the mountains that overshadow the birthplace of the Rhône. Now the

Finsteraarhorn showed us his back view, his shoulder blades, terrace upon

terrace of sheer rock.

Indeed, the force that was impelling Adolf back towards civilisation was

not of the sort that could make the pace for us. We were going onwards

and onwards, but rather drawn by the sun towards his haunt in the east,

the common goal of so many pilgrims. But our mood was not devout except

that we were nature worshippers who, while marching to Canterbury, were

diverting one another with appropriate tales. You might have had pleasure

in seeing us advance in very open order up the wrinkled back of the

Fiesch glacier. I believe one of us was holding a pipe between his teeth,

another strolled with his hands in his pockets, a fourth darted about

kodak in hand.

Adolf thought we were slow, and grew impatient at our tarrying on this

astonishing veranda. It has, perhaps, no like in the world in this, that

it is a suspended ice-garden of an extent and altitude well proportioned

to the physical faculties of man, showing as much of natural beauty under

one of its most prodigious aspects as does not exceed the understanding

of a well-balanced mind.

I shall never forget the ever renewed delight which I found in skirting

the southern buttresses of the Finsteraarhorn range. We did not take

a step forward without stopping to look backward through the wide gap

formed by the valley down which the Fiesch glacier pours its waters in

the Rhône. The whole of the Pennine Alps displayed themselves within this

gap.

There they loomed as lifted off the earth, a gossamer, a sea of soft

light, a row of pearls looking as frail as a dream, and yet a real world,

the key to which is love of the beautiful.

Softly--the ski have a way of caressing the snow--slowly, chatting, then

wrapped in silence, we went forward, as on wings. Immersed in light,

we might have been borne aloft by an expansive force within ourselves,

so much did we rise without any effort. It was barely midday when we

stood on the Oberaarjoch. Before us bent and curved the sides of the

last glacier which we had yet to follow--the Oberaar Gletscher. Our eyes

embraced a new horizon which, surging beyond the Galenstock and the

Dammastock, extended further than the Toedi in the north and enclosed the

Bernina in the east.

We were not alone on this Belvedere. The Oberaarjoch hut, high above

us on our left, looked like one of those boxes which in a theatre allow

the eyes of the occupants to plunge down upon the stage unseen. The

platform in front of the hut was occupied by some fellow-runners, whose

voices reached our ears almost as soon as we saw them. They were watching

us, and we exchanged with them such greetings as ships may send to one

another when crossing on the high seas. To-morrow they would resume their

course towards the skies we had left behind us, while we pushed our way

towards those they had hitherto travelled under.

It would be idle to attempt to reckon up our widely sweeping curves as we

came down the Oberaar glacier. The surface, concave at the top, becomes

convex at the bottom, with a regularity which is a good example of an

unfailing law in glacier phenomena. I think we turned to the right, and

spun round to the left, and then turned to the left and spun round to the

right for about twenty minutes on that sheet of snow without a stop. Our

men bowled themselves down anyhow. But the spiral line we looked back

upon from the foot of the glacier would have won respect from the most

exacting teacher in draughtsmanship.

Lunn says that the top slope was unskiable. So we set our lunch upon it.

“Thence some straight running took us over an uninterrupted stretch of

snow about five miles in length. The surface was hard and wind-swept,

but the gradient was so gentle that we could let ourselves go without

thought of possible falls. We turned off beyond the snout of the glacier

and bore away down a gully to our left. Here the professor supplied an

interesting _entre-acte_.

“The guides had, for once in a way, got ahead. Suddenly Professor Roget

fell down at the top of a steep and trying slope. He did not rise, so I

sent the guides back to help him. Adolf saw his opportunity: a little bit

of a tragedy coming in the nick of time when the perils of the route were

over. He puffed and panted up the slope, leading the search party with

a rush. When at last three hot and perspiring guides reached the piece

of wreckage stranded on the chilly shore they were not a little annoyed

to see the boat right itself without their help, and, recovering the use

of human speech, the Professor remarked that he hoped this lesson would

teach them to keep together. It did!”

By four o’clock in the afternoon we had wandered over the long, flat

basin at the end of the Unteraar glacier, whence we said goodbye to the

Finsteraarhorn. Arnold, in high spirits, was bent on making the most of

his last chances. We were on the last spur abutting on to the flat land

in the middle of which stands the Grimsel hospice, when I saw him dash to

the left over the brow of the last wave of the hill, exclaiming, “I see a

cheeky thing to do!” The next moment he was sailing along safely on the

flats. We had no thought of entering into the hospice. Why should we? We

had not a scratch, we did not feel an ache, our equipment was as complete

as when we had started. We therefore took immediately to the road.

“Here we at last discovered genuine winter. Above, on the glaciers,

all had been warmth, colour, and light. Here in this grim gorge all was

sombre, grey, and chill. The hospice seemed to breathe a feeble defiance

to the genius of this abode of frost. Never have I seen anything more

desolate than the deserted post-road, gagged with old avalanche tracks

and overhung with icicles. Below, the angry gash of the torrent peered

out between cakes of ice, whilst above the waning light revealed sombre

bosses of grey rock smothered in snow.

“We were anxious to telephone, so I took one of the guides and made all

speed down the road. Some one had conveniently made tracks, which had

iced during the night and afforded some furious running. At last, at 6

p.m., twelve hours after leaving the hut, we pulled up at Guttannen.

Here we telephoned to Beatenberg and Kandersteg and then went in search

of night quarters. The hotel was, of course, closed, but we found rooms

for the night in an adjoining chalet and were afforded one of those

sidelights on real Swiss life which the summer visitor so rarely sees.

“We supped in the one room which was warmed, and here the family were

pursuing their various occupations. The patriarch was mumbling in the

corner over his pipe, attracting, like the majority of patriarchs, little

attention. The father, a guide in summer, chatted on the winter’s work.

He appeared to think that cutting the wood and bearing it towards the

valley left a man little time to grow fat. At the table a young girl was

plying--alas!--not the spinning-wheel of a previous generation, but an

unromantic ‘Singer.’ In front of her stood some dressmaker’s model, a

hideous, headless monstrosity on a wire cage. On the stove a small youth

slept contentedly. To him entered a bustling little damsel with the

maternal instinct precociously developed. With unsuspected tenderness

she gently lifted him up, still sleeping, bore him out of the room, and

attacked ‘with an undaunted tread the long black passage up to bed.’

“Supper over, we lit our pipes with pardonable satisfaction. Our long

journey had been carried through without a hitch. Perfect weather,

thorough arrangements, every precaution. Seriously, one can scarcely

be too careful in winter mountaineering. With every precaution, the

entire complexion of things may be altered in one moment. A broken

ski, a wrenched ankle, the work of a minute, and the situation becomes

charged with painful anxiety. With superb indifference the mountains

suffer us for ninety-nine days, and, perhaps on the hundredth--with equal

indifference--they strike.

“_Friday, January 8th._--Up once more before the dawn, to discover signs

of bad weather, which had thoughtfully postponed its arrival till we had

left the upper snows. One day earlier and we should have been cooped up

in the Finsteraarhorn hut for four days, living on stale bread and tinned

meat. A sleigh was hired to drive us to Meiringen, but I was anxious to

finish the journey on ski, so, with unpardonable sophistry, I ‘tailed’

behind the sleigh. This proved far from easy on the icy, winding road.

“At last, six days and six hours after leaving Kandersteg, five happy

men stepped on to the Meiringen platform. On lake Brienz the sky was

veiled in dark, lowering clouds, and snow fell as we drove up to

Beatenberg. On arriving, we were plied with those questions which a

certain type of people offer as well-meant flattery: ‘Was it not too

cold?’ ‘Wasn’t it too, too awfully dangerous?’ We could have accepted

the heroic _rôle_ with greater equanimity, had we failed to realise that

any one with decent endurance and a fair knowledge of ski-ing could have

accompanied us without risk.”

To give satisfaction to so many kind inquiries, I gave two days later

my first lecture before a more than crowded audience, and Arnold Lunn

supplemented it. The joint address is the common foundation of anything

we have since written on the subject.

Let me now wind up with a few final remarks.

1. Winter mountaineering may be more difficult and more dangerous than

summer climbing. One often has to face the most intense cold; but with

first-class conditions such as we enjoyed, it is scarcely more arduous,

and certainly much more enjoyable, than summer work. Our journey in

summer would have involved hours of walking through damp, slushy snow.

There would have been wearisome tramps up and down _moraines_, tedious

stretches of mule paths, dull grinds over grass slopes, and I shudder to

think--consider the mileage!--what the last day would have meant in July.

As it was, we at no time suffered from the cold, and, strangely enough,

though our days were long and mostly uphill, in point of time at least,

we neither of us ever felt tired. This was, to be sure, owing to good

ski technique. “The professor would never allow us to raise our ski off

the surface of the snow. In that way they were absolutely no weight, and

even the raising of the foot and leg was replaced by the glide upwards of

the ski blade which provided a resting-point and support, reducing the

muscular action to the same amount of forward movement as is necessary

on level ground, without any additional force being employed in vertical

action.”

Given good weather and normal conditions, a six-day traverse can be

accomplished with very little fatigue and still less privation. I have

done four such and have never been any the worse. One may weary somewhat

of soup, bread and cheese, but barring these and similar drawbacks, there

is no reason why any one of moderate physique and fair ski-ing powers

should not follow in our steps.

Somehow the memories of those six days have the power to impart something

of the magical colourings of a winter sunset to the drab dullness of

lowland evenings. On the mountains we all have moments when life assumes

unsuspected values, helping us to realise on our return to civilisation,

that the things that are seen are temporal, whereas the things which for

the time are not seen are for all practical purposes eternal. “The winter

Alps are but a vision, a faint memory intruding itself at intervals

when the roar of the commonplace is for a moment hushed in silence. If

visions were not at times the most solid of realities this world would be

intolerable.”

“Just for a moment I have had a fleeting vision,” wrote Lunn, when he

had once more settled down to the round of daily life, “of the silent

snows of the Aletsch, as you and I saw them that glad evening on the

Loetschenlücke, lit in all the splendour of the January moon. It faded

all too soon, and the winter Alps again seem very far away.”

2. I append a table of levels, in feet, similar to the table of my

vertical displacements, in metres, which the reader has found at the end

of the Diablerets to Kandersteg chapter:--

_January 2nd._--Kandersteg to Mutthorn hut: 5,700 feet

(Tschingel pass).

_January 3rd._--Mutthorn hut to Petersgrat (our second pass):

1,000 feet.

_January 4th._--From Kippel to Egon von Steiger hut (Loetschen

pass): 6,000 feet.

_January 5th._--From Concordia Platz to Grünhornlücke (our

fourth pass): 2,000 feet.

_January 6th._--From Fieschfirn to Finsteraarhorn: 5,000 feet.

_January 7th._--From Fieschfirn to Oberaarjoch (fifth pass):

2,000 feet.

Add 2,000 feet for unconsidered trifles. The total vertical

displacement is thus brought out at a little under 24,000 feet.

We paid each of our men a pound a day. Other expenses brought the cost

to thirty pounds. It is better to have plenty of men and plenty of food.

Plenty of food because one is always liable to be detained some days in

the huts by the bad weather--plenty of men, which does not necessarily

mean guides, because a party that can be broken up into sections is

infinitely safer and handier. A party of six may be expressed by 2 + 2

+ 2, or by 3 + 3, or by 4 + 2, dispositions which may fit into almost

every emergency.

There is no doubt that sealskins are extremely convenient and a great

saving of labour in going uphill, because they annihilate back-slip, the

bugbear of beginners and of loaded men. Serious trouble may be caused

by wrinkled and puckered-up hard snow, or by those extremely slippery

patches, either snow or ice, which now and then upset the balance of the

High Alp runner.

The remedy to this I have found in a contrivance against side-slip

which figures as a permanent fixture on the powerful pair of military

ski which I used on all my big traverses. It consists of two blades of

hardish steel, about 5 inches long, sharpened and shaped in the fashion

of skates. Linked to each other across the upper surface of my ski, they

adhere to the sides by lateral pressure only, which is applied by means

of a top screw. The edge of each blade stands out beyond the flat of

the ski by the merest fraction of an inch, in front of one, and behind

the other, foot. This secures straight running on hard snow and ice by

biting into it, preventing side-slip when the broadside of the ski slew’s

round to the drop of the slope. The laws of mechanics teach that this

contrivance, maintained against the ski by side-pressure only, should get

pushed out of place when, the ski being edged, an unduly large portion

of the weight of the runner falls to be borne by the ski edge. But, in

practice, it is not so, provided you are careful to obtain the maximum of

side-pressure that the horizontal binding screw can produce.

[Illustration: ADOLF ON THE FINSTERAARHORN ARÊTE.

To face p. 178.]

Studs on the inside of the blade, making impressions upon the wood of

the ski, without injuring it in any way, increase the resistance of this

contrivance to the vertical pressure caused by the weight of the runner.

3. Within a few years from the date of writing, this part of

the Alps will be girdled by a network of mountain railways. The

Grindelwald-Jungfrau railway, already completed to the Jungfraujoch

(11,000 feet), will deposit the ski-runner within a stone’s throw of the

Concordia Platz. There he will, as the phrase goes, have it all his own

way, with the resources of civilisation and a railway station to fall

back upon.

The line of the Loetschberg, on the international railway,

now being built to join Berne to Brigue, should be open to

traffic by the end of 1913. It will then take but a few moments

to run there and back, underground, between Kandersteg and

Goppenstein in the Loetschenthal, joining together both ends

of the ski route Kandersteg--Gastern--Mutthorn--Petersgrat (or

Loetschberg)--Kippel--Goppenstein.

To the east, a line now under construction from Brigue, with a tunnel

under the Furka pass to Andermatt, will connect the St. Gothard ski-ing

grounds with those we have just described.

Skiers running down the Aletsch will be able to take train at Moerel

or Fiesch. These coming facilities are not altogether pleasant to

contemplate for those who hold the traditional ideas about the virginity

and sanctity of the Alpine Holy of Holies; but to the extent in which

it may be possible to work those lines in winter--and to this there is

no insuperable physical obstacle--they will greatly contribute to the

generalising of ski, and thereby confer inestimable benefits upon young

people in Europe, while reducing to the minimum consistent with the zest

of manly enjoyment those risks which are the haunting terror of the

parents, sisters, and wives of the adventurous winter sportsman.

[Illustration]