HOW MOUNTAINS ARE MADE
"Old as the hills" is not a comparison that would be considered apt if
invented to-day, for we now know that, geologically speaking, the
greatest mountain ranges are of recent elevation, and that even low
hills are seldom of great antiquity. It was not till men became
climbers, and so grew to have an intimate acquaintance with mountains in
detail, that a recognition of the rapid degradation which all mountains
are suffering was clearly obtained. To look at the Matterhorn from below
is to behold an apparently everlasting tower, yet its base is strewn
with ruins, and its flanks are continuously swept by falling masses of
rock.
The realisation of this different point of view, which we must
presently discuss in more detail, forms a clear mark of division between
the attitude towards mountains, of men in the pre-scientific age and
to-day. Our forefathers naturally regarded the hills as eternal and
everlasting. They defined the beginning of things in such phrases as
"Before the mountains were brought forth." The tops of peaks, actually
their newest feature, were hoary-headed to them. This was indeed partly
due to their limited idea of the stretch of time into the past. Six
thousand years, which to us seems but a day, was an eternity to them. Of
course six thousand years is a brief period in the life of a mountain.
Judged by such a standard it may be called eternal, and that was the
kind of meaning they attached to the word. Mountains have grown young as
our notions of time past have extended. If we could lengthen our
time-span, the interval of time (about one-tenth of a second) of which
we are simultaneously conscious, if we could extend it to years instead
of a fraction of a second, we should actually see the mountains
changing. In a sense that is what we have imaginatively accomplished.
Pre-scientific man possessed no such power. Dwellers in mountain
countries beheld the peaks apparently ever the same. Each summer, as it
stripped away part of the winter accumulation of snow, revealed the same
apparently unaltering features. They knew nothing of the movement of
glaciers. They regarded snow-mountains as accumulations piled up
continuously from the beginning of the world and destined to go on
increasing till the end. I remember reading in the comparatively recent
book of travel written by an Anglo-Indian, how he went up some Himalayan
valley and came to the glacier at the head of it. He attempted to go no
further. He conceived himself to have reached the limit of possible
advance. He mounted some way up the hillside and looked along towards
the head of the valley; all was ice--an accumulation fallen from the
cliffs on either hand for thousands of years and some day destined to
fill the trough to the brim--such was his notion of the thing he was
looking at.
Changeless, eternal, forbidding, still, silent, and horrible--thus
the snowy ranges appeared to the pre-scientific gaze. To us they seem
the very reverse. We know them to be ceaselessly changing, of relatively
short persistence, the theatre of movements of all kinds both violent
and slow--not places of death by any means, but the home of an active, a
beneficent, and a formative life--not regions cut off and unrelated to
the lowlands and habitable world, but the very parent of such, the
laboratory where soil is made, and the head of water collected that
distributes it below; the counterbalance of the denuding forces that
would level the earth with the ocean; regions beneficent as they are
beautiful, and as necessary to the well-being of the habitable world as
is the richest and most fertile plain.
[Illustration: 15. AT MEIRINGEN. Ridge above the Bruenig Pass in
distance.]
He that would know mountains and mountain regions aright must know them
as the theatre of change, the domain of action. He must not merely look
upon peaks as they are, but must conceive of them as they have been and
will be. As this kind of knowledge grows and becomes instinctive within
him, it will alter his attitude towards Alpine panoramas and broaden his
grasp of the significance of mountain physiognomy.
Let us briefly consider the stages of formation and decay of a single
group of mountains, not volcanic. If we go back to the very start, we
may imagine their future site occupied by a plain. The slow cooling and
consequent shrinking of the world involves the wrinkling of its surface,
and the position of the wrinkles is determined by a variety of forces,
as yet little understood, with which we need not concern ourselves.
Suffice it to assume that our plain occupies the position of the next
coming group of wrinkles. A single range or line of mountains hardly
exists in the world outside of the commonplace cartographer's mind.
Old-fashioned maps used to represent mountains by a kind of caterpillar
meandering about on them, and thus gave currency to the notion that
mountains are generally arranged along a single line--a notion, by the
by, that (in the minds of politicians negotiating boundary treaties) has
been prolific in costly disputes and misunderstandings.[1] Mountains
generally exist in rows of more or less parallel ranges intricately
jointed together, and they do so because, when the wrinkling that caused
them began, it did not begin with a single wrinkle, but with a row of
wrinkles, such as a soft tablecloth makes on a smooth table when parts
of it are moved toward one another.
[Footnote 1: Witness the Argentine and Alaska boundary disputes.]
Thus the first sign of a mountain range will be a series of
undulations upon the surface of the supposed plain. These undulations
will be roughly parallel to one another. We call the direction of their
parallelism the strike of the ranges. From the moment the wrinkling
movement begins, a set of forces is put in operation tending to level
the wrinkles and fill up the hollows or valleys between them. These are
the forces of denudation. People often vaguely speak as though mountains
were first elevated to their full height and then only began to be
pulled down; but of course the process of mountain sculpture is due to
the simultaneous operation of the elevating and destructive forces.
Every mountain is being pulled down in the very process of its
elevation. It grows only because it is elevated faster than the
destructive forces avail to level it. For all we yet know, some of the
mountain ranges which seem most rapidly disintegrating may, in fact,
still be growing. No one has yet divided the mountain ranges of the
world into those which have not yet reached and those which have passed
their maturity. When that has been done we shall doubtless find some
clearly marked difference in aspect between them which now we do not
know enough to recognise. The visible difference once discovered, the
two groups will raise different kinds of emotion in the man who sees
them. He will note the aspect of growth in one set and of decay in the
other, and will be correspondingly affected, as we all now are by the
young leaves and buds of spring and the fruits and faded foliage of
autumn. Sad folk will love the fading and sanguine folk the growing
hills. There will arise a new subject for poets and a new group of
similes for preachers and moralists. In this way also science enlarges
the material of art.
But we must return to our nascent mountain group, as yet a mere series
of parallel wrinklings, higher here, lower there, with lines of
depression between them. Rain falling will need to drain away, and in
doing so will form pools in hollows, and will run along the furrows till
it reaches the open country and can turn away. Thus the first streams of
a nascent group of mountains follow and do not flow across the strike.
Only the rivulets that actually flow down the slopes will flow in a
direction perpendicular to the strike, and will be tributaries to the
main lines of drainage that flow along the strike.
[Illustration: 16. STORM CLOUDS OVER THE LAKE OF THUN. Looking up the
Kander Thal. The Niesen on the right.]
The mountains are rising steadily as the millenniums of years pass
on. The rain keeps falling on them, and as they grow higher the snows of
winter first, and later of all the year, whiten their summits and
gradually descend upon their slopes as the summits reach higher and
higher aloft. If the rain always fell uniformly over the whole area, and
if the ranges were of rock, homogeneous like a great lump of plaster,
equally strong in every direction--if such were the case, each range
would remain approximately symmetrical on both sides, and the crest of
it would lie evenly between its two flanking troughs. But that is never
the case. The rain-bringing winds are sure to come more frequently from
one side of the mountain area than from the other. The wet quarter will
be the east or the west or the south-west, as the case may be, and more
moisture will be precipitated and consequently more denudation effected
by it on one side of the ridges than on the other, with important
sculpturing results as we shall presently observe.
We may best regard the rising mountain area as a plateau with a
wrinkled top, such a plateau as Tibet, for example. As time advances the
plateau will present ever loftier walls to the outside world, but the
undulations within will not greatly develop by any directly wrinkling
process. It is not the wrinkling that splits the plateau up into ranges,
but quite other forces. All that the wrinkling does is to give to those
forces their first direction. The interior of Tibet shows us what, but
for these other forces, a great mountain region would be like. It would
be traversed from end to end by low and roughly parallel ridges,
separated from one another by shallow valleys raised high aloft on the
great plateau-pedestal. In the shallow valleys there would lie many
lakes, some having no outlets, others drained by slow streams flowing
along the strike of the ranges, and fed by driblets from the slopes of
the flanking hills.
But at the ends and around the periphery of the plateau generally a
different condition of things will be found. Let us regard the ends
first. The slow flowing rivers of the plateau as they reach its
extremity will become swift, where they plunge down to the plain. In
proportion to their swiftness is the speed with which they cut down
their beds into the mass of the plateau-pedestal. If the end of the
plateau were a cliff, the rivers would tumble over it in waterfalls, and
these would cut their way back and thus dig out canyons in place of the
shallow valleys of the original wrinkling. In any case a similar result
will be arrived at, and the plateau will be more and more cut down into
deep valleys with high ridges between. What were originally small
wrinkles above the mean level of the plateau and slight depressions
beneath it will be changed by denudation into high mountains and deep
valleys, their scale being determined by the amount of general elevation
of the plateau above the low-lying country. As the general elevating
process goes on, so does the excavation. The deep valleys will be formed
first at the edge of the plateau. They will work back into its heart in
process of time. The original Tibetan plateau is now greatly reduced,
and only the remaining middle part of it preserves any resemblance to
its primary surface-form. As you go eastward or westward from that
central portion you come into ever deepening valleys and ever relatively
higher peaks, measured from the neighbouring valley floor.
[Illustration: 17. VITZNAU AND LAKE OF LUCERNE. Vitznau is the terminus
of the Rigi Railway. The two promontories on the right and left of the
picture are the Nasen, Ober Nase and Untere Nase.]
Thus far we have only spoken of the natural development of the strike
rivers, those original lines of flow that follow the direction of the
ranges. We must now observe how their course is affected by the
development of the tributary streams that flow down the slopes of the
ridges approximately at right angles to the strike. In the case of the
Himalayas the rains come from southerly quarters. The damp air-current
drifts against and over the plateau from that direction. Contact with
the elevations against which it drifts causes the rains to fall. As the
damp current flows further north it becomes continually dryer, so that
less and less rain falls. Thus denudation is most energetic on the
southern slopes. As the plateau rises its southern edge (to consider
that alone for a moment) is most vigorously cut into by the water
pouring down that face and forming gullies, which continuously tend to
deepen and to cut back into the mass of the plateau. The process has
only to go forward long enough, for the most energetic of these
side-streams to eat its way back, right through the outermost wrinkle of
the plateau, till it taps the first or southernmost of the strike
rivers. From that moment the course of the strike river is changed, and
instead of flowing away along its original valley, it turns at right
angles and flows out through the gully cut by the side-stream, which
thus becomes the main river. The next wrinkle is in turn attacked by the
side-streams flowing down its south slope and in turn cut through, so
that the second strike river becomes thus tributary to the first. And so
the process continues.
Such is the history of the formation of a great river like the Indus.
It is filled by the robbed waters of countless smaller rivers, one by
one drawn within its drainage area by the action of side-streams cutting
through intervening ridges. All these rivers and their tributaries go on
cutting their way back with ever-increasing vigour as the trunk outlet
is lowered by their united volume. This is the process whereby an
original plateau is sculptured into a maze of ridges and valleys. The
towering heights we behold were never elevated in isolated magnificence.
A different thrust did not send up the Matterhorn, the Weisshorn, and
Monte Rosa, but all the neighbourhood was elevated by one great heaving.
To begin with, some lines of elevation were a little higher than others,
and they determined the position of principal peaks and ridges; but as
the mass was elevated the hollows were engraved by the _burin_ of
flowing water. The higher the mass was raised the deeper the hollows
were impressed and the wider became their opening, for the self-same
forces operate on every slope and continually eat it away and open
side-valleys and subsidiary side-valleys into them. These forces
operating on both sides of every ridge rapidly pull down its crest and
ultimately round it off and reduce it lower and lower continually, so
that it is only a question of time for the biggest mountain mass to be
lowered to the level of the plains around it.
Running water is not the only agent that has to be considered. Even
more energetic agents act in the higher regions of frost. There the snow
that is melted by the sun (whose dissolving power is as operative in the
regions so-called of perpetual snow as it is below) percolates into the
crevices of the rocks and finds out all their weak places. At night this
water freezes, and in freezing expands, thus acting like a wedge and
splitting the rock it has penetrated. Next time the sun shines the
pieces thus split off may fall. Sooner or later, after repeated
operations of the wedge, they must fall, and a new surface of rock will
be uncovered to be split and shivered in its turn. The rocks that fall
tumble ultimately on to the snow-fields that spread over the high open
spaces, where they are taken charge of by the great carrying agents of
the heights--the glaciers. The higher a peak is, relatively to its
neighbours, the more rapidly will frost attack it, and the more
energetic will be the destruction wrought upon it. I have heard it
estimated, or perhaps only guessed, that 1000 tons of rock fall daily
from the upper portion of the Matterhorn's rock-pyramid. The great peaks
of the Himalaya are falling yet more rapidly to pieces.
But what in this relation is the action of the glaciers? At one time
they were regarded as a great abrading agency. It was thought that the
high valleys were fashioned out by them. Later it was concluded that
their hollowing action was a negligible quantity. The general belief now
is that it is not considerable. Whatever may be the action of glaciers
upon their beds, it is at all events a small matter compared with their
action as transporting agents. Glaciers are not hoary accumulations of
snow, collected in hollow places since the beginning of the world, as
our forefathers supposed, but flowing streams of ice, whose rate of
movement varies with the slope, the latitude, the mean temperature, and
other factors of their situation. The snow that falls at high elevations
lies in great masses where it finds lodgment, or falls to such places
from the steep rocks which are unable to give it steady support. By
these means it falls and drifts together into those great upper
reservoirs we call the snow-fields--resplendent areas of purest white,
so toilsome to cross when the sun shines hotly upon them, and so
incomparably beautiful to look upon. Here by melting of the surface,
percolation into the body of the snow-field, and freezing there, and by
the pressure of the ever-increasing accumulation of snow, the substance
is gradually changed into granulated ice, and the ice thus formed slowly
moves down-hill. The various neighbouring streams of ice flow and unite
together, and thus, reaching lower and lower levels and continually
melting, they come to a line where the annual increment of snow is equal
in amount to the depth of snow annually melted. This is called the
snow-line. Still downward flows the mass, and now the amount melted
becomes greater than the amount annually received. The thickness of the
ice steadily diminishes till at last the total arrival melts and the
glacier ends in a so-called snout.
[Illustration: 18. THE FALLS OF TOSA, VAL FORMAZZA. Said to be the
grandest in the Alps, 470 feet high. The Tosa falls in three cascades.
The first only is shown in the picture.]
The great importance of glaciers in mountain formation is the part
they play as carrying agents. There is practically no limit to the
weight of rock they will bear down with them in their steady
uninterrupted flow. Whatever falls upon the glacier at any part of its
course is carried down by it and ultimately dumped off its sides or end.
A stone that falls on the highest rim of the snowfield will presently be
covered up by newly-fallen snow and will be carried down at, or close
to, the floor of the glacier, where it will either be ground to powder
or will not emerge till it is melted out at the end of the glacier's
snout. A stone that plunges in a crevasse to the bottom of the glacier
will have similar experiences. Stones that tumble on to the glacier
surface further down will not be so deeply covered by annual
accumulations of snow, and will therefore sooner emerge again on to the
surface by the melting away of the accumulation above them. Stones that
fall on to the glacier below the snow-line will not be covered up at
all, but will simply be carried down on the surface.
The visible collections of stone rubbish carried by a glacier are
called its moraines. As the surface of a glacier tends to become convex
the moraine-stuff tends to be rolled off towards the sides, where it
forms the right and left lateral moraines. Where two glaciers flow
together and unite, the right lateral moraine of the one and the left of
the other will join and be carried down as a medial moraine on the
surface of the united glacier. Such medial moraines may be observed in
considerable numbers flowing down, side by side, on glaciers formed by
the union of a number of higher tributaries. First comers to the Alps,
beholding them from a distance, or seeing them in photographs, sometimes
have thought they were cart-ruts, thus showing how false a scale of size
their unaccustomed vision applies to mountain views.
A given kind of rock subjected to the action of frost and the other
disintegrating forces operative at high levels, usually breaks up into
debris of a roughly uniform average size. There will, of course, be some
large masses and a lot of dust and gravel, but the average lump will be
fairly uniform. A climber in a given district comes to know what to
expect on a moraine, and he will immediately notice if the average size
of the debris is much larger or smaller than usual. Thus, when he sees a
debris-slope or a moraine from a distance, he is instinctively conscious
that its granulated aspect represents great blocks of rock. That gives
him a roughly correct scale for the view. The lowlander, who has never
been in contact with a moraine, has no such sense, and can imagine that
the brown streak he sees a few miles away is, as it looks to be, a mere
line of dust. It was through the aspect of the moraines and
debris-slopes that I first obtained an approach to a direct visual
understanding of the vaster scale of the Himalayas than that of the
Alps.
A cliff below the snowy regions, if it does not rise out of the sea, is
protected at its base by the debris fallen from it. What tumbles from
above piles up below, and keeps the foot of the cliff from being eaten
away. But a cliff or slope of rock rising out of a glacier or snow-field
is deprived of such protection. All the stones that fall from it are
carried away by the ice, so that the surface of the whole cliff keeps on
peeling off, and that face of the mountain is gradually planed away.
Where a great glacier bay reaches into the mountains this action may be
very energetic. The whole surrounding cirque is constantly eaten at and
continually extends its inner circumference. In some regions this action
is more rapid than in others. Where, as in the tropics, the heat is
great by day and the frost at high altitudes bitter by night,
destruction goes quickly forward, and the mountains are vigorously
reduced. Weak points in the rocky structure are soon found out. The
range itself will be penetrated. A pass thus formed tends to be
continuously lowered. In the neighbourhood of the greatest altitudes the
destruction is of course most vigorous. This is the reason why, in so
many places, alike in the Himalayas and the Andes, cross-cutting rivers
find their way through a range by a gorge that passes quite near a
culminating peak. The great Indus gorge below Nanga Parbat is the most
notable instance I can recall.
We have thus, in the briefest possible manner, sketched out how some of
the chief sculpturing forces operate to form mountains. I have not
attempted to go into detail or to explain the various corrections and
modifications that have to be applied to make the simple outline
correspond with facts. Some valleys are actual depressions formed by the
caving in of the earth along a line of weakness. Every mountain region
contains examples of such hollows. Now and again by some complication or
intersection of the wrinkling process a small area may be forced up
considerably higher than the surrounding elevation and thus the mass
provided for an exceptionally high peak. Volcanic peaks also remain to
be considered, and have been excluded from the foregoing brief survey.
In the main, however, the statement is correct that the mountains of a
region are produced by the sculpturing into ridges and subsidiary ridges
of a great and slowly elevated mass. What begins as a growing plateau,
passes through the stage of rocky and snowy ranges, becomes later on an
area of undulating country, and if time sufficed would ultimately
flatten out once more into a plain. Between the first stage and the last
the sculpturing operations of nature pass through many phases. In the
beginning, when the area has only just begun to rise from the level,
those forces operate gently. Slopes are slight and streams flow easily
down them. When the mountains have been roughly blocked out and the
valleys precipitously deepened, the region enters into the dramatic
stage of its history. The peaks are at their highest, the valleys at
their deepest relatively to the heights. Cliffs are boldest, needles
sharpest, torrents most voluminous and rapid. Now is the time when great
mountain-falls most frequently occur. The rocks do not merely crumble
away stone by stone, but huge masses are undermined and fall with
gigantic crash and violence into the valleys, temporarily damming them
across and forming lakes, which presently burst, and pour an incredible
volume of water in destructive flood down the narrow and winding valley
below. The flood transports and grinds up great quantities of rock and
carries the material afar, for hundreds of miles perhaps, before the
plain is reached and the mud deposited upon it.
In the theatrical stage mud avalanches are likewise common. To produce
them there must be a great supply of loose debris on steep rocks at a
high level and much rapidly melting snow about them, whose water drains
into gullies and unites in larger gullies, all with banks of rotten and
crumbling rock. On a suitable day in early summer, when the sky is clear
and the sun hot, the stones will fall in such numbers that they will
plug some gully and dam back the water. It will collect and burst the
dam, and a flow of stones, dust, and water will begin. At other
neighbouring spots the same thing will happen, and the elements of the
avalanche will flow together, block a larger gully, and presently burst
that block also. So it will go on till a great mass of mud, water, and
rocks collects somewhere and finally bursts loose in an avalanche which
sweeps all before it.
Such an avalanche I saw from close at hand on 8th July 1892, in the
mountains of Nagar. We were walking up the right bank of a great glacier
river, and were forced at intervals to cross its tributaries which came
rushing down the hillside on our left. Approaching the mouth of one of
these side gullies we heard a noise like thunder and beheld a vast black
wave bulging down it. It passed before we arrived and there was silence
for a few minutes. Presently the sounds of another were heard aloft, and
it soon heaved into view--a terrific sight. The weight of the mud rolled
masses of rock down the gully, turning them over and over like so many
pebbles. They restrained the muddy torrent and kept it moving slowly
with accumulating volume. Each big rock in the vanguard of the avalanche
weighed many tons; some were about 10-foot cubes. The stuff behind them
filled the gully some 15 feet deep by 40 wide. The thing travelled
perhaps at the rate of seven miles an hour. Sometimes a bigger rock than
usual barred the way till the mud, piling up behind it, swept it on. The
avalanche ate into the sides of the gully and carried away huge
undermined masses that fell into it. We saw three enormous avalanches of
this sort pass down the same gully in rapid succession, and, after we
had gone by, others followed. All the neighbouring similar gullies
discharged such groups of mud avalanches during that period of the year.
They are one of the chief agents used by nature to pull down mountains
during this, the dramatic stage of their existence. The roaring
torrential river below carries off the mud and receives the boulders in
its bed, where they are rolled along and in time ground to powder.
Mud avalanches are rare now in the Alps, and are only caused by some
exceptional event, such as the bursting of a glacier lake. Once they
were common. Mountain-falls of any great size are also much rarer in the
Alps now than they were formerly or than they are in some Himalayan
regions. Alps and Andes have passed beyond the culmination of their
dramatic stage. The mountains of Hunza, Nagar, and North Kashmir
generally, are in the midst of theirs.
A mountaineer who has acquired a knowledge of how mountains are made,
who has seen in action the forces I have briefly described, who has
climbed among mountains in sunshine and storm, in heat and frost, who
has spent nights on their cold crests, who knows how and where
avalanches of snow, ice, and rock are likely to fall and has a realising
sense of their force, their frequency, and their mass: a mountaineer who
has attained by long experience a knowledge of the ways and action of
glaciers, who can as it were feel their weight and momentum, in whose
mind, when he looks at them, they are felt to be moving and vigorous
agents, who sees the lines of motion upon them, their swing round
corners, their energy in mid course, their feebleness at the
snout:--such a man can look abroad over a mountain panorama with an
understanding, a sense of the significance of what he beholds, which,
far from detracting from its aspect of beauty, adds greatly to it.
To him a mountain area is no confused labyrinth of valleys and tangle
of ridges, but the orderly and logical expression of a number of forces,
and of forces that are still operative. To him what he beholds is not a
painting on the wall, finished and done once and for ever, but, as it
were, a scene in a play--a scene to which others have led up, and after
which others will follow, all linked together and arising one out of
another in unavoidable and necessary sequence. He perceives the
arrangement of the peaks to be as logical as that of the men in a
regiment on parade. Each stands in its own proper place, buttressed, and
founded upon a broad and sufficient base. Its drapery of snow is not a
kind of fortuitous whitewashing, splashed on anyhow by the whim of a
storm. It is a vital part of the peak to which it adheres, owing all its
forms to the modelling of that peak--here lying in deep and almost level
snow-fields where broad hollows exist beneath it; there breaking into a
mass of towering seracs where it is forced to fall over a step in its
bed; there again reuniting in a smoothly surfaced area where the bed is
once more relatively smooth; yet again opening a system of crevasses
where its substance is torn asunder by unequal rates of flow.
[Illustration: 19. LOOKING OVER LUCERNE FROM THE DREI LINDEN. The Towers
of the Musegg in the middle distance.]
To the instructed eye it is not mysterious why one peak should be a
tower of rock and the next a dome of snow. All the forms assumed are the
result of a few simple causes. They express the past history of the
action of natural forces, not difficult of comprehension. Be assured
that the understanding eye is well rewarded for the power of
comprehension it has slowly and perhaps laboriously acquired. Such
understanding comes not merely by familiarity with mountain regions, and
is not to be attained by climbing alone, no matter for how many seasons
or with what refinement of gymnastic ability. It comes indeed only to
the climber, to the man who makes himself familiar with the fastnesses
of the hills by actually going amongst them; but it only comes to him if
he avails himself of his opportunities to watch the action of Nature's
forces when he comes in contact with them. It is not enough merely to
see, it is necessary also to look, to examine, to remember, and to love.
He that thus acquaints himself with the high places, will learn to know
them as they can be known by no other. They will become to him a home,
full of reminiscences, full of shared pleasures, full also of problems
yet to be solved, and of hopes yet to be fulfilled. To such a
mountain-lover weariness of mountains can never come. His climbing days
may be ended, for whatever reason; he may cease to expect or even to
desire to mount far aloft; but the mountains themselves, whencesoever
seen, will remain to him a joy, permanent, indescribable, and of
priceless worth, which he at least will hold to be superior to all other
emotions aroused within him by the beauties of Nature.