THE HUMAN INTEREST
It has often occurred to me, when travelling over glaciers and among
mountains, seldom or never before visited by men, how much the
impression they produce upon a first spectator loses by lacking the
human interest. Of course some stray huntsman or dumb and forgotten
native may have been there before, but if the fact is unknown to us, it
is as though he had not existed.
When climbing Illimani, the great Bolivian mountain, the human interest
accompanied us up the lower slopes. Here were old fields, old irrigation
channels, even ancient ruined huts. Higher up we still had the memory of
former adventurers to keep our hearts warm; but when we had forced the
great rock-cliff that guards the peak, and were upon the upper
snow-field, we were, so far as we knew, in an unvisited world. There did
indeed exist an ancient tradition that once, long long ago, an Aymara
Indian had gone aloft, seeking the abode of the gods, and that having
found it, he was taken by the gods to themselves and never returned to
his people; but the tale was too slender a thread to form a sensible
connection between us and the world of bygone humanity. The climb took
us over one high peak, then across a great snow-field and up the highest
peak. We revisited and rested on the lower peak in the descent. While
there resting, I dropped my hand on the rock beside me, and snatched it
away, feeling something soft and clammy, a kind of texture instinctively
perceived to be strange at such a place.
Looking to see what the substance was, I found it to be a fragment of
goat-hair rope, such as the Indians of the Bolivian plateau have used
from time immemorial. Instantly the old legend was recalled to my
remembrance. It was true! The Indian had actually been here where I was
sitting. Here he rested. Hence he looked abroad over the country of his
birth--probably his last long look on any view in this world; for he
never returned, and must presently have lost his life in some hidden
crevasse. The thought of that nameless one animated the scene, and
enriched the emotions we experienced with a new interest. I thought now
of how he had felt with this great prospect spread abroad before him. I
wondered whether his gods had appeared to him, whether he had beheld
visions and dreamed dreams, and what those visions were like. There
beneath him he had perhaps gazed for the last time on his birthplace,
and identified the little hut that was his home. Did he know that he
would never return? Did he think about his friends so far below and
wonder whether they were looking up towards him? Did he promise himself
great future fame in his tribe? Did he dream that they would identify
him with the very gods? For the remainder of our resting-time the whole
view was animated by thoughts of this man. It is the best instance I can
cite of the value of a human interest in giving sentiment to a mountain
scene.
The same lesson was taught me by the Spitsbergen mountains, amongst
which I spent two long summer seasons. The coast of Spitsbergen is rich
with the tales and traditions of human achievement and suffering. Few
places have been the scene of tragedies so numerous and so long drawn
out. In few have more dramatic adventures occurred and more varied
enterprises been undertaken. But the interior of Spitsbergen, and
especially its mountain ranges, had scarcely been penetrated before. The
mountains beyond reach of the shore were unclimbed, with one exception.
The landscapes were unknown to man. It was necessary to spend some time
in these solitary places to realise how much they lost by this
aloofness. No peak possessed name or history. None had ever been the
centre of any one's landscape. None had measured mid-day for any toiler,
or served as reckoning point for the close of his labour. No villagers
had ever imagined those Arctic glaciers as the home of any gods or the
paradise of any heroes. They had never found their way into ancient tale
or legend. They had never been worshipped or sung by man, historic or
pre-historic. They were just elemental lumps of the earth, with no more
human sentiment attached to them than to any dozen stones you may gather
off a heap and make mountains of in your imagination.
Pick up any fragment of rock you please and place it upon your table.
Look closely at it and persuade yourself that it is not six inches but
20,000 feet high. On that assumption search for routes up it. Examine
its faces and its ridges, its cracks and its gullies. You will be able
to climb about it in a day-dream, to have accidents upon it, to succeed
or to fail in various ascents. But who will care to "hear tell" of your
proceedings? And yet, apart from geographical and geological
considerations, which are in fact historical, any casual mountain is no
more interesting in its essence than your stone. There are hundreds of
thousands of mountains in the world. What intrinsic interest has one of
them more than another, from a climber's point of view, except in two
respects, the difficulty of the climb and the human interest? But the
difficulty is of no account, for if that is what you want you can find
it on Scafell, and need not wander to seek it.
No! it is above all the human interest that ennobles a peak and makes
the ascent of it desirable. It is to climb an elevation that men have
seen; to climb a peak that has been named, that has been looked at for
centuries by the inhabitants at its base, that travellers have passed by
and observed, that has a place in the knowledge and memory of men. If
there were a great mountain in full view of London or Rome, how much
more interesting it would be to climb than some nameless lump in Central
Asia, like K2, that was never within view of any abode of men.
This was one of the main attractions of the unclimbed Alps to early
explorers of the high levels. Mont Blanc was known of old. How many
generations of men had looked from Thun at the Oberland giants and told
stories about them. How much the famed devils and dragons added to the
fascination of the Matterhorn. The Alps had looked down upon the march
of armies and the flux of peoples for uncounted thousands of years.
Their solitudes were peopled by the dreams of all the generations that
had passed by them or dwelt amongst them. The subliminal consciousness
that this was so, counted for much in the strong attraction that drew
the pioneers aloft.
The pioneers in their turn have richly endowed the Alps with a further
human interest. Why do so many people want to climb the Matterhorn? It
is not a better climb than the Dent Blanche. The reason is because of
the stronger human interest that the Matterhorn evokes. All who have any
knowledge of Alpine history have read the story of the long siege, the
triumphant conquest, and the dramatic tragedies of which the Matterhorn
has been the scene. It is the fascination of those memories that draws
men to the peak, and makes the climbing of it seem so desirable an
adventure to so many people.
Thus also is it, more or less, all over the Alps. Each peak now has its
story. Each ascent has been made before and described. Wherever we go
now we find and recognise the traces of our predecessors. Here is an old
tent-platform; we know who built it and when. This is the site of such
an accident; that crag turned back such a party on such an occasion. The
memory of bygone climbers is everywhere. It peoples the solitudes and
humanises the waste places. These memories will grow mellower as they
deepen into the past. The best stories will become classical, and the
scenes of them will be endowed with a prestige far beyond any that now
attaches to them.
A very dull person looks interesting when beheld down a vista of
several centuries. The memory of the first climbers of the great Alpine
peaks will remain among the mountains to a far-distant future. I daresay
my Illimani Indian was a crack-brained semi-civilised person, but I
would sooner see him than a living Cabinet Minister. I can never think
about his peak without recalling him. So is it with the bays of
Spitsbergen. The whale-fishers were no doubt a coarse lot of quarrelsome
seamen, who stank of blubber most disgustingly; and yet if I could call
Mr. William Heley from his grave, and hear how he emptied out the
Dutchmen on one occasion and they emptied him out on another; if I could
get him to show me his huts where they stood, and could hear him yarn
about the fishery, how entertaining that would be, and how gladly would
I exchange the morning newspaper for such talk. We cannot in fact recall
these men, but in fancy we can and do. It is because we possess and
exercise this power of fancy that the mountains, which have been in past
times the scene of human activity and life, are so much more interesting
to wander amongst, except from a purely scientific and adventurous point
of view, than those which have not.
What is true of bygone individuals is no less true of bygone peoples.
Valleys that have been long inhabited and the high pastures that have
been frequented of old are far more pleasant to visit than valleys that
have scarcely beheld the face of man. We were made conscious of this
difference in the Mustagh mountains of high Kashmir. There the secluded
fastness of Hunza-Nagar is the home of an ancient civilisation. The
gently sloping floor of the valley is divided into terraced fields,
supported by cyclopean walls that might be as old as Mycenae itself. The
villages are built upon their own ruins, who can say to how great a
foundation depth? The paths are worn deeply into the ground. The Raja's
castle, dominating his little capital, has a venerable aspect, and if
not actually old, incorporates an ancient type. There are little ruins
by the roadside and carvings upon the rocks. Where-ever you look, the
marks of long frequentation are to be traced. Moreover, the people
themselves bear the imprint of surrounding nature upon them. Their
action in movement, their way of life, their adaptation to their
environment--all imply old habit and deep-rooted tradition. The valley
in which they are enclosed is the world to them. Its every feature has
entered into their habits of thought. The surrounding mountains are a
part of their existence, and borrow from man in turn a reflected glow of
traditional interest.
From this man-impregnated valley we presently passed over the mountains
to the valley of Braldu, descending upon the highest village. Above that
poverty-stricken place the traces of man were few. There were faintly
marked tracks; there were even a few small ruined huts; but all that
these indicated was the occasional passage of hunters or the brief
visits of shepherds or gold-washers. Once the glacier was reached, the
last of these traces was left behind. It was impossible not to feel the
contrast between this region and peopled Hunza. The scenery was not
less, was even more stupendous, but the human interest was lacking.
There were few named spots, and hardly a remembered tradition. The
scenery to the natives with us was not the home of their fathers, but
the elemental earth. It might have been fetched from the other side of
the moon, for all they had to tell about it. Two recorded parties had
preceded us for a certain distance up this valley, and their ghosts
alone peopled the solitude, but not a trace had they left upon the
surface of the ground discoverable by us. If we had found even the
remnants of one of their encampments, it would have animated the
surroundings with the memory of man; but we saw none. The lack was a
vacuum, an intellectual hunger, continuously felt.
[Illustration: 62. CHATILLON, VAL D'AOSTA.]
Few mountain regions in the world, outside of the Arctic and Antarctic
solitudes, are thus denuded of human interest. The mountains of the Old
World and the New have been inhabited over a large part of their
valley-area; but often the inhabitants have been people about whom
little is known. It is one of the great charms of the Alps that they
have long been the home of a fine group of peoples. "Your country," I
once remarked to a citizen of a South American Republic, "ought to be
the Switzerland of South America." "I will make it so," he replied, "if
you will fill it for me with the Swiss."
Throughout the large Alpine area various races have dwelt and dwell at
the present time. The character of the population changes from valley to
valley, and there is no small variety, not merely in dialects, but even
in languages. There is a similar variety in habits, in domestic
architecture, in costume, and in bearing. Much of these differences in
the character of the inhabitants we are wont to impute in our thoughts
to the mountain districts themselves. When we talk of the charms of the
Italian Alps, are we not thinking of the attractiveness of the people,
and the picturesqueness of their abodes and places of worship, as much
as of the luxuriance of the valleys, the sparkling of the waters, and
the mere beauty of the hills? The spirit of the people seems to infuse
itself into our memory of the mountains about them, as much as the
character of the mountains has affected the nature and disposition of
the people. Which, I wonder, borrows most from the other--the Lake of
Lucerne from the old Tell legend, or the legends from the landscape of
the lake?
An essential part of the human interest in the Alps grows out of the
length of time through which history has concerned herself with them.
The history of the Alpine valleys has only been written, or begun to be
written, in recent years. Early visitors to Zermatt no doubt were
conscious of the deep impress made by man upon the valley landscape, but
they could not interpret, as we now can, the meaning of much that they
saw. But when the local archives were searched and the traditions
written down, when it was realised that the life now being lived by the
peasantry was in all essentials the same life that had been lived by
their ancestors for hundreds of years, ancestors bearing the same names
and owning the same properties that are still borne and owned by their
living descendants, what an increase of interest that gave to a place.
[Illustration: 63. A CORNER OF THE TOWN OF ALTDORF. The traditional
scene of William Tell's exploits. Here Gessler ruled and the shooting of
the apple took place. A place of patriotic pilgrimage of the youthful
Swiss.]
The old tales about the village deep in Tiefenmatten, about the
pilgrimage that used to cross the Col d'Herens, about the frequented
routes over Theodul and Weissthor--does it not add a new charm to the
places themselves to hear them told? Who is not interested to remember,
when standing on the Theodul pass, that Roman coins have been found
there? Climbers have taken fully as much interest in the question of
where the Old Weissthor route lay as in actually climbing the passes. I
well remember the keen delight that came to me when I discovered that a
pass I had crossed, as I supposed for the first time, between the
Fillarkuppe and the Jaegerhorn, was in fact the real Old Weissthor
itself, a well-known mountain-route centuries ago. To rediscover an old
track like that is far more delightful than to invent and carry through
some entirely new expedition.
Correspondingly with the future as with the past--to make an expedition
for the first time that others will often repeat is a lasting source of
pleasure; but to make one that no sane person ever repeats or is likely
to repeat is poor fun. I have had many opportunities of making new
expeditions in the Alps and elsewhere, and have availed myself of a few;
but none ever gave me the continuing satisfaction that I derive from the
Wellenkuppe near Zermatt, a mountain that I invented, climbed, and
baptized, and that immediately became and has since remained a most
popular scramble.[2]
[Footnote 2: Its summit had previously been touched by some unrecorded
route by Lord Francis Douglas, in an attempt to climb the Gabelhorn; but
for twenty years no one had thought of the peak, which had no name.]
Some part of the popularity of the ascent of Mont Blanc from Chamonix is
due to the fact that the mountain is the highest in the Alps; part is
due to the fascinating beauty of the ice and snow scenery passed
through; but far the greatest attraction is the long and interesting
history of the climb. No one, I suppose, ascends Mont Blanc without a
thought of Balmat and De Saussure, and at least some dim consciousness
of the number of early climbers who mounted by the way he takes, and
felt all the strange emotions and high excitements they so naively
recorded. What would the Toedi be if robbed of the memory of Placidus a
Spescha? Even a Mont Ventoux can attain dignity and importance by
association with so great a man as Petrarch.
It is, however, to the passes rather than to the peaks of the Alps that
history clings. Allusion has been made to the Weissthor and the Theodul,
and many other minor passes similarly recorded might be mentioned; but
it is the great passes, the deep depressions in the main range, that are
chiefly memorable from the historical standpoint. Modern climbers
unwisely neglect these great routes, or confine themselves to such as
are tunnelled. John Ball and his contemporaries made a point of knowing
as many main passes as they could. It was their pride to be able to say,
not that they had climbed so many peaks, but that they had traversed the
Alpine chain by so many great passes. Old literature is therefore fuller
of accounts of the historic passes than are most present-day volumes,
which regard them as a subject outworn.
To mention the historic passes is to call up the name of Hannibal. Here
is no place to revive that old discussion as to the situation of
Hannibal's pass. Historians have not yet entirely convinced one another
on the matter. But if a general certainty had been arrived at, if we
could feel perfectly sure that Hannibal and his host had actually trod a
particular route, it cannot be denied that that route would be well
worth following, book in hand, for its historic interest alone.
Some, perhaps many, of my readers will have traversed the Great St.
Bernard, the Summus Penninus of antiquity. Few who have done so will
have been oblivious, as they went, of the many great men in whose steps
they were treading. Celts, Romans, Saracens, mediaeval warriors,
statesmen, saints, bishops, and monks streamed in their day across this
col. Here passed Charles the Great and other Holy Roman Emperors,
Lanfranc too, and the saintly Anselm in all the fervour of his young
enthusiasm. The reader will forgive me for quoting once again Bishop
Stubbs' translation of the letter of a Canterbury monk describing his
passage of the pass in February 1188:--
"Pardon me for not writing. I have been on the Mount of Jove;
on the one hand looking up to the heavens of the mountains, on
the other shuddering at the hell of the valleys, feeling myself
so much nearer heaven that I was more sure that my prayer would
be heard. 'Lord,' I said, 'restore me to my brethren, that I
may tell them, that they come not into this place of torment.'
Place of torment indeed, where the marble pavement of the stony
ground is ice alone, and you cannot set your foot safely;
where, strange to say, although it is so slippery that you
cannot stand, the death (into which there is every facility for
a fall) is certain death. I put my hand in my scrip, that I
might scratch out a syllable or two to your sincerity--lo, I
found my ink-bottle filled with a dry mass of ice; my fingers
too refused to write; my beard was stiff with frost, and my
breath congealed into a long icicle. I could not write the news
I wished."
[Illustration: 64. PONTE BROLLA. Over the Maggia, near its junction with
the Melezza, looking up the Val Centavalli.]
Mr. Coolidge, in that store of Alpine learning, his book entitled _Swiss
Travel and Swiss Guide-Books_, reminds us that the first known
guide-book was written for the crowd of pilgrims crossing this same
pass, by no less unlikely a person than the Abbot of Thingoer in Iceland,
about 1154. There was a building on the pass before the year 812. A
century later the Little St. Bernard was similarly provided. The Simplon
was thus equipped before 1235, the St. Gotthard before 1331, and the
Grimsel before 1479. Modern Swiss travellers may not be aware of these
facts in detail, but it is impossible for any intelligent man to
frequent the Alps and not become conscious of the antiquity of the
relation between man and the mountains.
Sometimes traces of visibly ancient ways are encountered, as on the
Albrun pass, for instance, or the Monte Moro. The sight of such a
fragment of old paved way instantly carries the mind back into the past,
and animates the route as with a ghostly procession. Thus, too, I found
it in Bolivia and Chile, where remnants of the old paved Inca road, that
traversed a large part of the continent from north to south, are often
to be met with. The sentimental value of such relics is incalculable.
They, as it were, hypnotise the mind and induce a mood in which we see
the nature that surrounds us in a new way. They remove from the
traveller the sense of isolation, and form a link between him and the
countless generations that have gone before. He shares with them the
toil of the way, and looks abroad on the scenes that they beheld.
Still more interesting and rich in a historic sense are the Brenner
and other passes over the Eastern Alps, which are known to have been
important trade-routes in the age of bronze. Over them successive
immigrant waves of humanity poured into Italy. Over them at a later date
passed emperors with their armies. No route bears the evidence of its
rich historical associations more visibly than the Brenner. An aura of
antiquity rests upon its villages. Its many castles, its ancient
churches, its noble village streets, its countless monuments, all tell
the same tale. I never can cross the Brenner without having Albrecht
Duerer by my side, who four times made the transit, sketch-book in hand,
and whose careful and beautiful drawings of some of the views still
exist in perfect preservation.
[Illustration: 65. IN THE VAL D'AOSTA.]
The presence of man, not as a traveller through the Alps, but as a
long-settled resident there, deriving his subsistence from the soil, is
an important scenic factor in yet another respect. The difference in
aspect between a well-peopled mountain region and one sparsely or not at
all inhabited is more striking to the eye than the inexperienced might
be prepared to expect. The amount of landscape modelling that one man
can effect in a lifetime is small, but a community of men, working
generation after generation for many centuries, can effect much.
The trained eye can perceive the effect almost everywhere in the
Alps; the untrained must learn to look for it. Take, for example, such a
well-known large grassy area as the slope descending from the Matterhorn
to the Zermatt valley, between the Gorner glacier on one side and the
Zmutt glacier on the other. If man had not laboured for centuries on
that slope, it would be ragged with fallen and protruding stones. The
grass upon it would be rough and uneven, or entirely replaced by stunted
rhododendron, juniper, or the like bushes. Now it is all smoothed and
tended. The loose stones are gathered into walls, bordering the
mule-paths or supporting the lower edges of the fields. Earth has been
carried on to bare patches. Little hay-huts and other farm-buildings are
planted about on suitably protected places. The grass is mown to a
velvety fineness of texture. Irrigation channels are led in all suitable
directions, and the glacier dust deposited along their beds has raised
long grassy mounds, which in process of time have sometimes grown to a
height of two or three feet. More important still, in smoothing off
asperities and giving a rounded curvature to the general surface, is the
continual deposit of the same dust which this artificially distributed
glacier-water lays down all over the meadows. There results a suavity of
outline, a delicacy of modelling, and a fine quality of grassy surface,
which change the aspect of the whole slope, even when beheld from a
great distance, so that it would be impossible to mistake it for a slope
correspondingly situated in any uninhabited or uncultivated mountain
region in the world.
[Illustration: 66. IN THE WOODS OF CHAMONIX.]
What is true of the middle pastures is likewise true of the forests.
Virgin hill-forests, such as one may see in the southern part of the
Argentine or Chile, are very different in appearance from an Alpine
wood, whether seen from far or near. Man, as we know only too well, has
not treated mountain-forests wisely, and he is suffering the consequence
to-day. But apart from cases of forest removal and the consequent
changes of scenery thereby caused, the alteration in appearance produced
by good forest management is very noticeable. Alpine woods have a
gardened aspect. The mere sight of them is eloquent of the presence and
activity of man, who here also has left unmistakable traces of his
activity drawn broadly over every Alpine landscape.
In the regulation of streams and rivers, again, the hand of man makes
its long, slowly acting presence felt in the Alps. Gaze from the
Riffelhorn down the St. Niklausthal, and notice how mainly of human
determination are all the minor forms of the valley-floor. It is easy to
compare with a photograph of that well-known view one, say, of the Bush
Valley in British Columbia, which has been revealed to us by the
explorations of Professor Norman Collie and his friends. Such a
comparison manifests, as no words can, the great effect upon valley
scenery on a large scale produced by the activity of man.
It is only high aloft, close to and all above the snow-line, that man's
energies have not availed to change the landscape. He has built a few
huts there, but they are insignificant. He cannot turn a glacier from
its course, nor can he dam it back in the event of its pleasing to
advance. The great cliffs and debris slopes, the reservoirs of snow, the
rivers of ice--these giant phenomena of the heights are beyond his
governance, even if any material advantage tempted him to try meddling
with them. The most he can do is to blast some small tunnel in ice or
rock to control the outflow of a gathering of water, that might
otherwise discharge itself with violence and work destruction far below.
[Illustration: 67. IN A GARDEN AT LOCARNO. Last gleam of the sunset on
the hills above Lago Maggiore.]
It is the great good fortune of the Alps, beyond all other snowy
ranges, to possess both the region of utterly untamed nature above, and
a larger area of humanly modified land below. A normal Alpine view
includes parts of both regions. Looking up from beneath, you have the
gardened world for foreground and the wild world for distance. Looking
down from above the reverse is the case. The contrast is always
charming. What more beautiful setting for a snow mountain can be
conceived than that which surrounds the Jungfrau as beheld from near
Interlaken? How pleasant it is, when resting at some fine noontide hour
on the summit of a lofty peak, to look abroad over the peopled Italian
plain, or down into some deep valley, dotted with farms and villages,
with here and there a white church standing in the midst of chalets. It
is only the works of modern man, his huge caravanserais, his railway
stations, and his accurately engineered roads, that are wholly
hateful--blots on the landscape defiling and degrading it. Let us hope
that these hideous intruders are not destined to a long existence. It is
not likely, much though we may desire it, that in our time the tide of
touristdom will abandon the Alps. It has come to stay. It will increase
rather than diminish. But with the advance of civilisation perhaps its
manners and tastes will improve, and it may, at some far distant time,
come to demand a kind of housing that will not utterly destroy the very
beauty which it blindly travels to seek.