Part 8
I lay long upon the Alp, scanning crag and snow in search of my guide. From the admirable account of the first attempt on the Matterhorn, drawn up by Mr. Hawkins,[10] it may be inferred that the ascent is not likely to be a matter of mere amusement. The account narrates that after climbing for several hours in the face of novel difficulties, my companion thought it wise to halt so as to secure our retreat. I will here state in a few words what occurred after our separation from him. Bennen and I had first a hard scramble up some very steep rocks, our motions giving to those below us the impression that we were urging up bales of goods instead of the simple weight of our own bodies. Turning the corner of the ridge, we had to cross an unpleasant slope of smooth rock, covered by about eighteen inches of snow. In ascending, this place was passed in silence, but in coming down the fear arose that the superficial layer might slip away with us. Bennen seldom warns me, but he did so here emphatically, declaring his own powerlessness to render any help should the footing give way. Having crossed this slope in our ascent, we were fronted by a cliff, against which we rose mainly by aid of the felspar crystals protuberant from its face. Midway up the cliff Bennen asked me to hold on, as he did not feel sure that it was the best route. I accordingly ceased moving, and lay against the rock with legs and arms outstretched. Bennen climbed to the top of the cliff, but returned immediately with a flush of confidence in his eye. ‘I will lead you to the top,’ he said excitedly. Had I been free I should have cried ‘Bravo!’ but in my position I did not care to risk the muscular motion which a hearty bravo would demand.
[10] Chapter III. of this volume.
Aided by the rope, I was at his side in a minute, and we soon learned that his confidence was premature. Difficulties thickened round us; on no other mountain are they so thick, and each of them is attended by possibilities of the most blood-chilling kind. Our mode of motion was this: Bennen advanced while I held on to a rock, prepared for the jerk if he should slip. When he had secured himself, he called out, ‘Ich bin fest, kommen Sie.’ I then worked forward, sometimes halting where he had halted, sometimes passing him until a firm anchorage was gained, when it again became his turn to advance. Thus each of us waited until the other could seize upon something capable of bearing the shock of a falling man. At some places Bennen deemed a little extra assurance necessary; and here he emphasised his statement that he was ‘fest’ by a suitable hyperbole. ‘Ich bin fest wie ein Mauer,--fest wie ein Berg, ich halte Sie gewiss,’ or some such expression.
Looking from Breuil, a series of moderate-sized prominences are seen along the _arête_ of the Matterhorn; but when you are near them, these black eminences rise like tremendous castles in the air, so wild and high as almost to quell all hope of scaling or getting round them. At the base of one of these edifices Bennen paused and looked closely at the grand mass; he wiped his forehead, and turning to me said, ‘Was denken Sie, Herr?’--‘Shall we go on, or shall we return? I will do what you wish.’ ‘I am without a wish, Bennen,’ I replied: ‘where you go I follow, be it up or down.’ He disliked the idea of giving in, and would willingly have thrown the onus of stopping upon me. We attacked the castle, and by a hard effort reached one of its mid ledges, whence we had plenty of room to examine the remainder. We might certainly have continued the ascent beyond this place, but Bennen paused here. To a minute of talk succeeded a minute of silence, during which my guide earnestly scanned the heights. He then turned towards me, and the words seemed to fall from his lips through a resisting medium, as he said, ‘Ich denke die Zeit ist zu kurz’ (I think the time is too short).
By this time each of the neighbouring peaks had unfolded a cloud banner, remaining clear to windward, but having a streamer hooked on to its summit and drawn far out into space by the moist south wind. It was a grand and affecting sight, grand intrinsically, but doubly impressive to feelings already loosened by the awe inseparable from our position. Looked at from Breuil, the mountain shows two summits separated from each other by a possibly impassable cleft. Only the lower one of these could be seen from where we stood. I asked Bennen how high he supposed it to be above the point where we then stood; he estimated its height at 400 feet, I at 500 feet. Probably both of us were under the mark; however, I state the fact as it occurred. The object of my present visit to Breuil was to finish the piece of work thus abruptly broken off, and so I awaited Bennen’s return with anxious interest.
At dusk I saw him striding down the Alp, and went out to meet him. I sought to gather his opinion from his eye before he spoke, but could make nothing out. It was perfectly firm, but might mean either pro or con. ‘Herr,’ he said at length, in a tone of unusual emphasis, ‘I have examined the mountain carefully, and find it more difficult and dangerous than I had imagined. There is no place upon it where we could well pass the night. We might do so on yonder col upon the snow, but there we should be almost frozen to death, and totally unfit for the work of the next day. On the rocks there is no ledge or cranny which could give us proper harbourage; and starting from Breuil it is certainly impossible to reach the summit in a single day.’ I was entirely taken back by this report. Bennen was evidently dead against any attempt upon the mountain. ‘We can, at all events, reach the lower of the two summits,’ I remarked. ‘Even that is difficult,’ he replied; ‘but when you have reached it, what then? The peak has neither name nor fame.’ I was silent; slightly irascible, perhaps; but it was against my habit to utter a word of remonstrance or persuasion. Bennen made his report with his eyes open. He knew me well, and I think mutual trust has rarely been more strongly developed between guide and traveller than between him and me. I knew that I had but to give the word and he would face the mountain with me next day, but it would have been inexcusable in me to deal thus with him. So I stroked my beard, and, like Lelia in the ‘Princess,’ when
Upon the sward She tapt her tiny silken-sandal’d foot,
I crushed the grass with my hobnails, seeking thus a safety-valve for my disappointment.
My sleep was unsatisfying that night, and on the following morning I felt a void within. The hope of finishing my work creditably had been suddenly dislodged, and, for a time, vacuity took its place. It was like the removal of a pleasant drug or the breaking down of a religious faith. I hardly knew what to do with myself. One thing was certain--the Italian valleys had no tonic strong enough to set me right; the mountains alone could restore what I had lost. Over the Joch then once more! We packed up and bade farewell to the host and waiter. Both men seemed smitten with a sudden languor, and could hardly respond to my adieus. They had expected us to be their guests for some time, and were evidently disgusted at our want of pluck. ‘Mais, monsieur, il faut faire la pénitence pour une nuit.’ Veils of the silkiest cloud began to draw themselves round the mountain, and to stretch in long gauzy filaments through the air, where they finally curdled up to common cloud, and lost the grace and beauty of their infancy. Had they condensed to thunder I should have been better satisfied; but it was some consolation to see them thicken so as to hide the mountain, and quench the longing with which I should have viewed its unclouded head. The thought of spending some days chamois-hunting occurred to me. Bennen seized the idea with delight, promising me an excellent gun. We crossed the summit, descended to Zermatt, paused there to refresh ourselves, and went forward to St. Nicholas, where we spent the night.
XI.
_OVER THE MORO._
I had only seen one half of Monte Rosa; and from the Italian side the aspect of the mountain was unknown to me. I had been upon the Monte Moro three years ago, but looked from it merely into an infinite sea of haze. To complete my knowledge of the mountain it was necessary to go to Macugnaga, and over the Moro I accordingly resolved to go. But resolution had as yet taken no deep root, and on reaching Saas I was beset by the desire to cross the Alphubel. Bennen called me at three; but over the pass grey clouds were hanging, and, determined not to mar this fine excursion by choosing an imperfect day, I then gave it up. At seven o’clock, however, all trace of cloud had disappeared; it had been merely a local gathering of no importance, which the first sunbeams resolved into transparency. It was now, however, too late to think of the Alphubel, so I reverted to my original design, and at 9 A.M. started up the valley towards Mattmark. A party of friends in advance contributed strongly to draw me on in this direction.
Onward then we went through the soft green meadows, with the river sounding to our right. The sun showered gold upon the pines, and brought richly out the colouring of the rocks. The blue wood-smoke ascended from the hamlets, and the companionable grasshopper sang and chirruped right and left. High up the sides of the mountains the rocks were planed down to tablets by the ancient glaciers. The valley narrowed, and we skirted a pile of moraine-like matter, which was roped compactly together by the roots of the pines. Huge blocks here choke the channel of the river, and raise its murmurs to a roar. We emerge from shade into sunshine, and observe the smoke of a distant cataract jetting from the side of the mountain. Crags and boulders are here heaped in confusion upon the hill-side, and among them the hardy trees find a lodgment, asking no nutriment from the stones--asking only a pedestal on which they may plant their trunks and lift their branches into the nourishing air. Then comes the cataract itself, plunging in rhythmic gushes down the shining rocks.
The valley again opens, and finds room for a little hamlet--dingy hovels, with a white little church in the midst of them; patches of green meadow and yellow rye, with the gleam of the river here and there. The moon hangs over the Mischabelhörner, turning a face which ever waxes paler towards the sun. The valley in the distance seems shut in by the Allalein glacier, which is approached amid the waterworn boulders strewn by the river in its hours of turbulence. The rounded rocks are now beautified with lichens, and scattered trees glimmer among the heaps. Nature heals herself. She feeds the glacier and planes the mountains down. She fuses the glacier and exposes the dead rocks. But instantly her energies are exerted to neutralise the desolation, clothing the crags with beauty, and sending the wandering wind in melody through the branches of the pines.
At the Mattmark hotel, which stands at the foot of the Monte Moro, I was joined by a gentleman who had just liberated himself from an unpleasant guide. Bennen halted on the way to adjust his knapsack, while my companion and myself went on. We lost sight of my guide, lost the track also, and clambered over crag and snow to the summit, where we waited till Bennen arrived. The mass of Monte Rosa here grandly revealed itself from top to bottom. Dark cliffs and white snows were finely contrasted, and the longer I looked at it, the more noble and impressive did the mountain appear. We were very soon clear of the snow, and went straight down the declivity towards Macugnaga.
We put up at the Monte Moro, where a party of friends greeted me with a vociferous welcome. This was my first visit to Macugnaga, and, save as a caldron for the generation of fogs, I knew scarcely anything about it. But there were no fogs there at the time to which I refer, and the place wore quite a charmed aspect. I walked out alone in the evening, up through the meadow towards the base of Monte Rosa, and on no other occasion have I seen peace, beauty, and grandeur so harmoniously blended. Earth and air were exquisite, and I returned to the hotel brimful of content.
Monte Rosa with her peaks and spurs builds here a noble amphitheatre. From the heart of the mountain creeps the Macugnaga glacier. To the right a precipitous barrier extends to the Cima di Jazzi, and between the latter and Monte Rosa this barrier is scarred by two couloirs, one of which, or the cliff beside it, has the reputation of forming the old pass of the Weissthor. It had long been uncertain whether this so-called ‘Alter Pass’ had ever been used as such, and many superior mountaineers deemed it from inspection to be impracticable. All doubt on this point was removed this year; for Mr. Tuckett, led by Bennen, had crossed the barrier by the couloir most distant from Monte Rosa, and consequently nearest to the Cima di Jazzi. As I stood in front of the hotel in the afternoon, I said to Bennen that I should like to try the pass on the following day; in ten minutes afterwards the plan of our expedition was arranged. We were to start before the dawn, and, to leave Bennen’s hands free, a muscular young fellow named Andermatten was engaged to carry our provisions. It was also proposed to vary the proceedings by assailing the ridge by the couloir nearest to Monte Rosa.
XII.
_THE OLD WEISSTHOR._
I was called by my host at a quarter before three. The firmament of Monte Rosa was almost as black as the rocks beneath it, while above in the darkness trembled the stars. At 4 A.M. we quitted the hotel. We wound along the meadows, by the slumbering houses, and the unslumbering river. The eastern heaven soon brightened, and we could look direct through the gloom of the valley at the opening of the dawn. We threaded our way amid the boulders which the torrent had scattered over the plain, and among which groups of stately pines now find anchorage. Some of the trees had exerted all their force in a vertical direction, and rose straight, tall, and mastlike, without lateral branches. We reached a great moraine, grey with years, and clothed with magnificent pines; our way lay up it, and from the top we dropped into a little dell of magical beauty. Deep hidden by the glacier-built ridges, guarded by noble trees, soft and green at the bottom, and tufted round with bilberry bushes, through which peeped here and there the lichen-covered crags, I have rarely seen a spot in which I should so like to dream away a day. Before I entered it, Monte Rosa was still in shadow, but on my emergence I noticed that her precipices were all aglow. The purple colouring of the mountains observed on looking down the valley was indescribable; out of Italy I have never seen anything like it. Oxygen and nitrogen could not produce the effect; some effluence from the earth, some foreign constituent of the atmosphere, developed in those deep valleys by the southern sun, must sift the solar beams, weaken the rays of medium refrangibility, and blend the red and violet of the spectrum to that incomparable hue. The air indeed is filled with floating matters which vary from day to day, and it is mainly to such extraneous substances that the chromatic splendours of our atmosphere are to be ascribed. The air south of the Alps is in this respect different from that on the north, but a modicum even of arsenic might be respired with satisfaction, if warmed by the bloom which suffused the air of Italy this glorious dawn.
The ancient moraines of the Macugnaga glacier rank among the finest that I have seen; long, high ridges tapering from base to edge, hoary with age, but beautified by the shrubs and blossoms of to-day. We crossed the ice and them. At the foot of the old Weissthor lay couched a small glacier, which had landed a multitude of boulders on the slope below it; and amid these we were soon threading our way. We crossed the little glacier, which at one place strove to be disagreeable, and here I learned from the deportment of his axe the kind of work to which our porter had been previously accustomed. Half a dozen strokes shook the head of the implement from its handle. We reached the rocks to the right of the couloir and climbed them for some distance. At the base the ice was cut by profound fissures, which extended quite across, and rendered a direct advance up the gulley impossible; but higher up we dropped down upon the snow.
Close to the rocks it was scarred by a furrow six or eight feet deep, and about twelve in width, evidently the track of avalanches, or of rocks let loose from the heights. Into this we descended. The bottom was firm, and roughened by stones which found a lodgment there. It seemed that we had here a very suitable roadway to the top. But a sudden crash was heard aloft. I looked upward, and right over the snow-brow which closed the view perceived a large brown boulder in the air, while a roar of unseen stones showed that the visible projectile was merely the first shot of a general cannonade. They appeared--pouring straight down upon us--the sides of the furrow preventing them from squandering their force in any other direction. ‘Schnell!’ shouted the man behind me, and there is a ring in the word, when sharply uttered in the Alps, that almost lifts a man off his feet. I sprang forward, but, urged by a sterner impulse, the man behind sprung right on to me. We cleared the furrow exactly as the first stone flew by, and once in safety we could calmly admire the energy with which the rattling boulders sped along.
Our way now lay up the couloir; the snow was steep, but knobbly, and hence but few steps were required to give the boots a hold. We crossed and recrossed obliquely, like a horse drawing a laden cart up hill. At times we paused and examined the heights. The view ended in the snow-fields above, but near the summit suddenly rose a high ice-wall. If we persisted in the couloir, this barrier would have to be surmounted, and the possibility of scaling it was very questionable. Our attention therefore was turned to the rocks at our right, and the thought of assailing them was several times mooted and discussed. They at length seduced us, and we resolved to abandon the snow. To reach the rocks, however, we had to recross the avalanche channel, which was here very deep. Bennen hewed a gap at the top of its flanking wall, and, stooping over, scooped steps out of its vertical face. He then made a deep hole, in which he anchored his left arm, let himself thus partly down, and with his right pushed the steps to the bottom. While this was going on small stones were continually flying down the gulley. Bennen reached the floor, and I followed. Our companion was still clinging to the snow-wall, when a horrible clatter was heard overhead. It was another stone avalanche, which there was hardly a hope of escaping. Happily a rock was here firmly stuck in the bed of the gulley, and I chanced to be beside it when the first huge missile appeared. This was the delinquent which had set the others loose. I was directly in the line of fire, but, ducking behind the boulder, I let the projectile shoot over my head. Behind it came a shoal of smaller fry, each of them, however, quite competent to crack a human life. ‘Schnell!’ with its metallic clang, rung from the throat of Bennen; and never before had I seen his axe so promptly and vigorously applied.
While this infernal cannonade was directed upon us we hung upon a slope of snow which had been pressed and polished to ice by the descending stones, and so steep that a single slip would have converted us into an avalanche also. Without steps of some kind we dared not set foot on the slope, and these had to be cut while the stone shower was falling on us. Mere scratches in the ice, however, were all the axe could accomplish, and on these we steadied ourselves with the energy of desperate men. Bennen was first, and I followed him, while the stones flew thick beside and between us. My excellent guide thought of me more than of himself, and once caught upon the handle of his axe, as a cricketer catches a ball upon his bat, a lump which might have finished my climbing. The labour of his axe was here for a time divided between the projectiles and the ice, while at every pause in the volley ‘he cut a step and sprang forward.’ Had the peril been less, it would have been amusing to see our duckings and contortions as we fenced with our swarming foes. A final jump landed us on an embankment out of the direct line of fire, and we thus escaped a danger extremely exciting to us all.
We had next to descend an ice-slope to a place at which the rocks could be invaded. Here Andermatten slipped, shot down the slope, knocked Bennen off his legs, but before the rope had jerked me off mine the guide had stopped his flight. The porter’s hat, however, followed the rushing stones. It was shaken off his head and lost. If discipline for eye, limb, head, and heart be of any value, we had it, and were still likely to have it, here. Our first experience of the rocks was by no means comforting: they were uniformly steep, and, as far as we could judge from a long look upwards, they were likely to continue so. A stiffer bit than ordinary intervened now and then, making us feel how possible it was to be entirely cut off.
We at length reached real difficulty number one. All three of us were huddled together on a narrow ledge, with a smooth and vertical cliff above us. Bennen tried it in various ways, but he was several times forced back to the ledge. At length he managed to hook the fingers of one hand over the top of the cliff, while to aid his grip he tried to fasten his shoes against its face. But the nails scraped freely over the granular surface, and he had for a time to lift himself almost by a single arm. As he did so he had as ugly a place beneath him as a human body could well be suspended over. We were tied to him of course; but the jerk, had his grip failed, would have been terrible. He raised at length his breast to a level with the top, and leaning over it he relieved the strain. Seizing upon something further on, he lifted himself quite to the top; then tightened the rope, while I slowly worked myself over the face of the cliff after him. We were soon side by side, and immediately afterwards Andermatten, with his long unkempt hair, and face white with excitement, hung midway between heaven and earth supported by the rope alone. We hauled him up bodily, and as he stood upon the ledge his limbs quivered beneath him.
We now strained slowly upwards amid the maze of crags, and scaled a second cliff, resembling, though in a modified form, that just described. There was no peace, no rest, no delivery from the anxiety ‘which weighed upon the heart.’ Bennen looked extremely blank, and often cast an eye downward to the couloir we had quitted, muttering aloud, ‘Had we only held on to the snow!’ He had soon reason to emphasise his ejaculation.