Part 6

listening to the wind howling and the clatter of stones and ice falling from the Great Tower upon the roof. Next morning the wind dropped at sunrise, and a warm, cloudless day followed, of that wonderful clearness which foretells the advent of bad weather. One more instance of the unexpected--and in this I have my justification: that day we were in a sense pilgrims, for we set out to discover a route by which men might pass direct from the Ober Steinberg to the Concordia. We started in light, rolling mist, and towards sunrise looked down upon a cloud-sea hiding the deep-cut valley of Lauterbrunnen. Then crossing a world of stones we climbed a steep, short glacier, and over a heap of avalanche-debris reached the lowest rocks of our mountain, the Mittaghorn. Here we had expected difficulty with a steep band of rock, but passed rapidly upwards without check to where the angle eased off. Then came trouble, for the rock became of a loose slaty texture, in places covered with ice. Higher up matters improved, until we reached the foot of a great overhanging wall of red rock, which turned us left along a narrow ledge and round jutting corners, to where a steep ice gully cut through the wall. I was left standing in a vast ice step, from which I could see nothing but the leader’s foot searching now and then for some cranny in the rock. Below me a great ice slope ran down with alarming steepness and then dipped over, beyond which I saw the green valley and our hotel; in the far distance I could see the ripples sparkling on the Lake of Thun, and above the sunlight was playing on a patch of rocks which had come no nearer after two hours’ hard work. On such occasions time passes slowly to those who only stand and wait, and I was right glad when they hoisted me over the rock wall and into the sunlight once more. To our disgust the summit lay still far off to our left, and to attain it we had to follow a narrow ridge of sloppy snow; on the far side of the peak we found crusted snow, to complete our tribulation. Thus we found both good and evil unexpectedly, and like Christian fell ‘from running to going, and from going to clambering upon hands and knees,’ until we wished ourselves trippers once more.

It is, above all, when the climber passes from one valley to another that the unexpected is liable to occur. He then experiences all the pilgrim’s joy of wandering, the uncertainty of the night’s lodging, the pleasure of tracing out the next day’s ascent on the far hillside. He will follow the line of path through the pine wood, and train his powers of observation, learning, moreover, to trust his own eyes in preference to the map. Though he may not see cities, he will see many men, and will find hospitality as unselfish as in the days when all travellers and pilgrims were objects of pity. He travels from place to place with a pilgrim’s desire to find the ideal peak or valley. There are not many that find it; and this failure in the search is due partly to the climber’s own natural restlessness, partly to his intense desire to see if the Happy Valley may not lie just round the corner. He feeds this discontent with his present circumstances, knowing that in so doing he gets the greatest joy. He is in no hurry to find this Happy Valley; nor, if he never find it, will he consider that he has climbed in vain.

IV

Both pilgrim and mountaineer may claim for themselves the virtue of enthusiasm. But if they be humble-minded men they will not deny the possible existence of other and nobler forms of enthusiasm. If this virtue of theirs be not identical with all excellence, it must be capable of definition or analysis in terms other than itself. The pilgrim’s answer is easily given: he goes out to seek recreation, in the fullest sense of the word, to introduce a new element into his life. ‘I go to free myself from the Wheel of Things by a broad and open road.’ Less easy to define is the τέλος of the mountaineer; under no moral compulsion, he endures the pilgrim’s hardships for a less definite end, yet returns year after year in search of discomfort. A writer endeavouring to analyse this enthusiasm has put it down as a mild madness, a drawback to mountain-climbing. It is in great part an enthusiasm for past and future: put the mountaineer among his hills, and he is no sooner in full training than he begins to anticipate with joy his return to civilisation. Place him once more at home, and he will be eager to return to his old haunts, will busy himself in planning for the next year. He climbs, as it seems, against his will.

Yet he sets out willingly in search of recreation, knowing that he will certainly find it through hours of toil. He finds also a very full pleasure, forgetting readily the early start and all the thousand inconveniences which afford copy for the scribbler. The moon in the pine woods, the early dawn in the upper snow, the descent of Mont Blanc towards the sunset are not for valley-dwellers; and to attain these rewards the mountaineer welcomes the opportunity of an enforced self-denial:--

‘Carnis terat Superbiam Potus cibique parcitas.’

He shares also the pilgrim’s joy of solitude and contemplation in the long hours of silence, and the joy of friendly conversation with all manner of men at the close of day. He regards no day, however trying, as wasted which is spent above snow-line, and next day he can take his ease in the valley with a clear conscience. ‘It is pleasant,’ says Leslie Stephen, ‘to lie on one’s back in a bed of rhododendrons, and look up to a mountain-top peering at one from above a bank of cloud; but it is pleasantest when one has qualified oneself for repose by climbing the peak the day before, and becoming familiar with its terrors and its beauties.’ Herein lies a point of resemblance between pilgrim and mountaineer: to feel the need of qualifying for this repose, which loses half its value when it is not the reward of labour.

Finally, the mountaineer will learn two secrets by experience. He will discover the secret of those philosophers that have dominion over the young, that one may argue (on mountains as elsewhere) from any given premise with equally convincing logic to two contrary conclusions. This is the essence of the mountaineer’s freedom of mind; for wherever he may find himself he can advance many reasons for or against every proposal, as conscience-free as the pilgrim himself, calling in prudence to support equally his bold or his lazy wishes; which is a dangerous thing for all climbers, as Mr. Worldly Wiseman knows. He will learn also the secret of a true holiday, which the pilgrim possesses: that this lies, not in the abandonment of everything familiar in search of distraction, but in taking up some fresh and absorbing interest, which will continue from one holiday to another.

PASSES

BY

N. T. HUXLEY (Balliol)

VI. PASSES

There are few people who are not at heart geographers; the passion may be repressed or forgotten, but it is probably ready to reappear, and elderly persons often surprise themselves no less than their youthful companions by the zeal with which they attempt to mould the face of the earth by amateur engineering: it is in early years, however, that the passion inevitably shows itself.

It was the chief delight of a community of cousins, brought together each summer at the sea-side, to spend as much of the day as the day left possible in altering in every conceivable manner, by dams, diversions, or channels, the geography of a wet strip of sand, which the tide in its next advance would restore to its old conformation. Sometimes operations, more ambitious in the durability of their materials, were begun in a stream inland; pools were made, and the stream diverted into a new, or perhaps a long disused, channel. Sometimes, too, a party of us would explore along a stream to its source, which we rarely reached, since even small streams are apt to extend farther than childish zeal will endure, though fired by the ambition of finding a real spring, entrancing to the dwellers among sluggish south-country rivers.

But it was with our first visit to the Alps that the revelation came. Here were streams without number, small enough to follow, during the course of a long picnicking day, up to real authentic springs, which bubbled clear and cold from the ground at our feet. Geography could be made and altered; our dams made pools where none were before, or caused the paths and water-courses of the neighbourhood to exchange their functions, so that the inhabitants of lonely chalets found their water supply miraculously curtailed, and visited the culprits up above with guttural wrath. Watersheds, things hard for the low-lander to comprehend--mere imaginary lines drawn across gently swelling sand-ridges or downs--gained new life when seen as the jagged ridge of the Engelhörner, or the great line of green hills north from the Schwartzhorn to the bastion of Tschingli over Haslithal.

With the magic of water was joined the mystery of the other side. If we followed any of the streams up and up, to the Engelhörner or the Schöniwanghörner, whither should we see the torrents going, when the rain that fell on the mountains streamed down the far side? The quest of the geographer was made concrete; and as water has been the chief power in the making of geography, so it is first to start the quest in a child’s imagination, and the best guide in the knight-errantry of childhood. But the streams that fell from the precipices of the Engelhörner and Wellhorn pointed out a course beyond our ambitions; not yet could we aspire to be climbers, and they still guard their secret, though ready to yield it, now the time has come, to an ambition strengthened with strengthened limbs. Even the grass slopes of the Schöniwanghörner were too high to cross; but the great day came when we started at six, with two mules, to cross the Great Scheidegg, so long a barrier at the head of the valley slung between Wetterhorn and Schwartzhorn, with Grindelwald as our object.

It was a water-following on a great scale; we started with the sound of the Reichenbach falls in our ears, and followed along the line of least resistance, made by the stream. Still before breakfast we passed the Schwartzwald, where the stream was already shorn of so much of its strength that it could be harnessed and made to pass through hollowed half tree-trunks to do the work of a saw-mill. Higher up was the region of bogs and grass slopes, each few hundred yards sending its half-buried tinkling trickle to join the head waters of the river itself. And then, without warning, the path took a final zig, and brought us to the top; and for the first time we saw part of the land of the other waters, with the other glaciers and snow-fields, grass peaks and stony ones, which gave them birth. We saw how the valleys bent round to Thun and Brienz, how the valley of Lauterbrunnen and the peak of the Jungfrau fitted on to a world whose horizon had been suddenly enlarged; looking for those places above all which had gained special interest and familiarity from the pictured slips in our chocolate packets.

That evening, after a hot trudge up from Grindelwald, and a cool descent along the home stream that somehow rested our tired limbs, we returned to Rosenlaui with a new sense of expansion and a vague feeling of the coherence of things, for the dead lines of the map had become actual and living before our eyes. Yet this feeling soon gave place to the disappointing yet somehow thrilling thought, that by enlarging our horizon we had only left ourselves ringed about by a wider circle of other sides, making it still less likely than before that we should ever solve the abiding questions of our childhood.

For four years the Alps remained a memory and a hope, till in 1907 the long horrors of the Certificate Examination were followed by the thrill of the night journey, enjoyed to the full owing to a constitutional inability to sleep, and a drive from Martigny to the upper part of the Val de Bagnes, a shut-in and self-centred valley presided over by the Combin. It was here that Italy became identified with the other side. Here I was first initiated as a climber, and taken up the Ruinette; and for two lazy hours on the top I watched the Italian mountains raise themselves up from the ever-thickening screen of mist with which the Lombard plains seemed to be hiding their secret. A few weeks later came twenty minutes’ actual walking on Italian soil, between the Great St. Bernard and the Col de Fenêtre. Italy lay at our feet, brought near to us by the road winding down visibly to Aosta, and by the first Italian notices of ‘Caccia Riservata,’ as well as by the southward-flowing water.

That day saw, too, the registering of a vow, fulfilled in the next year, to visit the country of the Gran Paradiso and the Grivola. Peaks there and around Mont Blanc fell before our onslaught, and we grew to be hardened climbers; while passes became mere incidents in the journey between one peak and another. But Geography was roused from her hiding-place by a walking tour two years later--part of the regular ‘Tour of Mont Blanc’ from Chamonix to Champex with variations. The Col du Bonhomme was unsatisfactory because, after much display, it failed to turn a watershed at the first attempt, and, after including the Col des Fours, left us still in the Rhone basin, with the Col de la Seigne between us and Italy. Geography was displeased, but her craving after completeness was satisfied by the long drive from Aosta up the Italian side of the Great St. Bernard. Two known regions were linked up, and of the remembered dips and corners of the road seen from the top, each had had its answer. Also I had a sense of triumph in having cheated the powers of the universe by taking several ounces of water in my soaked clothes across the watershed to the Swiss side of the Col de Fenêtre.

The passion still retained its childish power, but in a wider sense. By being children we had been nearly in the position of the first primitive inhabitants of such a country of mountain and valley: to them peaks are haunts of terror and danger, the parents of all the powers of destruction--winds, avalanches, and lightnings--which descend upon them; their situation makes them geographers by profession: at first their eyes are turned down stream, and communication only extends over the main valley and its tributaries, till a more venturesome spirit arises and uses the water as his guide, but now, ascending it, takes the line of least resistance over the passes to the peoples of the neighbouring river-basins; and ancient legends of hill tribes give a prominent place to watersheds, and great heroes are often made to conquer a monster which has been terrorising the valley, and fling him into some great lake at the head of the waters of the next basin. Did he not embody the terror of those frowning walls, and was not his conquest a victory indeed?

Thus the passes gained in importance, while the peaks were afar off and terrible: they were already in use when there filtered through to Herodotus across section after section of trade route the tradition, confused in its long journey, of a town of Pyrene and a river Alpis; when a new wave of inhabitants, scarcely pushing communication between valley and valley themselves, used their mountain hardiness to extract toll from the Roman merchants whose enterprise brought them across the St. Bernard and the Mont Cenis to Vienna and Lugdunum; and each traveller added to their importance and fame, while the local paths were linked up into great highways, joining country to country, and shrine to shrine, making a way for invasions, for pilgrims, or for traders. The pass where Xenophon’s men cried θάλασσα! θάλασσα! possesses a reality and interest of its own, not shared by the almost laughable description of the mythical peaks of Krophi and Mophi in Herodotus. But for us, even as children, there was a difference: the prowess and achievements of our elders made impossible the fear which our ancestors felt even for ‘Helm Crag, Helvellyn, and Butterlip Howe’--the last-named a small wooded eminence about two hundred feet high--yet we lacked the spiritual and bodily pride which the attainer of summits must possess. What climber has not known the moment when this has failed him suddenly, and he has realised the impudence of his presence among the mountain sanctuaries and of his trial of strength face to face with the mountain’s bulk; when he either expiates the crime of his intrusion by a great and tranquillising humility, or struggles, only to find all he sees assume a mask of grinning hatefulness? The attainer of summits follows a way which, even if definite, is none the less new and none the less formidable to each successive user: we children, like them, were pass-goers, enterers of a sanctuary of a different kind, one hallowed by the slow toil of generations, where the mountains could not resent intrusion, since it was the mark of their community of life with the humble folk whom they supported.

Even then we were no longer geographers by profession, still less now, when the Alps are to us no longer a barrier to be forced, but the playground of Europe, whither we in our sophisticated age make trains convey us; and it seems as if the amateur geography of our childhood were a mere survival, to be put away together with other childish things when we grow up to be ‘modern men,’ with the climber’s devotion to peaks, and the true modern appreciation of mountains. Shall we not come to treat passes as highest minima instead of lowest maxima, and so despise them; and will not our new mystical attitude make the partial survival in us of primitive man a bar to the growth of a right spirit?

For your true mountain lover professes himself a mystic: he is one of those that ‘live by places,’ and he waits upon the fruition of those moments in which his senses give him a sudden feeling of fellowship with his surroundings, when

‘A gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery....’

These moments, he will tell you, are an end in themselves, and not pursued for any moral strengthening of our social fibre for fighting the battles of life. Only in isolation from his fellows, from science, and from the interference of intelligence, when he adopts a ‘wise passivity’ of mere sensation, is this sense of fellowship granted him; and among the peaks, under the spell of his rhythmical bodily movements, he and the silent mountains stand face to face, as pure living sensation and lifeless matter, and each finds in the other a mysterious completion.

This is the creed he professes; but how rarely comes one who can practise it or achieve its enjoyment. Nearly all indeed share in some degree this passion for fellowship; nearly all live their lives as much by places as by people. The contrast is put by Wordsworth in one of the poems on the Naming of Places, that called ‘Joanna’s rock’:--

‘Amid the smoke of cities did you pass The time of early youth; and there you learned, From years of quiet industry, to love The living beings by your own fireside With such a strong devotion, that your heart Is slow towards the sympathies of them Who look upon the hills with tenderness, And make dear friendships with the streams and groves.’

They are the extremes: Joanna cannot understand the frame of mind at all; Wordsworth is, in this mood, the perfect example of the life lived in the fellowship of inanimate things.

But to few is the fellowship thus whole-heartedly given. For this it is necessary to be a true æsthete (using the word in an unprejudiced sense), so that in the one indivisible act of seeing, the one great moment, a whole message is revealed. But life refuses to divide itself into such moments; we cannot isolate ourselves either from the continuity of the past or the community of the present. Most men move on a plain of less concentration and greater self-consciousness, where the act of seeing inevitably includes and leads up to reflection and analysis. We still have the animal and the primitive man within us, linking us to the past and the flow of time; and reason, the common gift of all men, keeps always lurking in the background. Yet we still strive after this immediacy of fellowship, but there come times when the snow-peaks and the rocks have fed our appreciation on too strong a draught, when our senses, relying on themselves alone, are over-sated, and there seems a film before our eyes, so that we are no longer ‘alive and drinking up our wonder,’ but the draught stagnates without us and turns to bitterness.

Then we must be humble, and resign our pretensions to an ‘æsthetic geography’ for one on a lower scale; we shall return to the passes, which will remain to us the emblem of a new ‘geography of the spirit’ which, instead of trying to gain all in one tremendous moment, will be content to browse upon the myriad things which intelligence sees displayed. Even as a picture, an arrangement of lines and colours, the pass has much that the higher peaks cannot give us: the deep curve of the summit, slung between its supporting peaks, appeals to us by its grace and weakness; there is a discontinuity of colour and clearness as each bastion of the valley comes out from the curve its forerunner had hidden. But these effects are heightened and brought together by our geography; we imagine the glaciers that separated those bastions from one another; that cup at the end is perhaps the work of some other mighty glacier of the far side, piled up so high that it fell across the watershed and cut its way down; maybe there is a giant moraine, bigger than most of our English mountains, still to bear witness of it.

But it is the stream and the road which hold our imagination; the water tells us of all the powers which we know to be at work, but which our senses are too slow to perceive. Each stream is itself part of the great cycle of water, each is an agent in the mountain cycle, perpetually hurrying the actual fabric of the mountains down to the sea; their voice is never silent even on the summits; they are the lords of the peaks, moulding them slowly to new shapes, and their murmur seems to call the clouds, ‘chased by the hounding winds from distant seas,’ to come and renew their springs for a new course of the never-ending circle.

But the road takes our geography farther afield and peoples our imaginings. We have softened the immediacy of our ‘æsthetic geography’ by the aid of intelligence; the road softens it by bringing in humankind to stand with us facing the gulf between the living and the inanimate. As the water alters our view of the mountains by bringing to light the importance of time, so does the road alter our view of ourselves. As we look up a pass from below, the view of the road appearing and vanishing round the folds of the valley brings to us two pictures of men. Winding away from us up to the skyline goes the pilgrim’s progress, the slow toiling advance upwards to gain the view of things not seen. Many there are, but few together; some on side-tracks; some on the old steep road with its rough stones now overgrown, more on the new smooth driving road which turns about so that they can take their eyes from the goal; some even making a path for themselves, either above on the hillside, steering for some nearer gap on the skyline, which does not cross the main watershed; others below the road, toiling painfully along the stream-bed. And each in turn we see reach the summit and disappear; we cannot see what they see, nor even the expression of their faces as they confront the other side.