CHAPTER VII

TYPES OF ALPINE PEAKS

In a previous chapter reference has been made to the varied types of scenery which belong to different divisions of the Alpine chain, and the briefest kind of characterisation of those varieties was attempted. But the Alps, and indeed almost all the great snow ranges of the world, possess side by side within a single neighbourhood varieties of peaks sufficiently divergent to be capable of grouping and classification. For example, in the Mont Blanc group, there are domes of snow, needle-points of rock, areted pyramids, serrated ridges, peaks twinned together, peaks closely grouped in larger number, and other varieties of mountains. In fact, just as whole districts of mountains possess, each one, an individual character due to their geographical position, their local history of uplift and denudation, the materials of which they are formed, and other such factors, so individual peaks for like reasons possess individual character, and conform more or less evidently to one or another well-marked type. That such is the case will be readily admitted. In common talk, indeed, we are accustomed to attribute fancifully to this mountain masculine ruggedness, to that feminine grace, to another qualities of terror. Some mountains attract to themselves a kind of human affection; others repel; yet others bore, or, on the contrary, interest without charming. In the present chapter, therefore, I intend to discuss the characters of mountains, especially of the great Alpine peaks, from this point of view, considering so far as space permits the characters and dispositions of all sorts and conditions of Alps.

It will be perceived at once that the treatment of our subject will entirely depend on the point of view from which we regard it. Mountains are not beasts and possess no real characters. It is only we who, with our anthropomorphic tendency, endow them with imaginary qualities belonging actually to ourselves and projected forth from us on to the so-called external world. If mountains are primarily thought of as things to be climbed, we shall characterise them as they react upon the climber. If they are regarded as sights to be beheld, we shall characterise them as they affect our sense of vision. A climber may fancifully figure one mountain as friendly though severe, another as hostile, a third as mean, a fourth as recondite, a fifth as deceitful. Climbers, however, though I hope I may number some of them amongst my readers, are not primarily those for whom this book is written. It is aimed more broadly to interest the mountain-lover of whatever age or sex and whatever agility or endurance. I testify here, not so much of what I know, but of what I have seen and found delightful in the seeing, in hopes to revive recollections of pleasure in others and to suggest the possibility of further joys to the mountain traveller.

Pre-eminent, then, to look at, pre-eminent as a mountain vision, one must, I assert, rank the great domes of snow, such as Mont Blanc. The two greatest Alpine mountains assume that form when beheld from characteristic points of view, sufficiently remote, and, of course, it is the apparent form only that here concerns us. A peak may actually be a blade of rock, snow-whitened, and yet may appear to be a dome, as the Lyskamm appears from north and south. It must be ranked amongst domes when so beheld. On these giant masses Nature frequently bestows a measurable pre-eminence, for it is not only in the Alps that they attain loftiest altitudes among their neighbours. Elburz which reigns over the Caucasus is a dome, so is Chimborazo, so likewise Nanga Parbat. But even if they were not actually piled higher than their satellites they would look bigger.

A notable instance of the great dignity of effect of a snow dome beheld amongst more rugged and precipitous peaks--peaks, moreover, much loftier than the dome--was forced upon my notice in the Baltoro region of the Mustagh mountains of Kashmir. The Baltoro glacier, most wonderfully situated of all glaciers in the world, is surrounded by the greatest group of high peaks known to exist. A number of them exceed 25,000 feet in altitude, and several are over 27,000 feet. Moreover, most of these great mountains are of bold outline and precipitous structure. There is no deceit about them. They look their height. Some of them are needle-pointed and buttressed by the narrowest rock ridges, set with needle-pointed teeth. It would be imagined that no mountain forms could be more impressive than theirs, as one after another they come within range of the traveller's vision and grow familiar to him during the long days of his creeping advance along their feet. Impressive indeed they are, splendid beyond words, majestic surpassingly.

It happens, however, that, amongst them all a solitary exception, there stands a single dome of snow, named by me the Golden Throne. I first beheld it somewhat dramatically, when, after climbing to a high elevation by night, the sun rose behind it, and it was revealed in all its width, flanked on either hand by a long line of jagged and aspiring peaks. They were higher than it--most of them considerably higher, yet beyond all question the dome was the most dignified of them all. It owed something of its dignity and distinction, no doubt, to contrast, to the rarity of its form in that region of splintered aiguilles; but that was not alone the cause. The suavity and continuous curvature of its outline, and the grace of it, as well as its greater breadth and apparent relative volume, made the Golden Throne absolutely, as well as by contrast, more dignified than its bolder neighbours. Had it differed from them only in form it would have prevailed, but it differed more noticeably from them in drapery and colour. Whereas they were of naked rock, it was enveloped in a mantle of purest snow, and the broad white mass (especially later when it shone in the advancing daylight) attained a pre-eminence in brightness and purity for which no ruggedness or precipitancy in the others could compensate.

It is a far cry to the Golden Throne, but Mont Blanc is near at hand, and its aspect is familiar to countless people. None will deny that its reputation is pre-eminent among Alps. I claim that that pre-eminence is not solely due to its culminating position in point of size, but that its broad white mass and shining amplitude go a long way towards accounting for it. It would scarcely occur to any one but a climber to depose Mont Blanc from the first place--Mont Blanc, the "monarch of mountains," diademed with snow. As in human architecture the dome is the most dignified and impressive form, so also it is in nature. In Mont Blanc it attains perfection by the noble breadth of its base and adjustment of its buttresses. Whencesoever beheld, from north or south, from far or near, it always appears poised aloft in a dignity as impressive as it is reposeful, the white sheen of its spotless snows pure as the bosom of a summer cloud, but unlike that, gifted with an aspect of adamantine permanence.

Next to Mont Blanc in abiding reputation, the Matterhorn takes rank among Alps by universal consent. We may regard it as the best example of pyramidal mountains. Four-square it stands upon its mighty base, fronting the four cardinal points of the compass, each face divided from its neighbour by a clearly-defined ridge or rock arete. As Mont Blanc the dome, so the Matterhorn in turn displays a form adopted by man for some of his grandest architectural efforts, the pyramids of Egypt. If the dome best expresses the idea of soaring aloft, when seen from without, the pyramid best expresses the idea of eternal repose and endurance without end. Geologists may tell us that even the Matterhorn is a passing phenomenon, that the frosts are daily causing it to disintegrate, and that thousands of tons of rock fall at frequent intervals down its sides. Climbers may describe its near aspect as ruinous, and we may know these statements to be true. None the less the mountain beheld as a whole, from even a moderate distance, seems to belie them. It appears to be from everlasting and to everlasting. It incorporates the ideal of permanence. We conceive it as belonging not to an age but to all time. Were it mathematically four-square, and its faces true planes of even slope, that would be its chief effect, that and the sense of mass and grandeur inseparable from an object of such visibly huge dimensions. But Nature has fashioned it subtly and endowed its faces and ridges with curves most delicate and refined. To its appearance of mass and endurance it adds a grace so exquisite, an uplift so imposing, that these qualities almost take the first place in the impression produced upon the beholder. Seen from the north-east it appears to best advantage. Towards Breuil it shows a more massive front. Its recondite western face, only visible from high snow-fields, displays precipices more appalling and a general aspect of more savage grandeur. But with singular good fortune for the unathletic traveller, it manifests its incomparable grace to perfection towards the easily accessible north-east, and 50,000 people go there annually to worship at its Riffel shrines. They may approach with no more devotional feeling than the average pilgrim manifests at Lourdes, but the fact that they go is homage to the reality of the emotion which many have actually felt in that glorious presence. The poetic brain has exhausted itself in efforts to find comparisons with living creatures whereby to describe it. Best is Ruskin's choice of a rearing horse. Traces of the neck clothed with thunder, of the mane-fringed crest with cloud streamers for hair, even of the sharp contrasting angle of the folded fore-leg, can be traced in the natural composition; but it is rather the might and spirit of the thing--its combination of wildness, force, and grace--that give aptness to this fetch of similitude.

In writing of the Matterhorn one can make an assumption that would be impossible with any other mountain:--that most readers can recall a vision of its form to their minds. Let me make that demand upon the present reader. Observe then how beautifully the double curve of the left hand or Theodule ridge, first convex, then concave, is terminated and contrasted with the sudden jags of the shoulder, and then taken up and continued again convex to the summit. How the right-hand or Stockje ridge, convex above, drops with a larger sweep and a more astounding ultimate steepness, to be again interrupted by a lower and more jagged shoulder, and again continued downward by the magnificent white convex curve, which, in its turn drooping into concave, leads the eye away to the broad foundation. No less essential than the outline to the total effect are the two white _neve_ basins that lie below the faces and steepen upwards to ice-slopes leading to crags that have all the appearance of cliffs. The importance to the composition of the third or middle shoulder--_the_ Shoulder _par excellence_ of climbers--should also be insisted on, but space does not here admit a lengthier analysis. The reader will find no difficulty in pursuing the investigation for himself.

The four-sided pyramid, of which we have chosen the Matterhorn for type, is a rarer form than the three-sided, perhaps the commonest class of fully developed peak. Here again there cannot be a moment's hesitation in the choice of a representative mountain, for of such the Weisshorn is beyond question the finest and most famous in the Alps. What mountain-lover has not beheld it, towering gracefully and superbly aloft before him as he descended the upper reaches of the Rhone valley on some bright August day? Westward it opposes a face of rock and is a less gorgeous object to look upon. But its other two faces with their glacial robe are brilliant under all illuminations. What gives it distinction among the multitude of mountains similarly formed is the grace of its slender and long drawn-out ridges. Each of these sharp aretes, beheld from most points of view, drops very steeply from the spear-tipped summit; then gradually levels off to a shoulder, and so leads the eye down to the massive foundation that supports the whole. Slenderness above, massive strength below--such is the effective contrast that Nature provides.

Another famous peak, the Jungfrau, appears from Interlaken almost as graceful as the Weisshorn; but its beauty is really of another order, and depends far more upon the brilliancy of the curdled surface of the snow, and its division between ice-falls, rocks, and ice-slopes, than upon the outline of the peak itself or the form of its ridges. For pure grace of pyramidal form the Aletschhorn surpasses the Jungfrau, but the better-known peak has advantages of position and of grouping to which we shall presently refer.

Pyramidal peaks lend themselves kindly to embellishment by banners of cloud. Often we behold great sheets of white mist waving away from their ridges. The sharp definition and marble-like permanence of the mountain forms an admirable offset to the softness and inconstancy of the cloud, which is not merely ever varying the form of its outlines, but is throughout in constant and often swift motion under the dominion of a furious gale. The sense of violent agitation high aloft thus impressed upon the eye, well associates itself with an idea of rugged resistance proper to high peaks and splintered ridges. The slenderer the pyramid and the sharper its aretes, so much the better does it serve as flagstaff for a flying cloud.

Best of all, however, for this purpose are the rock aiguilles, which never seem quite complete, never fully manifest the astonishing boldness of their structure, except when they are in turn concealed and revealed by mists that form and fade and form again--now cutting them off from all visible connection with the earth and almost seeming to lift them into the heavens, now half-hiding them and half-revealing, now as it were smoking away from their summits like steam from a volcano, now offering a white background to their rugged mass, now overshrouding and empurpling them with shadows stolen from the wardrobe of Night. They lack the dignity of the broader peaks, these needle rocks, and few of them really deserve (save from a climber's standpoint) to be called peaks at all. Generally they are only buttress pinnacles of greater mountain masses. Yet a tall and well-planted aiguille always possesses marked individuality of its own, which more than compensates for lack of volume and altitude. By its form it attracts the attention of the eye away from large but less wonder-evoking mountains. Thus it makes itself the centre of a view and is remembered when its larger neighbours are forgotten. More than any other kind of peak an aiguille depends for effect upon the character of its foundation and the place where it is planted. The Aiguille du Geant is, perhaps, the most remarkable monolith shaft in the Alps, and has attained no little fame. But its fame is due to the difficulty of scrambling up it. For sheer impressiveness of effect from a distance it cannot enter into serious competition with the Aiguille du Dru. The actual summit-shaft of the Dru is not really remarkable for slenderness. Its sides are not the plumb vertical cliffs that the Geant can show. But the foundations of the Dru carry its lines down, and the supporting masses seem expressly piled together for no other purpose than to lift the slender-seeming peak as far aloft as possible. The Dru, moreover, though actually an appanage of the Verte, is so situated as to be seen alone and admirably set off by glacier or wooded foregrounds from several easily accessible and convenient positions. Instead of standing aloof like the Geant, it peers down into the valley and takes an interest in human affairs. It is there to signal the sunset with its flaming beacon, and to glow like a brand from the furnace in the presence of the dawn. The departing traveller turns back to it for a last look, and the returning votary of the Alps is impatient to pass the corner beyond which he well knows that it will come into view. It is one of a class, the aiguilles of Chamonix, but it possesses a marked individuality of aspect and it transcends all its neighbours and rivals. They may be harder to climb, but it _looks_ as precipitous and inaccessible as any, and, after all, the appearance is the essential element for a lover of the picturesque. There is much more that might be said about aiguilles, their value for contrast with other forms, their essentially subordinate, almost parasitic, character, and so forth, but our space has narrow limits and we must pass on.

We have considered domes and pyramids in special reference to their outline. But they and all sorts of other mountains have faces as well as bounding ridges, and these faces sometimes take the form of tremendous walls. We may therefore devote a moment's attention to mountain walls, or rather to what we may briefly describe as wall-faced mountains. These great walls are not necessarily, nor indeed often, truly precipitous, but the important point about them is that they look precipitous. They are not walls, but the eye is deceived into believing that they are. The Alps are rich in noble examples of this type. To name only the most famous: there are the Italian fronts of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa, the Saas front of the Mischabelhoerner, and the north face of the Jungfrau. If you stand in a suitable position, facing rather than enfilading any of these great walls, their slope seems practically vertical. Climbers know that they can all be climbed; their instructed eyes can even trace the routes without difficulty. In so far as that knowledge interferes with the imposing impression which ordinary persons derive from the mere look of the thing, it is a misfortune. Yet even the climber can sometimes forget his _metier_, and lose himself in pure contemplation of Nature's splendour. It is nowhere easier so to do than in face of these gigantic walls. Pre-eminent amongst them is, of course, the Macugnaga face of Monte Rosa. Not merely does it excel in unbroken width and continuity of plunge, but its striping by buttress and couloir, its impending masses of serac, its huge piles of avalanche ruins below, and the frequency of the falls that take place, whose fresh traces are obvious even when they are not beheld in actual descent, all serve to increase the observer's sense of the actual steepness of the face. First beheld from near at hand, the vast size of the thing overwhelms the beholder, and yet this first impression is small compared with the ultimate sense of size which slowly grows within him as he gazes and learns the meaning of the details. His attention will soon be called to the fact that the whole face is ruled with lines. They seem fine, almost like the meshes of a spider's web, but a brief consideration proves that they are the tracks of falling masses--some of avalanches, others of falling stones. They are not fine lines at all, but deep grooves, perhaps ten feet wide and as deep as the height of a man. Realise that fact, as the climber does (in so doing he in his turn has the advantage), and you at once magnify, and may even overmagnify, the scale of the view.

It is a commonplace to proclaim the exhaustless prodigality of Nature's inventions, which every field of grass sufficiently proves, and yet it always seems to me that these great faces specially exemplify it. How easy, one might imagine, to invent detail for a precipice of ice and rock--but take a blank sheet of paper and try; you will find the task almost hopeless. Then turn to any view of Monte Rosa from Macugnaga and observe how it has been done, and how much, indeed how entirely, the effect of the view depends upon the structure and variety of the wall. The classical point whence the face is seen at its best is the Pizzo Bianco. There is a photograph from it in the eleventh volume of the _Alpine Journal_. Note how essential every detail is to the effect of the whole, and how impossible it would be to invent such a consistent multitude of details. The sky-line is of minor importance; it does not hold the eye. What first attracts it is the great sweeping buttresses that emerge through the snow and carry the attention down by their parallelism. As we look more closely at them we find that they in turn break up into minor groups of parallels, and these again into similar elements; yet with all this general repetition no two details are the same. The aspect of the general structure may be compared to that of a leaf with a number of ribs all obedient to a single law of form. The snow that fills the spaces between the buttresses and overflows them where it can, is no dead covering, but alive like a river. We obtain at first glance, now that we know how to look for it, a sense of its weight and movement. How strange it seems that that movement should not have been observed centuries ago! The flowing of the snow is expressed by all sorts of signs. Here it breaks into cliffs and tumbles; there it pours down in a continuous stream interrupted only by crevasses, which indicate its relative speed at adjacent points; there again, on some small ledge or gentler slope, it lags and piles up. But as a rule it is evidently in haste to get down, and the signs of this haste are a measure of the steepness of the slope. High aloft the plunge seems vertical, and one wonders how any snow can adhere to such uncompromising crags. When the mists are drawn across it, or a bed of clouds lies at its foot, filling the Macugnaga valley as with a white lake, the wall seems yet more cliff-like. It is only when low sunlight strikes it aslant and makes manifest its modelling that a suggestion is given of the actual angle of the slope leading up from the glacier floor below to the giddy crest.

Another kind of mountain front, akin to these yet belonging to a class of its own, is the true rock-face. Such may have their ledges and gullies picked out with snow, or even (as in the case of the Meije) a small glacier caught on a shelf, but snow must not predominate, must not even cover a considerable fraction of their surface. Mountains with rock-faces of this kind are, of course, commonest among the secondary groups. Thus there are many in Canton Glarus and thereabouts, yet more among the Dolomites and in all the limestone districts. The west face of the Weisshorn may perhaps be counted a rock-wall, but, if that is excluded, the Grivola is, I think, the biggest example. The Bluemlisalp and Breithorn, Altels and the Balmhorn, are other examples. If, however, I were to be compelled to select one such peak as type, I should choose Pelmo or Schlern in the Dolomites, and be content, even though some vaster example were quoted against me. For, after all, it is not the actual scale that matters, but the appearance of scale. I have heard it said that the north-east face of the Zinal Rothhorn is the biggest true cliff in the Alps. It may be, but it does not so appear from any ordinary point of view--the Rothhorn, in fact, seeming insignificant from almost everywhere.

These rock fronts must not be looked at from too far away. Unless they subtend a high vertical angle to the vision they produce little effect. But stand beneath them, and what pomp and power they display! You must be near enough to see the details of their structure, and to trace the joints of their masonry, for it is in the recognition of their upbuilding, stone by stone, that their impressiveness consists. That is why a snow-slope drawn down across the edges of their strata is so little to be desired. If by good-luck the successive strata vary somewhat in colour, the cliff will be magnified thereby. To the perception of multiplicity recurrent detail is essential, and that perception involves relative proximity and is helped by familiarity. The oftener you stand beneath such a wall the bigger it appears to grow.

It is not a thing that can be painted, still less photographed; for no painter could set down details enough, and the camera will not select the right ones. It is the horizontal details that we want. If the reader will observe how a high tower or other lofty building impresses its scale upon him, he will find it to be by the joints of its masonry, unless indeed he be standing far off and the tower is seen to rise high above the houses of a town whose size is instinctively perceived. Here again the accomplished climber who has actually scrambled up the sheer face of such a cliff and so measured it against his own slow progress and his accumulated fatigue, has an advantage over any mere spectator. This advantage is increased by the fact that he will recognise and know the size of many details of ledge and pitch which he has actually handled and surmounted. Such personal knowledge is the best of all measuring scales. A traveller who cannot attain it must be content with the lesser insight that can be attained by slow examination. In no case is the full effect to be perceived at once. Nature sometimes, as it were, flings herself upon our imaginations and suddenly overpowers us by her excessive grandeur. At other times she seems to say, "It is nothing"; so as to let superficial persons pass by; but just then perhaps we are in the presence of some superlatively great exhibition of her majesty which it requires experience, time, and attention to discover.

It should remove any tendency to conceit in those who have travelled far and seen much to remember that, however often they may have beheld and delighted in glorious sights, the best-visioned of them and the most sensitive has missed far more than he has seen. What opportunities he must have had, and how relatively few of them has he utilised! At best he has been but like a traveller in a motor-car, whisking across historic lands, and passing here by an abbey, there through some old town, there again over some historic battle-field, and not suspecting their existence, or not knowing enough to thrill with the rich emotions they would excite in a better-informed mind. It is not the eyes that are lacking, but the knowledge and the time to acquire it. You may scurry along below the cliff of Pelmo without a flutter of the heart. But wander half a day beneath it, examine its details, watch the sunlight playing on its ledges, and the shadows in the gullies that cut them, a sense of its grandeur will invade your consciousness, and the memory of that will remain with you till you turn childish with old age and others know that you have lived too long.

Whatever the dignity of these great walls, when suitably beheld, the peaks they belong to, if their summit crests are long and flat, are not comparable for individual beauty of form with the snow domes or the ridged pyramids. They have, however, an importance and perform a function of their own in any large mountain panorama of which they form a part. Before me as I write there chances to lie Donkin's photograph of the view from the New Weissthor, looking down the Gorner glacier. The pyramid of the Matterhorn is on the right; the wall of the Breithorn is in the midst; the curdled snow-face of the Lyskamm is near at hand on the left. It is not by any means a perfect natural composition, yet it does fix the attention, and a moment's thought shows that it does so by the marked contrast between the forms of the Breithorn and the Cervin. Blot either of them out and the character of the view is changed.

I well remember standing, one very clear day, on the summit of a relatively high peak in the icy heart of Spitsbergen and surveying a vast panorama. The peaks in it being all actually small (though not appearing so) and the area of the panorama very large, the multitude of peaks in sight was numerically much greater than in any Alpine panorama, not excluding even that from Mont Blanc. In one direction the mountains happened to be all of one character. Each was similar in form to its neighbour. Some distance further round was another group formed of peaks as various as are the Alps. It was at once obvious how much the variety added to the picturesqueness. The same lesson can be learnt from the top of Monte Viso. Look southward and you will behold, ridge behind similar ridge, a remarkable uniformity. Face northward and round to the east, the effect is one of infinite variety. Such variety, contrast of walled peak with pyramid, of pyramid with dome, here thronged together, there sundered by some wide stretch of lower elevation, entertains and stimulates the observer's mind.

Sometimes the repetition of a form with only slight change has the value of emphasis, or, as in the case of minor ridges dividing couloirs or side glaciers, it binds the composition together and forms a kind of warp and woof for Nature's detailed embroidery. The value of repetition is instinctively felt by most in the case of a pair of peaks, standing side by side and visibly linked together by some high connecting ridge, or apparently linked by what seems to be a ridge but is really produced by foreshortening. They are frequently named "the Twins." A notable instance of such a pair is the Dom and Taeschhorn. Stand anywhere commanding a view down the Zermatt valley, where you can see this pair of peaks defining it on the right, and the Weisshorn's delicate and single pyramid opposed to them on the left, and you will at once recognise how much the great pair and the single peak gain by contrast with one another. Or climb (I should now say take the train) to the Gorner Grat and look abroad to the south. How much less effective would be the panorama if the two long walls of the Breithorn and Lyskamm had a third similar wall between them instead of the coupled domes named Castor and Pollux.

It would be easy to continue this fanciful classification of Alps and discussion of types for another fifty pages, but it would serve no useful purpose. Long before this the reader has probably been objecting that it is an unscientific and incomplete classification, and that most peaks could be made to enter all the categories if regarded from suitable standpoints. Such, in fact, may be the case. My object in thus writing has merely been to suggest cross-routes and byways for the memories, fancies, and future observations of my readers. The mountains for us who love them are the playthings of our fancy. We may do with them what we please. They excite in us the sense of beauty, and we try to tell of the emotions we have felt in their presence. Those emotions quickened by them, how we know not, in fact arise in us. We are free to make of them what we please, to give them any kind of play. They are then bound by no scientific laws. A mountain may be a chunk of granite heaved up by I know not what play of forces and carved out by a perfectly orderly denudation; but to me, if I please, it is a Maiden, an Ogre, a Golden Throne. I can endow it with a character, and reckon up friends and foes to it amongst its neighbours. Or I can call it a fairy palace, and people it with sprites and dancing creatures of gossamer clothed in the dawn. No one can say me nay. Now and again, perhaps, I may whisper my dream to a sympathetic friend--but not often. For the most part we keep such heart-frolics of a happy hour in the inaccessible places of their origin.

Brother climber! we have secrets of our own, you and I--secrets that we never told to one another, even when we stood side by side together on the mountain-top. But there was a thrill within each of us, was there not? and each knew that with the other it was well.