Some Alpine Variations
By G. Winthrop Young.
(Read before The Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club, November 8th, 1907.)
It used to be, and probably still is, the custom for every eminent preacher in Eton College Chapel to preface his sermon to the boys, and incidentally to earn their abiding contempt, by an eulogium on the glory of their school and the greatness of the ‘traditions which their small persons embodied.
I remember a famous headmaster creating a wholesome impression of relief by treating the point somewhat differently:- “You think a lot of yourselves, you Eton boys but, after all, what are you? Just comfortable little animals! You eat, and you play, and you curl yourselves up to sleep!” I am aware that I should, by all precedent, begin by expressing my sense of the honour you have undoubtedly done me, and by dilating upon the unique principles which your Club embodies, and which you are peculiarly successful in putting in practise. I ought to bring a blush to your cheek by the blatancy with which I uncover virtues you thought known only to yourselves, and almost force one to my own at the parade with which I pretend a bashfulness which I do not feel. But I will do neither. For, after all, what are we mountaineers? Just comfortable animals! We climb, and we eat, and – forgive the necessary change of pronoun – you curl yourselves up – in potholes.
Now I do not intend to follow you into the murky depths of’ your admiration. If ever I find myself in one of those Gehennas in which the Yorkshire heart is supposed to delight, I invariably follow Virgil’s precedent, who, as you are doubtless aware, was the originator of the art. “Now Virgilius” says the Chronicler, “was at school at Tolentum, where he stodied dyligently, for he was of greate understandynge. Upon a tyme the scholars hadde lycense to goo to play and sporte them in the fyldes, after the usaunce of the holde tyme, and there was also Virgilius thereby, walkynge amonge the hylles all about. It fortuned he spyed a great hole in the syde of a greate hylle, wherein he went so depe that he culd see no more lyght. And then he went a lyttell ferther therein, and then he saw some lyght agayne, – and then he wente fourth strayghte.”
I am like Virgil. I no sooner find myself in a pot-hole, than I look for the quickest method of taking my pot-hook.
But I do not believe we can satisfactorily compare one branch of our common sport with another. We only mislead if we attempt to interpret the spirit of mountaineering interest which inspires us all by means of the details or description of the particular type of climbing in which each of us fancies that he can best find that spirit. If I suggest that there is more of the truth of mountaineering to be found on the iced walls of the Alps than on the sooty pinnacles of my old College roof, many former friends will pronounce me an “Ultramontane,” or a “Megalomaniac,” and suspect me of unpatriotic leanings towards the German Emperor. If I maintain, as I should like to, that I find in the slow lines and nameless tints of our British hills, where our inconsistent sun runs races with the shadows along the rain-dewed slopes and angrily sweeps its sleepy purple lights across the cliffs that intervene to check it, a beauty and an inspiration greater than in all the startling splendours of the glacier world, some exquisite alpinist is certain to retort with cries of “little Englander,” “greasy-poler,” or even “pro-Boer,” or “pro-Motor.” As a fact we feel that we cannot compare rock with range or glacier with cavern. The spirit of mountaineering is apart from and above all special local incarnations, and, at the same time, those who know it can find its presence equally manifest in all; it calls to us as clearly from Ingleborough as from the Jungfrau, from a ” hole” as from a haystack.
This is what makes it hopeless for us by our narratives to explain the nature of our enthusiasm to the non-climbing world. We cannot convey to others what the sensation of belief feels like by expounding the doctrines of the particular creed which produces that sensation in us. This debars us from understanding by a sceptically-minded public; but, after all, I am not sure that we are much more successful in rendering true account to one another.
Because I may take it for granted that we all of us here acknowledge a common ground of climbing belief, apart from any question of whether we call ourselves ‘Ramblers’ or ‘Kyndwrs’ or ‘Rocky-Fellers’ or ‘gallant little Welshers’ or ‘Greater Britainers’ or ‘Great Scotters,’ I need not seem provincial in talking of an alpine ascent to British climbers. But I cannot hope to give you any idea of the real facts unless you will, for yourselves, invest the colourless details with the atmosphere of mountaineering exaltation, which at the time transmuted for us their toils and uncertainties into that romantic blend of fairy-story and allegory commonly known as – a good climb. I may say that I have never yet read a true account of an ascent; and I have never, so far as I know, written one. I do not by this mean to shake the faith of our Olympian editors in the accuracy of our Notes and Records. I merely plead guilty to our common and futile effort to supply our inability to reproduce the truth that lay only in our sensations, by the over-accentuation of details of times, and food consumption, and comic incident, which at the moment passed quite unheeded. What delightful things mountaineering records are! Analysis of the ‘times,’ enumeration of the contents of the rucksack, dissection of the views, exaggeration of our ecstasies, a sort of combined pantechnichon, panorama and pandemonium. And the transparent altruism with which we cloak our harmless vanity in our own performances with the pretence of guidance to succeeding climbers! As if the times of rapid X’s climb under blank conditions could be of the slighest service to laggard Y, prospecting the climb under blank, blank conditions! “O Tempora” cries X; “O More-ease!” retorts Y; And the mass of us who care only for X’s pace or Y’s repose just so far as they make good literature or recall the mountain atmosphere to us, drown them both with shouts of – “O Whymper-a!” “O Moor-es!”
Lest, however, my explanation of what I consider real truth in a mountaineering record may render any one suspicious of the ascents I am going to describe, I must insist, that so far as mere accuracy of detail is concerned, I yield to no modern chronicler in the precision with which I can poke grotesque direction through the romance of a rock climb; for example – “Put your right foot on the ledge invisible behind your left shoulder; turn half round so as to grasp the rock between your , knees with your left arm; drag your fourth waistcoat button above the projecting knob; wriggle sharply upward, avoiding the temptation to tread on your right ear ;-and catch the capstone with your back teeth.” I confess to a gentle pleasure in reading such accounts after the ascent, and in discovering that a certain similarity in the human figure has led the author and myself to use or neglect the same two hands and feet with which nature happened to endow us both. But I have not yet succeeded in discovering a climb where my efforts to surmount an obstacle could be conveniently synchronised with the perusal of a large octavo volume of directions. In a rather cynical spirit I once induced a fellow climber to read aloud one such detailed passage while I tackled the specified pitch above his head. My conscientious efforts at observance of the author’s account, combined with precautionary attempts to prevent an involuntary descent on my own, led to such an ingenious nightmare of contortions, that my companion flung away the volume and implored me with agonised accents, as I respected his sanity and his camera, to resolve myself into some semblance of humanity before a chance change of wind or a spontaneous combustion of the Kodak should risk perpetuating its transient horror. No one could assert that either the guide-book or my account of its consequences embodies the whole romance or truth of climbing. I asked for truth; the book gave me ‘times’ and monkey tricks. You ask for truth, and I can’t give you much more.
A verse of Davenant’s is happily prophetic of our mutual difficulty:-
“Those heights which the dwarf life can never reach
Here by the ways of diligence they climb;
Truth, scared with terms from school, they cannot teach
And buy it with their best-saved treasure “time(s).”
If your imaginations will lend the atmosphere of truth to my record, I will attempt to supply at least the diligence and my treasured “times.”
I must claim to-night not to be speaking to the orthodox, or, if I am, it must be in the aspect of an awful moral. I suppose we all find that age and experience lend to our later and respectable ascents a precision and monotony of calculated success, which, while it flatters our own recollections of them, is apt to make their recital very heavy hearing. Under the seal of confession, therefore I am harking back over a few lustres – I will not confess how many – to a time when the Alps were still undiscovered regions of romance to our inexperience, when we dragged in incident literally by the ‘head and heels,’ when every pinnacle was still crowned with the tradition of ‘a stylite’ or of an ‘Early Climbing Father,’ and each piton on an ice wall seemed some sacred nail driven by that athletic Princess of the Glass Mountain. The ancient chestnuts that I shall recall will be all the better for a little roasting at the tire of your better educated criticism.
I will ask you, first, to adumbrate in your mountaineering imaginations one of the best of Scottish climbers, A. M. Mackay, and my then more youthful self lodged at the Concordia hut on the Aletsch Glacier one furious July, devouring ten-franc omelets and pledged to a guideless campaign. I will make no confession of present faith, but merely hint that, as the result of a long and comfortable association we then held, among other heresies, the fixed belief that:-
“The fewer you are, the sooner it’s done;
Two, it is true, are better than one;
Two is company, three is none;
Two can never be two to one.”
The last line of the adage will explain itself to men who have ever climbed with two guides and experienced the ‘out-in-the cold’ atmosphere their combination creates for the lonely amateur. Nevertheless, as we were aiming at the Finsteraarhorn, as a training walk, and had not yet got well together in our seasonal collar, we secured an elderly, crabbed, but effective local guide, as a sort of paid chaperone for our introduction to the Oberland élite.
The ascent, like most guided ascents by ordinary routes, has left few traces on the memory. We left at 2 a.m.: we were back between 9 and 10: and if you remonstrate at our speeding back from the huge expanses of this great peak to the still larger expenses of the small hotel, I will only reply that it is my undertaking to give you the facts, and the duty of your imagination to find in an unbearably hot sun on pitiless snow, in a windswept summit, a possible glissade from the Hugi-Sattel almost to the base, an uncongenial companion and the need of a long rest before the commencing campaign, the true mountaineering reason why 71/2 hours seemed to us as much indulgence as the peak deserved on the day, and why a prolongation of its pleasures seemed as nothing to the delight of lounging on the hot rocks in the centre of that unequalled ice-world, within hail of the dinner bell and within sight of innumerable parties, passing and repassing all the long hours across the dazzling white arena to and from their several conquests.
The night that followed was only remarkable for a new Alpine peril. By some mischance the catch that upheld the only air inlet to our loft slipped in the night, and I awoke in the small hours in all the agonies of suffocation. Fortunately in a final paroxysm my list drove through the window, or the roof, I forget which, and I claim indisputably so to have saved two valuable lives:- although, as Mackay slept sonorously throughout and objected to pay for a new roof, I am doubtful of the exact measure of his gratitude – or value. We shared then a common passion for poetical quotation, and to the absorption involved in a long sunrise competition in this line I can alone attribute the melancholy fact that we found ourselves, with full daylight, cheerfully ascending the south summit of that treacherous peak the Trugberg, in the happy belief that it was our real Mecca, the Mönch. I am surprised to find that the new edition of Ball’s Central Alps refers to the “singular error” of M. Agassiz’ guides in mistaking the Trugberg for the Jungfrau. The Trugberg seems to me to have the inclination, and the power, to take on the semblance of any peak it chooses. I regard its derelict presence in the Oberland as a permanent menace to safe climbing and as irresponsible and colossal an obstruction to fair traffic as a motor-bus with a passion for side-slipping. We were not to be beaten, so we rushed ill-temperedly down, and began the circuit of that interminable white gallery that leads round the north end of the Trugberg to the Mönch and the Ober Mönch-Joch. The season was a singularly hot one and the sun had by now become unendurable. Its glare was multiplied by a white, dense pall of mist that swept the bristles of heat about us, fracted, refracted and re-refracted from the snow below and on either hand, like the circulating brushes of a knife-machine. We reached the Ober Mönch-Joch with the last of our seven cuticles; and definitely started the ascent of the Mönch at an unconventionally late hour. All went well until we reached the long fine edge of snow and ice that leads up to the final snow peak. Here the snow, which was dissolving in the heat like butter on an oven, proved too insecure to allow us to pass either along its upper knife edge, or, with security, on either steep side. For a while We proceeded on the somewhat original method of each kicking his own steps along opposite sides with the protectionary rope across the ridge between. On such a day we were well aware that every half hour increased the risk of return or descent and, as I am confessing to one or two eccentricities, I will claim credit here for the fact that, when we were almost across, with the summit not much more than half-an-hour distant and with a double disappointment behind us, we turned back. With chastened spirits we faced again the furnace of the unspeakable white corridor round to the Mönch-Joch, and our glow of conscious virtue must be considered to have rather increased our sufferings.
We hit the Bergli hut on the farther side of the Joch, perched on its dizzy rock-spit in the middle of the descending cascades of ice, and paused to debate the serious problem of a descent thence through the ominous ice-fall. The unusual heat had had its effect on the mountains, and the great amphitheatre of the Eiger and Fiescherhorner enclosing us was shaken with an almost continuous roar of avalanches. Some of these had even obliterated the partially visible tracks of earlier parties down the ice-fall below. We seldom had to make a more difficult decision. A night in the hut, foodless and fuelless, offered a cheerless prospect. An attempt to descend direct down the face of the rocks died away in , the long venomous hiss of the snow, which slid from us as we touched it and exposed only bare black slabs.
Finally we pulled ourselves together, and dashed out on the customary traverse into the ice-fall at a positively police-trap speed, trusting to the lateness of the hour, between 3 and 4 p.m., to shorten the range of the avalanche artillery. I doubt I have ever gone faster. We plunged furiously downward with the cautious cumbrousness of sprightly megatheriums. Every dozen steps one or the other of us sank to the waist in the loose refuse of spent avalanches, and on one occasion some precious moments had to be spent in cutting out a refractory leg from its frozen concealment. Once happily out of range we threaded the séracs successfully, and on reaching the Fiescherfirn were rewarded with a melting, smooth and sloping surface of glacier down which we could skate with long swinging strokes of our heavy boots, as lightly as upon ski.
We accomplished the well known passage of the Three Bears – Bergli hut, Bäregg Teahouse and Bear Hotel, in time to get a secluded dinner in a dusky room suited to our suffering complexions; and we borrowed the Boots’ last pair of slippers as our only effort at table-d’-hôte attire.
It is time perhaps to tell you that all this circumambulation had merely been a preliminary to our real object, the traversing of the Jungfrau. The Jungfrau has always had a special romance for me, since it was my father who, with Mr. George, made the first ascent of its north face from the Guggi Glacier, an expedition Mr. A. W. Moore considered “the most interesting in the Alps.” I had been on its summit once at least before, but I was anxious on this occasion to extend the local family geography by getting up on the south-west or Roththal side, usually considered a sound’ rock-climb. So ignorant were we – and now as I am getting to dull facts I must ask you to set the electric fan of your imagination going in order to breathe upon them an atmosphere of truth – so ignorant were we, however, of the local topography or of the situation of the hut, that we actually took the funicular up to Murren, on the wrong side of the Lauterbrunnen valley, in the hope that we might thence be able to get round at a high level to the hut and so save our legs a trifle of ascent. On getting there we, naturally, found ourselves separated by the whole breadth of the valley from our goal. We raised an amateur goatherd as a porter, and bustled down again, consoled in some sort for the late hour and for the rain by the spectacle of successive gorgeous rainbows on the clouds and waterfalls below us. Night however caught us far from the hut and we spent some desperate hours in a drenching quest before chance one of us, about 10 p.m., to collide with an invisible door post. We lit our damp wood with difficulty, and then a further catastrophe unfolded itself: by some error our food supply had got exchanged for a handsome library of Tauchnitz volumes and two wood-carvings, and we were faced by a fast-night as a poor preparation for what we knew we should have to make a fast day. Sadly we prowled round the hut, and were rejoiced to discover on a remote shelf a box of condensed milk tins, left as an advertisement. We dined like hungry men exclusively and thankfully on that yellow, oleaginous and nauseating saccharine.
It was then past midnight, the straw was sparse and moist and we were to start at 3. Breakfast was not a success. Much tribulation at mountain hotels has now accustomed me to consume a lamplight meal of tepid chocolate, breadchunks and cherry jam, to the accompaniment of a black Swiss cigar, with becoming equanimity, but even on that first day the sight of the milk tins aroused a premonition of minatory qualms which have only grown more pronounced with every later glimpse of their oozy surfaces.
We left the porter to batten on the tins, and started with rather hollow exultation up the obvious line of ascent.
So far we had had too much to do, and too little to eat, to attend to the unfavourable weather, and happily there was no ghoul of a guide to remind us of it. A wet wind, with a chill shiver in it, assured us at least of respite from rain, but indicated at the same time a serious prospect of iced rocks to follow above, where we should have to face the results of the night’s frost following upon a tearful day. The first passages on the S.W. ridge went trippingly enough; spits of hard snow and a step or two in ice helped us where the rocks were glazed, and the sight of an occasional fixed rope, bedded six inches deep in ice, advised us that we were on the right and much ill-treated r route. Then the angle steepened and the mountain began to take up the gage in earnest. You all know that thrilling moment when you first realize that you are really getting to grips with your climb and that everything depends upon snatching a confident hold. Our peak wrestled cunningly. The glazed rocks, with a bite of frost whitening their chilly curves and disguising their chinks, drove us steadily off what we felt to be the true line; unwillingly we crossed on a diagonal from furrow to furrow on the steep face, searching for passages where hard snow or deeper ice should give firm basis for the cutting of steps. In such conditions this could be our only course. Slowly but surely we were driven out on to the great couloir or open face, between the West and South West ridges. At one time We Were so far across that had the cheerless West aréte offered us any better prospect we could well have taken refuge on it. The slabs got more precipitous, sloping, glassy and uncomfortable, and more than once as I forced a way up some bulbous curve I found myself trusting, rather more than the Badminton on Mountaineering could approve of, to the friction of my rough gloves frozen by pressure to the polished glaze. I am aware that I ought, conventionally, at this point to do a little scene painting with a dash, of amateur psychology; give you the picture of the vast, frozen precipices plunging from our feet into the cold void of eddying mists; enlarge upon the huge and shapeless towers looming savagely above and around us in the , chilly half-light ; while the first shiver of dawn crept in upon our solitude, rendering our insect-like proportions mid chirpy struggles pathetically ludicrous in the face of those stupendous, colourless spaces and still more tremendous silences. In fact I ought to slap a brushful of Ruskin and George Meredith, with a seasoning of Savage Landor, across the details of the sketch. But I cannot remember that we stopped to remark upon it ourselves, or that it would have made much difference to the climb if we had so shall merely ask you to turn on the limelight, and to supply all the subconscious effects and atmosphere necessary to a truthful presentment of the incidents.
As we got higher the walls closed in on either hand, until at last further progress was reduced to the choice of two formidable-looking chimneys, draped with rough icicles and separated by an ice-coated wrinkle of rock. The left hand seemed to overhang at the top, so I started up the right, with Mackay in sure anchorage at the foot. At first it went well enough; the walls were smooth, but it wall-paper of ice allowed of steps being chipped conveniently for either foot. Some ten feet from the top, where the angle looked to ease off in a broad snowslope crowning the gullies, the ice gave out, and the further passage seemed vaguely precarious for a climber at the wrong end of a 60ft. rope. Mutual confidence, bred of a long climbing companionship, found at last a way over the difficulty. Steadied by the rope from my honest but not opulent standing-place Mackay crossed the glazed proboscis on our left into the second chimney, and ascended steadily until it too went finally out of business in an overhang, some ten feet above and well to the left of my head. Stimulated by the presence of the rope and still more by Mackay’s never-failing composure and cheery confidence, I faced the bald corner again, and getting the axe fixed above me in a crack drew myself up onto it, and clambering gingerly, – and at one point literally ‘with tooth and nail,’ – eventually emerged on the easier ice above. A few steps brought me again on to hard snow, where a comfortable anchorage could be excavated for Mackay’s translation.
The penthouse on which we stood sloped up at a steep angle to the foot of a precipitous rock wall, one which, so far as I remember, unites the West and South West ridges. The sun was now in full and savage action, and was rapidly reducing the snow to the sloppy and slovenly condition in which we had found it on the Mönch. We treated its failings with tender consideration, and on reaching its upper limit investigated the wall for a kindly line of attack. Suddenly far to our right we saw what looked like a cord. We cut carefully towards it and found a rope, coated with ice, depending over the glazed rocks; doubtless the one, which in similar conditions had already been responsible for at least one fatal accident. We traversed back to the left and lighting on a considerate flaw clung up it with no serious difficulty beyond some injury to our knees and elbows. It was one of those familiar problems which a climber may be said “to honour more in the Breech than in the Bootnail.” The , mountain had now got its shoulders very near the mat: the rocks gave surely back as we pushed forward, and working to the right we soon ran up against the last steep snow ridge which terminates happily in the Hochfirn. This was the end of our doubts and difficulties, and of a variation route up the West wall of the peak for which we have, until this day, never claimed the credit of a “New ascent.”
But we were somewhat fatigued, and in that condition suffered the more, as one is apt to do, from the height and the heat. The compartments for food in the digestion and in the rucksack were but inadequately filled by the recollection of the milk and by the Tauchnitz library. I have them still, those four volumes, two of ‘Aylwyn’ and two of Trevelyan’s ‘American Revolution’; light reading, but yet not light enough for the Jungfrau traverse. The wood-carvings were subsequently suitably dedicated to the annihilation of the Jungfrau Railway. Rather heavily we chipped steps up the steep ridge and dragged across the great snow plateau of the Hochfirn to the foot of the final wall. Fifty steps and a halt, fifty steps and a halt; the best method for such occasions but not all that a romantic soul demands of mountaineering. We scaled the wall at its southern end, joined the usual route up the ice-crest that surmounts it, and cut our way with heavy arms and light hearts onto the welcome summit. The measure of our exertions may be gathered from my reply when Mackay asked me to guess the hour. I said 1 o’clock. It was actually only 9-45.
On the first occasion on which I had reached this summit from the south its fancy had treated us to a singular effect. The old local guide who was cutting the steps up the back of the ice-crest stopped, to my disgust, with the final edge still above my head and shutting out all the prospect. I was anxious to get my first sight of the northern valleys and requested him to indulge the harmless whim. With a grim chuckle he struck the wall above my head: the cornice gave with a crash, and, framed in a window of blue ice of almost transparent fineness, the deep green valleys of Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen leapt into view with the suddenness of’ enchantment, their restful colours springing direct from the oval rim of glittering ice, away to the shadowy lakes und the far violet distances of southern Germany. On this occasion, however, the summit was in a more solid humour, and merely gratified us with the_ spectacle of some fanciful processions of rainbow cloud and a few fantastic efforts at the Brocken Spectre. Yet this is the spire which is to be canonised as the junction of the Jungfrau and Aletsch Glacier joint-stock railway line.
The condition of the snow had merited little confidence, so we took time persuasively by the pigtail, which is the next best thing to catching him by the forelock, and struck down the mountain side.
There were no guiding traces, and as a fact we descended too far to the left on to the open face, instead of following the ridge down to the Roththal-Sattel below us on the right; Mackay, however, kicked steps like an ostrich down the still undecided snow-slopes, and seemed to relish the occasional long sequences where the axe came again into play. As we descended over the curve of the dome, and could see the lie of the netherland, my recollection revived, and we worked back towards the right; not far enough however to avoid striking the huge bergschrund, the principal obstacle on this face, considerably to the left of its vulnerable point, which is usually to be found almost on the sattel itself. Fortune had led us, however, to a spot where the great upper lip had broken away, leaving a loose, lofty wall of precipitous but not impossible snow. The schrund far below at its foot looked very narrow, and the snow-slopes beyond it deceitfully near. Snow does not help perspective. I anchored securely and paid out rope, while Mackay made a skilful tunnel down the face of the rickety snow-cliff, and only paused where it looked from above to be practically overhanging. I called to him cheeringly to jump, giving him ample line, but he seemed to hesitate and then, rather to my dismay, proceeded to try and descend still further down the overhanging lip. As was to be expected the snow gave and he started slipping. Our object was to descend, so .there was no gain in checking him, from his point of view, and I had full confidence in his presence of mind. We were neither of us disappointed. When he had reached the last point in his slide at which he could be said to be in actual contact with the wall he shoved back with hands and feet and shooting out into space descended on the soft snow beyond the schrund with the muffled explosion of distant drums. I was startled to see how small he looked. I was soon to know the reason. Cautiously I crawled down his funnel to the slipping point, and then, craning out, realized why he had temporised. The height was horrific. It was like taking observations from a steeple. However, the rope pointed downward, and the snow below looked consolingly frothy. I threw the axe well clear, and dropped into space. For two hours and a half the white world and all my internal economy rushed up and by me, and when a projecting portion of it at last failed to get past and roared into me, it seemed like a deliberate and irritating personal assault. My feet hit the snow and my head caught up my feet almost simultaneously and it is an unquestionable fact that I knocked off my snow spectacles with my own boots. In those early days our dimensions were more telescopically adjustable. We picked up our remnants and marched across the Sattel with exaggerated sobriety, to re-establish our shaken identities.
The easiest line would probably have been found in a direct descent from the pass to the snowfields on our left; , but I preferred to follow my former tracks, and to cross to the further side of a big shoulder that projects at right angles on this side of the Sattel into the Great Aletsch Glacier. The descent of its further wall proved the least pleasant portion of the climb, and, though it is frequently traversed I continue to regard it as the worst bit of the usual ascent. The shoulder, an ice wall, curves over smoothly and steeply, and its covering of snow is very dreamily and lightly attached in all but excellent weather conditions. A gaping system of crevasses immediately below adds to the general depression. The snow held, revoltingly, but it did just hold for us, and moving with elaborate care and cutting steps often right through into the underlying ice, we finally landed on the upper glacier with very conscious relief and a premonition of greyness about the temples. The necessity of responding without over-confidence or impatience to an unexpected or prolonged call upon his skill and caution at the end of a successful day is the hardest of all lessons the climber has to learn. A sudden revulsion usually follows the relaxation of the nervous tension: the muscles seem to move irresponsibly, and the mind, no longer concentrated, riots off into a kind of foolish maze of trifles and often of petty irritations. We were moderately hardened wanderers, but I will admit I now consider that we came down the snow-covered glacier below in a somewhat Balaclava fashion, and that we abandoned the embraces of the rope with unseemly precipitation in our haste to pursue our several steeplechase courses across crevasses and glacier streams down to the creature comforts of the Concordia refuge. The pace and isolation of our approaches prepared apparently the Concordites for the reception of the news of at least two separate catastrophes; but fortunately our .simultaneous arrival left them no time for the perpetration of relief parties.
Seriously we set to work to obliterate the memory of the milk and to take vengeance upon the tribe of Tauchnitz with a concentrated energy worthy of a better cook. And then, in a very different and meditative manner, we set out again into the sunset, and lingered down the glacier towards our promised land of cold baths and cold cream. So far I shall not follow, but propose to drop the curtain of the first Act upon our contemplative and silent progress past the ice-cliffs of the darkening Märjelen See, at the precise, poetic moment when, in Stevenson’s Words, “We sat again and ate and drank, in a place where we could see the sun going down into a great field of wild and houseless mountains.”
And now, if your hardworked imaginations are not weary of straining at my gnats and swallowing them as camels, I am ready to embark on a last variation. The man from Chicago, you may remember, on awakening after his decease, – remarked to his neighbour, – “Who would have thought heaven was so like Chicago!” “Ah” said his neighbour, “but this isn’t heaven.” Those of you who have just woken up in the belief that your haven of silence was near, are in a very similar case; that promised land is still remote; you are journeying at present towards, to put it gently, ‘another clime.’
One of the cherished ambitions of an indiscreet youth had been the invention of a route up that least genial of mountains, the Dent Blanche, from the Zinal Valley. In my forensic efforts to persuade the local guides of the immense advantage to their valley the discovery of such a route would prove, efforts more the result of a long spell of bad and idle weather than any hope of inducing one of them to escort me, I was only too successful. A body of them took advantage of the first week of fine weather following my departure to go and do it without me. With deep indignation, and with A. M. Mackay, I returned the following season vowed to vindicate my claim. The reputation of the Viereselsgrat, over which part of the climb must lead, was, however, too formidable to allow of our more mature discretion attempting it without the insurance policy of a guide. And on investigation we found that the three exploiters were mutually pledged to do it “not at all or all in all.” We were not prepared to fight the Trades Unions on a holiday, so accepting the imposition in the cheerful vein of Albert Smith with his 200 chickens on Mont Blanc, we left the pleasures of moonlight tea-parties, plodded up the long Gorge and assembled our battalions at the Constantia Hut. The splendid semi-circle of giant peaks, extending from the Weisshorn to the Grand Cornier, which dominates the Zinal Valley, went through their usual vespiternal transformation-scene for the benefit of the sunset and ourselves, until the last arc of summer light rested, irridescent and unchanging, along that most perfect of all mountain curves, the sweep of the Col du Grand Cornier. Moonshine however provided a more helpful lantern for the unromantic climber, and at its first glint our cohorts moved out across the glacier with the tramp of the midnight Assyrian. Clambering by the dusky moon is mysterious and indiscriminate, more especially if one of the guides is quite incompetent to proceed without posterior propulsion. We gouged, jammed and bunted up chimneys and loose corners, until we emerged on the pleasant edge of the long N.E. aréte not far above its last plunge to the glacier. The ascent went dangerously smoothly; we met the yellow dawn on a little snow col quite half-way up towards the beginning of the Four-Donkeys’ ridge, where the new portion of our climb would end. It was almost dull.
Then the ridge flattened out into the boilerplate slabs characteristic of all climbs on this peak, and the angle began to puff itself up under bulging ice in an ill-tempered fashion that drove us out again and again on to the face in long and toilsome diagonals of sketchy steps chipped in the glazed grey icing of the crags. The guides on their first ascent had kept well out on this face to our right, but apart from the fact that the icy and unattractive condition of these tremendous precipices rendered the ridge a securer, if a more prickly, path, we were anxious to make the first ascent by the “true” ridge, and so kept calling our cattle home whenever they strayed too far from the narrow way.
There is a well marked point where the Viereselsgrat begins above the junction of the N.E. and E. ridges. It is marked by some huge gendarmes, and by an insolent shrug of the mountain’s great black shoulder. We had to circumvent this corner on the right, and on the traverse took our first halt of the day for breakfast. Some idea of the general angle may be gathered from the fact that at this, the most convenient spot, we balanced in shallow ice steps on the face, while we swallowed jam and sardines with one hand and held on to the rope, carefully fixed round a few small spikes, with the other. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the incompetent guide, who had to be propelled by axes inserted in the angles of his awkward person and so served as a useful safety-valve for the hydraulic energies of the other professionals, we regained the ridge above the difficult shoulder, and started at 8 a.m. only some 7 hours from our commencement, along the deceitfully easy angles of the Viereselsgrat. We were now on a ridge that had already been traversed some 2 or 3 times. Uncertainty and novelty were behind us, and a clear morning summit faced us full in view. We could even see another party celebrating their arrival on the crest by the ordinary route, and we felt confident of reaching their remnants in 4 or 5 hours at most. Man appoints, fate disappoints. The ridge looked demure, arched its spines, ruffled up its cornices, and joined battle with an almost fiendish display of temper and device. Fang after fang and spire beyond spire erected themselves across our narrow ascending edge of rock, polished of visage and at adamant to direct attack. When we tried to turn their flanks to right or left, sheets of impish ice and draperies of green icicles maliciously hid every helpful wrinkle. Between the towers the gaps were spanned by huge tottering cornices that balanced like breaking waves along the edge of the ridges they concealed, and left us the choice of clinging like beetles along their shapely but treacherous convex backs, or even more precariously tunnelling below the impending curves of their deciduous crests. After turning the flank of one grim tower we had, in order to regain the aréte above us, to glide up a wall of disintegrating stucco only held in place by a plaster of ice. The incompetent guide here tugged at my rope and murmuring, with an eye of melancholy pleasure, “Ah, there is one of our dear old fixed ropes,” pointed out the remains of a spongebag string, grinning below the ice in an entirely useless situation. On one crest, perhaps 30 feet in length, we watched for 25 minutes the leading guide progress along under the overhang of the snow cornice by driving his axe in above him, hanging on to it while he could kick a step and burrow an armhold, and then drawing out the axe and suspending himself to it again some 18 inches further on. As the day wore on the patience of the weather began to wear out, and cold spirts of cloud and fitful breaks of snow-flakes made a sombre setting for the already somewhat oppressive conditions of the climb. We considered these fugitive waterworks in bad taste, but had little attention to spare to them, as our whole forces were already seriously engaged. There was no safety in return. It had become a stubborn fight to finish, and on the long hazardous traverses the knowledge that there was little but one’s own skill to rely upon had a very stimulating effect. With every step doggedly contested, memory retains few details of particular passages. One incident however is recorded in a flashlight of sharp sensation. We were traversing with silent ` and delicate caution along the precipitous back of a great hummocky cornice half hidden in mist, cutting steps quite 20 feet below its crest. All of a sudden, with a harsh tremulous sob, as perceptible to the eye as to the ear, the dim wall, looming with a strange sickly whiteness behind, above and before us through the grey enveloping mists went out, like a candle: the vast broken spaces of the mountain yawned into sight below our feet, and consciousness, momentarily suspended, awoke to the roll of thunderous echoes and the confused glare of shattered avalanches dashing in tempestuous precipitance to the glaciers many thousand feet below. It took a perceptible instant to realise that a mass of cornice, quite 100 feet long and in parts 30 feet across, had broken away along the line of our steps. Half my left boot still pointed foolishly into space, and my axe had only been rescued by the clutch of instinct. Mackay, slightly higher on the wall, saved himself by leaping up and out to the right, descending again on the lower broken edge. The rest, in their steps ahead, were already below and clear of the line of cleavage. It is significant of the completeness of our concentration in our task that no word was said, and that we battered on with a sort of resigned determination, in silence. I recollect just murmuring, “This White Fang would be the better of some stopping” as we turned to the next difficulty.
As before, I am counting on your supplying the framework of measureless abysses on either hand, icy spires before, awesome precipices behind, and all the subjective and objective sensationalisms, necessary for the truthful location of the details. The peak had now been long out of sight in the mist, and the snow on the ridges and cornices faded mysteriously, behind and before us, into a veil of dreary grey vapour, producing a nightmare-like sensation of drifting upon air with very heavy feet. Each climbed for himself and, in the obscurity, felt strangely by himself; the telegraphic vibrations of the frozen rope alone kept us in touch.
I know we reached the summit at last, because we got there; but it would be difficult to recall anything of the minutiae of the later climbing. Each moment had its own fascination, but had to yield its full place to the next, and leave no litter of memory behind. To reach the peak had been so long our only conscious notion that its successful realisation awoke then none of the surprise which it does now, as we look back and balance the chances against the conditions. Collectively both were against us, but we overcame them, as one always can in climbing, by attacking them in detail, making one secure step succeed the other, and, one by one, cutting off the minutes of safe passage from the mass of threatening hours ahead.
It was past five when we reached the top. We had spent more than 9 crowded hours on the Viereselsgrat alone; and as we were not of that class of benighted wanderers who seek to win fame as Night Errants by sleeping in snow-wallows, we only took ten minutes for pause and pabulum before hurrying into the descent.
The evening greeted our conquest with a cold cheer of wind. The clouds sank before us into grey turbulent seas surging in the gulfs and spaces of the valleys, and the sun set itself to fight off our inevitable darkness with a luminous splendour of attacking colour impossible to reproduce. Long sword-like rays of tawny, purple and crimson flame seemed to stab the oncoming gloom into islands of angry hesitation. The rising waves of mist flushed passionately at their touch with the rose-light of dying ashes, and for a long moment we each of us saw our own full shadows thrown vividly on the eddying surface and surrounded with coronals of rainbow fire. Then the waning colours melted into an even calm of faint, exquisite lilac shadow; the dim quivering green radiance of the after-glow faded in the last leaden velvet of twilight, and darkness took up the battle which the mountain had all but abandoned.
In the meantime however we had made very rapid and rather contemptuous tracks down the usual ridge, towers, and slopes towards Ferpecle, and we were well off the rocks and on the upper hanging glacier by the time the night had got respectably going. Here we paused to light our lanterns. The guides were sleepy, and the process involved a lot of aimless circulation. If five men on a long rope really set themselves to get entangled the resultant complication can be made to pass human comprehension. The little lamps danced furiously round in the darkness in a sort of mazy, fiendish can-can, to the accompaniment of three separate monotones of patois curses. I was so helpless with laughter that it was sometime before a general disropement could be suggested as a simple solution.
Then the guides took their revenge, for in a conscientious search to find tracks which should facilitate our path down the ice-falls they forced us to plough wearily across interminable snow slopes almost to the summit of the Col d’ Hérens, many heavy uphill miles out of our course, before some traces kindly revealed themselves to our farthing dips. We were all now somewhat languid, and a little of the flow of gushing amiability had dried up in our small-talk. Ponderously we plodded down the infinite glacier. Dimly I seem to remember sinking once to the armpits in a covered crevasse and hearing that musical tinkle of breaking crockery, familiar to most of us, echoing far beneath my boot-soles. I accepted the fact with philosophic apathy until the incompetent guide, now completely incapable and staggering heavily, growled an imputation on the precision of my steps. Then I woke up and spent a happy half hour in icy sarcasms about angels and fools. The glacier path seemed even more eternal than the glaciers. Mind and body were both uneasily asleep to the rythmic beat of our boots. The length of the path and the elusiveness of the hotel were our only thoughts,-or rather nightmares; they clanged like deafening bells in the brain. I believe we occasionally spoke, but thought was so resonant that I sometimes felt unsure whether I was speaking or thinking, and caught myself once or twice finishing a half-thought aloud. But I do not believe Mackay noticed anything singular, and I have no recollection of his making any memorable contributions to the discussion. When we l reached the hotel, the door was, not very surprisingly, locked. One guide tried the handle, but was so overcome with the hopeless disappointment that he sank asleep on the doorstep. Mackay shewed the gallant heroism of a Scot. I can see him still swinging his axe heavily in the moonlight, and battering with sleepy monotony and fearful animus upon its groaning panels. We were most cordially welcomed, and only implored-after all this assault-not to speak too loud and waken the children.
We hauled in the sleeper, and a second guide fell asleep beside him across the table. It was then past 3 a.m. We had been climbing continuously for 26 hours, with only half-an-hour’s halt, and practically all that time in very exacting circumstances for muscles and nerves. Training however, is a triumphant tonic. At 9 the same morning Mackay and I were tramping down the 16 miles to Sion, leaving the guides to their much-needed beauty-sleep. At the fall of the valley, Mackay, with incipient snow blindness and the journey to England before him, caught the post and joined the pleasant memories, while I sat down and steadily ate out the hotel and the village, until the cool of evening and a mule-barrow floated me down to Sion, thence along the valley by railway, and up again on foot to Bel Alp, in darkness and a much , disputed ‘shortest time.’
And so in spite of all my efforts I have had to bring our flight safely to earth again. As you knew all along I should, but as we did not always so dully anticipate. That is what makes it so hopeless to give actuality to the story of an ascent. Half the joy of climbing lies in its uncertainty. Not the uncertainty of ever returning: to climb on such terms would be brainless bravado, such as is only found in certain writers who climb with their pens in our magazines, and whose contributions would be more happily placed among the advertisements. I mean the uncertainty of the explorer or the sportsman: the uncertainty of reaching your goal in the time you ought to, by the way you want to, after the fashion that you should, and with the security that you must.
If we sometimes climb without guides, it is not in order to evade rules or increase risk, but because we had rather lose the game independently and sportingly, compelled to turn back by the time-limit or by our own strict rules, than pull off a dozen inevitable wins, hauled in the train of professionals who know all the tricks of the game and play only for the stakes. If again, when we take guides, we like to launch them at new routes, it is with the same hope of introducing a harmless uncertainty into the result and of taking a larger share in the game ourselves. I am not preaching guideless or brainless climbing. I look upon a climber with a propaganda as a proper goose. I am merely indicating, with due reservations for inexperience, that the better you know the rules and the form of the players the more interesting the finishes you can produce by a little careful handicapping or a discreet choice of ground.
Romance and novelty alone can give us the full release we desire from our spiritual – and financial – depressions. If ever any more of you perpetrate books on climbing, may I suggest to you a title, – “Bolts from the Blues.” We climb for pleasure. We ask of mountaineering, not the license to dance upon a tight rope or to brandish an aneroid barometer, but the setting of a fairy-tale, in which we can feel ourselves the Youngest Prince, with each boot a Seven-leaguer and our old felt hat an Arabian Night-cap.
If the guide, the tripper and the bottle chase Puck and Ariel from our Macadamized Alps, the prince has got to pursue them up the untrodden way, across the remoter ranges or among the ever new mysteries of our own shadowy hills. The wicked Elder Brother, who has our sympathy but not our respect, too often tries to overtake these Fairy experts by foolish short-cuts through difficulties and dangers, before he is master of himself or of our magic art. The True Prince, properly instructed by our god-mother of practise and precaution, can hear their steps as clearly on the ‘brante hylle-side’ as in the strenuous gully, and only asks for the removal of the noisy philistine and the noisome picnic-refuse to let him catch the trailing end of their enchanted ‘rope.’
I will give you my moral in the words of a 16th century traveller, to whom those mountaineering sprites proved most faithful guides among the Mountains of Romance We all are seeking:- “Who is so tender, effeminate and cowardly, whom the heat of the sun, the cold, the snow, the rain, hard seats and stony pillows will not make more courageous and valiant? Who so simple and improvident, whom the wonderful cunning of innkeepers and the great dangers of his ‘life will not stir up to vigilancy, prudence and temperance? . . . . What I pray you is more pleasant, more delectable, and more acceptable to a man than to behold the heighth of hills, – as it were the Atlantes themselves of heaven? . . . . to see the mountains Taurus and Caucasus; . . . . to view the hill Olympus; . . . . to pass over the Alps; . . . . to climb up the Apennine promontory of Italy; from the hill Ida to behold the rising of the sunne before the sunne appears; . . . . to view Pernasse and Helicon? Indeed there is no hill which doth not contane in it some most sweete memory of worthy matters.”