Reviews

Plant Life In Alpine Switzerland.
By E. A. Newell Arber.

(London: John Murray. 355 pp. 7s. 6d.)

Books dealing with the Flora of any range or country have three courses open to them.  They may be strictly botanical, or strictly prattling, or largely horticultural.  That this third course admits a certain amount of both the others I should be the last to deny.  But the danger that lies before the writer will always be that of having too little of one element, without a counterbalancing sufficiency of the other.  From this danger we do not think that this book entirely escapes.  At first sight one has higher expectations than are ultimately realised.  For the author sets out to give an honest and scientific account of the plants and their ways; unfortunately he does not go quite far enough for many people, and perhaps too far for the rest.  His lucid explanations of plant-processes, marriages and generations, are too much up in the air to be of any very practical use or instruction to the absolute outsider, while they give no fresh information to the large number of people who know all this already.  One wants either more scientific explanation, or less.

For the book is far from being (or pretending to be) exhaustive.  Mr. Arber takes a very cursory glance at the plants of the various alpine regions – sub-alpine, alpine, high alpine and paludose – and while he has nothing new for the gardener or scientist who knows these regions and their plants, his account is far too rapid and sketchy to be of any use to the amateur who either wants to know plants or to grow them.  Mr. Arber scuttles perfunctorily through the great races, such as the Saxifrages for instance, making no attempt to deal with them in any detail, nor to give any full account of their characters and circumstances.  Therefore, while one would not give the book as a present to any botanist, one would equally feel that it would be no use to anyone going abroad with a wish to study the alpine Flora on the spot.  This is the more regrettable in that the work is, in itself, so interesting; a very little more and it might have been valuable.  As it stands, it is a pleasant arm-chair volume for someone who has no knowledge of plants and wants to glean a little academic information.  It was rather viciously described to me once as the sort of thing one would give to an old maid going to Switzerland for the first time; I so far dissent from the severity of this view that

I would only give this book to an intelligent old maid for I whom I had an affection.  Otherwise I am afraid that the justice of the criticism stands.

Not that, within its limits, the book does not contain much that one endorses; Mr. Arber deals very sternly with the Edelweiss legend, and his descriptions of the various plant- processes, of the regional developments, the accretion of soils and the methods of pollen-protection adopted by the plants are all both clear and sound.  And, whatever its shortcomings, the book has the signal merit of really wishing to talk sense about the plants and find out what they are driving at.  The author’s limitation of his subject to Swiss territory only, is, of course, against him; the mountain Flora of the world is one gigantic whole, in which territorial distinctions do not exist; one cannot, from Mr. Arber’s high and scientific standpoint – as distinguished from the merely distributive point of view – consider the Flora of one country apart from that of all the other mountain-countries.  One might as well try to appreciate a word in a sentence apart from the sentence to which it belongs.  However Mr. Arber transcends his limits very profitably, if briefly, when he points out, on Prof. Bonnier’s authority, that differences of soil count really for a great deal less than is usually supposed; that is, that a species, such as Edelweiss or Ranunculus glacialis, can easily be a lime-hater in one district, and be found quite happy on limestone in another.  With regard to the Professor’s experiments in acclimatisation one would only add the obvious comment that while you can dwarf a plant’s growth and enlarge its flower by transplanting it to the Alps, it will certainly revert again when you bring it back to the garden.  But you might grow Eritrichium for five centuries in your garden, – if you had the luck and the vitality,  – and never make it bush out into Myosotis Rupicola, or anything like it.

Mr. Arber’s book appears inconveniently bulky, and therefore doubly unsuited to the traveller.  The type is too large for the matter, and the margins needlessly lavish.  But the illustrations are, in themselves, of quite sufficient value to justify the purchase of the volume.  They are not only extremely good first-hand photographs, and extremely well reproduced, but they also, being first-hand, shed light on the habits and situations of the plants.  We could take Mr. Arber, by the way, to a marsh where Trollius grows in sheets among Caltha palustria.  For the rest, the book makes no pretence at style; it is plain, direct and undistinguished in workmanship.  On p.154 Mr. Arber says that “Crocus vernus …. frequently does not wait for the snow to entirely disappear.” This is to do Crocus vernus a grave injustice.  Whatever else it may do, it does not split its infinitives!

R.F.

Summer Flowers Of The High Alps.
By Somerville Hastings. Illustrated from coloured photographs by the Author.

(London: J. M. Dent. pp. 79.)

This, book ought really to be reviewed by a photographer.  The gardener has nothing to say to it, as the plants figured are merely chosen as objects for coloured photography.  Speaking, therefore, from a purely outside point of view, one may most warmly commend the interest of these reproductions from original colour photographs, and hope that the art may soon come within the reach of all enthusiasts.  It has not, however, yet attained any high degree of perfection: by what defect I do not know, these plates have a disappointing mistiness, as if out of focus: and their colouring, perhaps through reproduction, is a trifle sad, and occasionally false, as when the remoter leaves of Rhododendron hirsutum are represented in a tone so violet that one thinks a purple flower is lurking among the stems of the Alpine Rose.  At the same time taking into account the novelty of these processes, and the extreme difficulty of getting good ordinary photographs of the mountain plants in situ, any criticism one passes must be taken as the measure of the interest aroused, and of the hopes one entertains that this may be only the prelude to even more perfect work.

The flowers portrayed are chosen without regard to any order, simply as convenient objects for the camera.  Despite the title of the book, only one of the thirty-nine subjects chosen can fairly be called a plant of the “High” Alps.  This is Gentiana brachyphylla (pl. xxxi.) which also happens, I think, to make the best plate in the book, singularly characteristic and singularly beautiful.  The letterpress is too much of a mere appendage to the plates: these are the raisons d’étre of the hook: the written portion has the appearance of being a not very enthusiastic work of necessity.  It tells one nothing new, nothing very interesting, nothing that is not quite sound as far as it goes.  The would-be collector, though, must not be alarmed by Mr. Hastings’s perpetuation of the myth that the export of plants is officially forbidden in Switzerland.  Hotels and local officials sometimes try to make unauthorised trouble: but there is no law or regulation of any kind to prevent the stubborn from sending home, by parcel post, as many boxes as he chooses.  His directions for culture are very brief and shallow: tending towards the false idea that Mountain Plants as a whole are difficult to grow.  Nor are they by any means averse from manure, judiciously applied.  As a rule, the plants here figured are the least interesting and most ordinary of the Alps: it is hardly fair to accuse Anemone narcissiflora of a preference for limestone, and there could not be said to be any sort of resemblance between Gentiana acaulis and G. Pneumonanthe, – except in so far as they are both Gentians.  The get up of book is excellent: and the nomenclature satisfactory and thorough.

R.F.

The Valley Of Aosta.
By Felice Ferrero.

(London & New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. pp. xv. & 336. 1910.)

Every climber who has crossed the Monte Moro and looked on the ice cliffs of Monte Rosa impending over Val Anzasca remains thereafter a faithful lover of the Italian valleys of the Alps – Val Tournanche, Val Pellina, Val Ferret, Val d’Eyvia and the rest – visions of flashing streams, dark chalets, frescoed churches, beetling crags and chestnut woods, “with the snowfields shining through.” These valleys are all tributaries of their over-lord, the subject of this volume, the great Val d’Aoste, the counterpart on the south side of the Pennine Chain of the Rhone Valley on the north, and of old, one of the great highways of the nations; compared with which, the side valleys, with all their beauty, are merely glens.  All who have looked upon its cornfields and vineyards glimmering under an afternoon sun and shadowed here and there by a ruined castle, will be glad to know more of its history.

M. Ferrero’s book has all the charm of intimacy and he writes of places as one who knows and loves them.  With the aid of a well-designed diagram map, in which the ridges are shewn by black lines, he first deals with the side valleys, pointing out how the torrent in each has deposited a plateau or “river fan” which has been seized upon as the site of a village; and then with the people, from the Salassi or pre-Roman inhabitants, down to the peasants of to-day.  The origin of the Silvier or German speaking inhabitants in the upper parts of some of the side valleys he gives up as a hopeless puzzle, but speaks with familiarity and enthusiasm of the Valdostan priesthood, which he describes as entirely native in its origin and as almost a caste by itself, of the guides, including the great names of Carrel, Maquignaz and Rey, and last, of the poor crétins, those “horrible examples of the miseries that flourish by the side of the divine glory of the great mountains.”

Of the “Four Great Peaks,” he says quaintly: – “Mont Blanc poses, Monte Rosa is gentle and gracious, the Matterhorn seems to embody all the characteristics of a stormy daredevil, whilst the Grand Paradiso is solid and well balanced, quite the business man.” After dealing with the glacier world and the two passes that bear the name of St. Bernard, with their long history of consecrated devotion and endurance, M. Ferrero turns to the history of Aosta and its valley.  In a well known passage Ruskin has said “Those everspringing flowers and everflowing streams have been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour and virtue,” and one of the greatest charms of Val d’Aoste is, after descending through scenes of great natural beauty like the Val Pellina, to find, a Roman city like Aosta with its many remains of imperial greatness.  Aosta “lieth four square,” and, more than Rome or any other Roman city, preserves the remains of the sterner Republican architecture that preceded the extravagances of the Imperial age – witness the arch built to commemorate the triumph of Augustus over the Alpine tribes still standing just outside the city and the Pont d’El, that fairy structure well known to all who have walked up to Cogne, and declared on the evidence of the inscription on its face to have been a private bridge connecting the properties of two friendly land-owners.

The stout Roman buildings served in many instances as castles for the feudal lords who followed and we have the story of their occupation, including the unhappy life history of “The Leper of Aosta.” “Stranger,” said that unfortunate, “when grief and discouragement knock at your door, think of the solitary one of the City of Aosta, you will not have visited him in vain.”

The book concludes with an account of the Saracenic and Hungarian invasions of the Ninth Century, the rule of the Counts of Savoy, now Kings of Italy, and the Glorieuse Ré-entrée of the Vaudois to their home valleys.  The Valdostans, it would seem, have ever been an independent set of people and to outweigh the power of the baronage they received from their Counts a constitution which only flickered out some twenty years before the French Revolution.  Conservative in questions of State and Church, they paid no heed to the reforming zeal of their Waldensian neighbours, drove out Calvin and put up a cross in memory of the deed whilst, on the other hand, refusing to admit either the Jesuits or the Inquisition.  As M. Ferrero puts it “They are members of the Church of Aosta which happens to be a part of the Church of Rome.”

Once a military route – the “Story of the Forts “tells how Napoleon passed the Fort of Bard on his way to Italy  – Val d’Aoste is not now a fortified highway and most of its castles and forts are in ruins, or, like Issogne, only preserved by the loving care of their owners.

It may be added that “Aoste at sa Vallée,” (Turin. 1904), in the “Guides Illustrées Reynaud “series, should also be read by anyone wishing to know something of the valley.  It is well written and full of illustrations and maps.

J. J. B.

Romantic Corsica.
By George Renwick.

(London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1909. 333 pp. 10s. 6d.)

Judged by the rule that a good travel book ought to make the reader eager to pack up at once and visit the place described, this book is very good indeed.

“Corsica” we are told is “a land of green and gold, of far rolling forests of glistening pine and fir and larch, with clusters of oak and eucalyptus trees, olive, orange and lemon groves, with hill sides decked with the vine, dotted here and there with a gem like lake and streaked with silvery rivers.”

“Far and wide the Mediterranean heath spreads itself like a gorgeous carpet; rich mosses weave their vari-coloured, eternal tapestries; while lovely ferns, an endless profusion  of wild berries, a fairyland riot of violets, pinks and crocuses, yellow and purple mesembryanthemum, lavender, myrtle and rosemary, are woven by Nature’s exquisite handiwork into  scenes of inspiring beauty.”

The Author is a cyclist rather than a walker, though he had often to leave or carry his machine, but a walking tour is quite possible, given time.  The heat is in summer very great, and April, May and June are the best months.  There are three zones or climates: (1) up to 1,700 feet the climate of Italy and Spain; (2) 1,700 to 5,000 feet that of Provence; (3) above 5,000 feet that of Scandinavia, and all three can be met with in a day’s walk.  The wet days in the winter season range in number from ten to fourteen, and it is quite a common thing for eight months of the year to pass without a drop of rain falling.

And everywhere is the glorious charm of the maquis, with its hesitant elusive perfume, which makes the air of Corsica something unique in the world.  “It is spread all over the island like a carpet, making the country another Green Isle, another Ireland.  It is a mixture of eight plants – cistus, lentiscus, arbutus, myrtle, heath, rosemary, juniper and wild olive – combining to give Corsica an enchanted atmosphere, to make it the Scented Isle.  ‘With my eyes shut’ said Napoleon at St. Helena ‘I would know Corsica by the perfume.'”  Without it the vegetable soil would soon be washed and burnt away.

Napoleon’s name reminds us that Corsica was his birthplace, and we are told all about his life there; but the Corsican does not love Napoleon – “Did he not leave Corsica? No real Corsican does that – for ever.” Their real heroes are Sampiero and Paoli, and the author weaves their life story and the history of the island generally into his descriptions of the scenery and the various “beauty spots” of the island, if its beauty can be limited to spots – Ajaccio, Sartene, Bonifacio, Corté, Morsiglia, Bastia, Cap Corse, St. Florent and Calvi, all beautiful and all full of historical interest.

Mr. Ouston contributes an interesting article on mountaineering, which, with his recent article in the Alpine Journal, (Vol. 24, p. 645), shews what splendid rock climbing and striking scenery can be found, at any rate in the Cinto group; and the camping out, which is necessary, adds greatly to the charms.  The “Kessels “or gorges are of unrivalled wildness; and the view through the “hole” on Capo Tafonato is described as one of the sights of Europe.  We have space only for one incident.  In order to reach the summit ridge of Capo Tafonato it was necessary “to balance with the right foot only on a small projection of rock; when, by throwing the arms and body sideways to the left, and at the same time quitting the foothold, a good grip could be obtained for the hands, the body and legs swinging sideways without support below.  There was no possibility of return when once the swing was taken nor was it evident that the following arm pull would land one in safety, but after looking at it for twenty minutes we demonstrated that it did and found ourselves in sensational safety on the narrow aréte a few feet broad with appalling drops on either side.” A worthy rival surely to the Hand Traverse on the Pillar Rock.

The book is illustrated with many photographs and a good map.

Notes From A Knapsack.
By George Wherry.

(Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes. 1909. pp. VIII. and 308.)

Like the Scotsman’s haggis, this little work contains a lot of “miscellaneous feeding” and besides some chapters on mountaineering, deals with Stonehenge and other subjects of deeper moment, such as “Why are both legs of equal length?” “Which end of a cow gets up first?” and “Why do people touch wood?”

The author gives us a straightforward and well written account of several seasons spent in the Alps under conditions as familiar as they are delightful.  He evidently has an eye for everything he meets, and spares no “corroborative detail which will give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”  Descriptions of the bouquetins and chamois that lend such an added charm to the Graians, the comforts of the little inn at Dégioz, the vipers of the Arolla Valley, the desolation left by the Altels avalanche – to name only few – help to fill in the picture and shew how climbs even on well known tracks may acquire fresh interest.

Especially do we like his account of the Val Pellina, on whose beauties he lingers with a fondness easily understood by those who know that charming Italian valley.  He spent several days with the curé at Bionaz, for there was not then, nor indeed is there now, any inn ; and tells pleasant anecdotes of the struggles of that enterprising cleric with the apathy and ignorance of his flock, who believe neither in doctors nor priests, and, though idle all the winter months, decline even to take gratuitous lessons in carpentry.  Each labourer, we are told, can support his life on the yield of one cow: some possess fifteen or twenty, and most are proprietors, so that there is little poverty to be found and no misery.  They rarely leave the district and are very artful and clever at bargains, but no one has ever left the valley and gained distinction, they just “hoard and sleep and feed.”

One story told by the curé deserves to become a classic, wandering with his dog after chamois high up on the Za de Zan Glacier, among the highest crevasses, the dog fell into one of them, and its piteous cries were heard far below growing fainter and fainter until all was still.  Sadly he returned home lamenting the loss of his companion.  Some time afterwards, when passing down below the last extremity of the glacier, where the water comes out from under the ice, he saw the dog emerge and, vigorously shaking the snow and water from his coat, run to greet his master.  The author’s innocent query, which all who know that splendid glacier would re-echo, “Are you sure it was the same dog?” was greeted, he says, with shouts of laughter by the rest of the audience, and no wonder!

Graphic accounts of several nasty accidents in the Arolla district emphasize the dangers, often underestimated or forgotten, from falling stones and especially from rocks to which the climber has trusted giving way under him.

There are numerous well executed and illuminating wood cuts.

Recollections Of An Old Mountaineer.
By Walter Larden.

(London: Edward Arnold. pp. xiv. and 320. 14s. net.)

We remember our former Head Master, himself a confirmed “Engadiner,” asking us many years ago – it was about the time that Mr. Larden commences his story – when we intended to begin going to Switzerland.  The question conveyed nothing to us at the time, and it was not till some years later, and then more by accident than design, that we first made what has now become an annual pilgrimage to the mountains.  So Mr. Larden, beginning in 1880 with a journey of health to Waggis, a sufficiently unexciting place one would think, finds himself, thirty years later, able to bring out a stout volume crammed full of interesting experience among the Swiss Alps and to say of some parts of them that what he does not know is not worth knowing.  Nor did he owe this to especially good luck in the companionship either of first rate guides or good amateurs.  His climbs and tours differ in no way from those of the ordinary clubman, and anyone who keeps a diary could furnish a similar narrative.  But not everyone could weave the scattered threads into such a pleasing whole or embroider the web with such an informing margin of obiter dicta; many of them perhaps commonplace or not new, but good advice suffers nothing from repetition, and his hints on climbing technique and health and the morals he draws from such accidents as befell him are eminently practical

Mr. Larden takes all Switzerland for his parish, though, like most climbers, he has his favourite centre, in his case, we need hardly say, Arolla; but of the Alps outside Switzerland and Tirol – to some of us the most attractive part – he says little or nothing.

His note on the old inscriptions on wooden chalets opens out a new and very interesting subject and the photographs, especially those by Mr. Alfred Holmes, are beyond praise.

Mountain Adventures At Home And Abroad.
By George D. Abraham.

(London: Methuen & Co. 1910. pp. x. and 308.)

To many of its disciples Mountaineering is not merely a sport but a cult and its mysteries only to be disclosed to the anxious seeker after truth – to the common herd they would fain cry with the poet : –

Procul O procul este profani !

Others of the craft, however, would seem to look upon it rather as a gospel, to be proclaimed urbi et orbi; in cheerful confidence that those only of their hearers who are rightly qualified will be doers also.  Whether, or how far, this missionary zeal must be held accountable for the recent increase in the numbers of those who climb upon – and sometimes fall from – our home mountains, we will not enquire, But that the author of this volume does not seek for his audience only in club-huts and mountain inns is admitted in the Preface; and his chapters on Swiss climbs, full of energy and descriptive power, will appeal to that large audience who, like a Scotsman we once heard of, would say: “I also have climbed with Whymper – that is to say, I have read his books!”  His accounts of climbs on the Gabelhorn, Schreckhorn and Matterhorn and the Chamonix Aiguilles are all good; but the most interesting, to climbers, is that of the late O. G. Jones’s two climbs on the Dent Blanche, the second of which ended so disastrously.  Still more interesting are his recollections of that great climber, although these, and the chapters dealing with climbs in Lakeland and Wales, might perhaps have been more properly confined to the pages of some Club Journal whose readers could have formed a truer appreciation of the difficulties met with and the skill and daring shewn in overcoming them.  The author’s successful ascents of Slanting Gully on Lliwedd, Walker’s Gully, the Devil’s Kitchen and the West Face of the Pillar Rock are described in detail; the last named being rendered remarkably lucid by two good photographs.

We doubt, however, whether any good purpose is served by the detailed and thrilling account of the narrow escapes of two parties, both on the Pillar Rock, at any rate in so public a manner.  Full of warning to the climber, they can only cause the enemies of the craft – and he that is not with us is against us – to blaspheme.  We can imagine no surer way of stopping recruiting to our ranks than a gift of the book to anyone in loco parentis.  The sketch of the Savage Gully accident in particular is ludicrously wrong in detail and ought certainly to have been omitted.

There is an interesting chapter on the highest climbs in the world with a discussion of the possibility of effecting them, and some splendid photographs and sketches, but we have very good authority for taking exception to the accuracy of the sketch of Mummery’s Crack on the Grépon.

Swiss Mountain Climbs.
By George D. Abraham.

(London: Mills & Boon, Ltd. 1910. pp. xv. and 423. 7s. 6d.)

It is natural that the majority of climbers making their first season in the Alps should find themselves at some well-known climbing centre like Grindelwald or Zermatt.  The glamour of the great peaks and the certainty of obtaining guidance and companionship are quite sufficient to account for this.  But unless the novice is lucky enough to find some experienced friend he may easily waste a good part of his time and perhaps incur unnecessary risk.  It is for such as he that this little book is primarily intended and he could not have a better introduction.  After some preliminary pages full of practical and up-to-date advice imbued with a whole hearted reverence for the beauties – and the dangers – of the mountains, it takes up the chief climbing centres in the Pennines, Oberland and Engadine in turn and gives a short but well-written description of the principal peaks and passes attainable from each.  There are no maps, but with such perfect specimens of cartography as the Siegfried Government maps none are needed.  There are photographs of some of the chief peaks; and the outline sketches, shewing the different routes, are a new and useful feature.  The official tariffs for guides and porters are also given; and, indeed, the author insists, very wisely we think, on the beginner taking guides; although we doubt if good ones are so easily come by as he seems to think.  He also utters a needed word of warning against skill in rock climbing alone, even of the “newschool,” being regarded as sufficient to enable the novice to deal with the snow problems he will find in the Alps.  We should like to know however what he means by the “scrabbling” methods of the “old school “of rock climbers.

The Alps Of The Bernina.
By E. L. Strutt.

(London: Fisher Unwin & Co. 2 Vols. 1910.)

These two volumes, the latest additions to the well-known series of Climbers’ Guides, deal with that compact and well defined section of the Alps, roughly triangular in shape, which has its northern apex at the town of Samaden in the Upper Engadine; from which point the boundary lines diverge, one going S.W. by St. Moritz, the Maloja Pass and the Val Bregaglia to Chiavenna and Lake Como, and the other E. by Pontresina and the Bernina Pass, down the Val Posciavino to Tirano in the fertile Valtellina, famous for its wine.

The district covered is divided by a line running from S.E. to N.W., from Sondrio, the capital of the Valtellina, up the Val Malenco to Chiesa, and thence by the old mule pass of the Muretto to Maloja, the watershed between the Val Bregaglia and the Valley of the Upper Inn.

Though Piz Bernina, (13,304 ft.), the culminating summit of the N.E. group, does not rise so high as the highest peaks of the Central Pennines and is about 700 feet lower than the Finsteraarhorn, the highest peak in the Bernese Oberland, many extensive glaciers flow from the peaks immediately surrounding it.

The region comprised in the S.W. Division is much less known to British climbers and the peaks are lower; but the rock scenery is of a high class, as the range is broken into steep ridges, with many sharp aiguilles and pinnacles, many of which have as yet been ascended once or twice and by one way only.  As Dr. Claude Wilson says in a recent number of the Alpine Journal, (A. J. XXV., p. 232), “There is as much rock climbing within easy range of the Allievi Hut (Zocca) as in the Coolins, Lakeland and the Snowdon district put together.”

The highest summit in this district is the heavily ice-clad and beautiful Disgrazia, (12,067 ft.), which rises wholly in Italy at the very head of the Val Malenco.  First climbed as far back as 1862 its ascent by a new route and without guides by Messrs. C. and L. Pilkington and E. Hulton in 1882, (A. J. VIII., p. 24), inaugurated the era of guideless climbing by members of the Alpine Club and proved that it could be done with safety and success by competent mountaineers who understood what they were about.

The author gives a full description of all the known and recorded routes up the various peaks in the district from his own extensive experience and the published accounts of ascents by others, and he has been fortunate in obtaining a great deal of recent information from the note books of various friends, especially those of the well-known guide Christian Klucker of Sils, the greatest authority on this district.

There is an excellent little map drawn by Dr. Claude Wilson, the best yet published, of which the portion dealing with the Disgrazia appears, redrawn and corrected up to date, in the Alpine Journal for August 1910.

H. R.

NOTE BY EDITOR:- We may add, what the reviewer is too modest too mention, that he and his companion Mr. Ling, made a new way in 1910 up the N. face of the Disgrazia, of which the view from the Muretto Pass is said very truly by Dr. Wilson to equal that of the S. face of Monte Rosa as seen from Monte Moro.

We may also note, as of special interest to ourselves, the record of the first ascent of the N. face of the Crast’ Aguzza by Herr von Leyden and two guides on the 25th July, 1904.  The party found the bergschrund troublesome, and we, who were watching them from the glacier below, might easily have found it even more so, in another sense.^[1]

The Alps From End To End.
By Sir W. M. Conway.

(London, &C.: Thomas Nelson & Sons. 1910. pp. 381. 1s. 0d.)

A cheap edition, with six photographs instead of the sketches by Mr. McCormick which adorned the original edition, of Sir Martin’s practical counter-blast to the modern cult of “centrism,” whether practised at Gaping Ghyll, Wasdale or Zermatt, and an encouragement to those, who like him, choose rather to “scorn delight and live laborious days” betwixt one hot Alpine centre and the next.

The Climbs On Lliwedd.
By J. M. Archer Thomson And A. W. Andrews.

Climbing In The Ogwen District.
By J. M. Archer Thomson.

(London: Edward Arnold. 1910.)

In Mountaineering, as in other forms of human knowledge, there comes a time when the exuberant raptures of the pioneers and the patient researches of their followers become crystallized in the cold formulae of the scientist and the philosopher.  In matters Alpine the joyous narratives of a Whymper or a Stephen and the prodigious labours of a Coolidge have been boiled down into the sententious brevity of the “Climbers’ Guides ” – we had nearly said “Potted Peaks “; and now, in these two volumes, brought out under the auspices of the Climbers’ Club, we have, reduced to its simplest dimensions, the results of pioneer ramblings among the stormy hills of Wales during the last twenty years – the Golden Age of British Rock Climbing – of which Messrs. Andrews and Thomson may justly boast: Quorum pars magna fui The difference between Rock Climbing in Britain and Mountaineering in the Alps, as Mr. Thomson points out, is “a difference  not only of magnitude but of essential quality and dissimilarity of method, accentuated of late years by specialization.”

How far it has been specialized appears from the fact that the climbs on Lliwedd, or rather on the N. face of it, amount to thirty and those in the Ogwen district to more than seventy.  These climbs are described in detail, and the novice or the stranger on these rocks can have no excuse for losing his way – or his hold – if only he makes sure he has started on the right climb – and with the proper foot.  The introductory remarks and chapters on Botany and Bird Life and the excellent photographs are not the least interesting parts of the volumes.  Of the drawings in the Lliwedd volume however we will only say that they remind us of Mr. Espinasse, an old and somewhat careless law reporter, of whom it was said, that, being deaf, he heard one half of the case and reported the other.

The Lliwedd volume has a workmanlike binding, suitable for hard wear, which might very well have been retained in the other volume.

We await with interest the completion of the Welsh part of this work, and wonder which Club will be first to do the same for Lakeland.

The Andes And The Amazon.
By C. Reginald Enock, F.R.G.S.

(London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1907. pp. xvi. and 370.)

With the help of excellent photographs, sketches and map, the author gives a graphic and comprehensive account of Peru as it is to-day, including the conditions of life and travel, climate, religion, politics, antiquities and all else that make up the life history of a state.  His profession of a mining, engineer took him all over the country, and especially into the mountains, and his descriptions of the mighty Andes shew him to be, if not a skilled mountaineer, at any rate a devout mountain lover.  His experiences of mountain sickness, soroche the natives call it, on the high plateaux, (some of the mines are themselves 17,000 ceet high), and the various remedies are interesting, and among them we note especially the use of cakes of chancaca or crude brown sugar.  His attempt on Huascaran (22,180 ft.) in the Eastern Cordilleras, a worthy rival to Aconcagua, (23,080 ft.), in May 1904, was very plucky though we are bound to add somewhat ill-advised.  With five cholos or natives, and a Peruvian friend he reached the snow-line, (14,500 ft.), at eleven o’clock in the forenoon, and after breakfasting they set off up the snow, but the Peruvian and one native soon stopped, and with the other four the author continued upwards.

“We passed,” he says, “various grietas or crevasses, and arrived at a small saddle-back from which an outcrop of rocks protruded through the ice-cap.  At this place one ofthe cholos broke through the snow crust, and became buried to the arm-pits and, although there was little danger, the occurence inspired such fear in the timid souls of the others that they declined to go on.  The aspect of the glaciers beyond was, it is true, awe inspiring.  Frightful precipices opened to the view, shewing where avalanches had fallen; and even as I watched an avalanche fell – a wave of snow whose resounding roar wound grimly among those high terraces and far facades, and possibly caused the people in the valley towns below to look upward.”

 “My first intention had been only to pass the snow-line, but the desire to attempt the summit had been taking possession of me as I ascended. The tonic air invigorated the body, the glorious panorama inspired the mind, and I felt capable of reaching the crest of one of those beautiful twin peaks of Huascaran which towered above.  The cowardice of the cholos inspired me with anger and disgust, and in vain I offered them reward; they would not leave the point of rocks where they had taken refuge.  At length I left them, and went on alone.”

“At 16,500 ft. I stopped.  Before me was a deep and narrow crevasse, which it seemed imprudeut to cross alone.  I stood long on the verge, for the desire to go on was very strong.  At the other side, still far away, the twin peaks gleamed like purest porcelain in the rays of the afternoon sun.  Blue and pearly shadows shaded gently off upon their flanks, losing themselves in grim profundities, where, far below, the foaming blanket of the avalanche now lay; the mist of its pulverisation still hanging like a faint white curtain near the base.  Nearly 6,000 ft. above me the northernmost peak stood out, piercing the blue heavens like the gnomon of a mighty dial, along whose sloping side I could ascend.  I was alone in the midst of that awful yet beautiful solitude: alone with Nature upon the highest points of matter – the roof of the World! But an unstable matter, for at my right hand were millions of tons of ice and snow, so insecurely poised upon the abrupt steeps that a breath, it seemed, might hurl them down upon me, and which, even as I watched seemed almost to be in movement.  Also the broad ice-field over which my gaze wandered, and which intervened between me and the base of the ‘gnomon’ was crossed by faint blue lines, the surface edges of innumerable chasms and crevasses.  Should I go on alone?”

 “Yes!  I passed the crevasse, and continued onward over the ice-cap, slipping at times and stopping to recover breath from the thin air and to observe the panorama below.  Again I was brought to a halt by an abyss wider and deeper than before, whilst near at hand and all around were others.  The ice-cap was folded, rigid and cracked; a false step might send me down a thousand feet or more: was it wise to proceed alone?”

“The majesty of that vast solitude fascinated me; I was glad to be alone where no human foot had ever trod.”

“Again I hesitated, still drawn onward, and again I examined the crevasse.  Part of the tuft of snow whereon I stood upon the verge, crunched and gave way, falling down, down, down.  Was it a warning?  To continue onward might be death.  Yet what a resting place and grave-stone for a wearied mortal!  By day rearing its splendour on high, this gnomon peak; by night ever cutting its silent arc against the purple dome of the starry firmament – a launching point in space whence a last human thought might wing its way, leaving its material temple to eternal preservation in the matter it strove to overcome.”

“I turned away regretfully, and followed my own foot-prints – the only ones which had ever been made there by man – downwards again, passed the crevasse, crossed the tableland, and shortly arrived at the place where the cholos anxiously awaited my return.  There I made them build a cairn of loose granite blocks; it was with a species of satisfaction that I saw them groan and sweat – a punishment for having failed to accompany me, so preventing the probability of arriving at the summit.”

“I consider that the ascent of Huascaran could be made without great difficulty, with proper companions and appliances.  I felt a species of regret as I looked back at the virgin slopes above where I had ascended, that regret which he might feel who has loved, whose love has been reciprocated, but who had been separated by the iron hand of circumstance from the beloved object before the consummation of his affections!”

This is all mighty well, but we confess our sympathies are with the cholos, and we strongly advise the author before he again tackles 6,000 ft. of ice and snow work in the afternoon of a tropical summer’s day, – and alone at that – to have a season or two behind a Swiss guide in the Alps, and even then we should advise him to make his will first.

Wind And Hill: Poems.
By Geoffrey Winthrop Young.

(London : Smith Elder & Co. 1909. pp. viii. and 106. 3s. 6d. net.)

That Mr. Young is in the first rank of present day climbers is admitted by all mountaineers: that he is a witty and unconventional narrator of climbing stories the pages of this Journal bear witness; and now this slim volume of verses comes to prove him a skilful weaver into song of those thoughts which lie deep in the heart of every true lover of the mountains.  Many can describe a landscape in words or depict it in colour, to the few only is it given to bring out, either with pen or brush, the soul of things behind, and among these Mr.Young takes a high place.

As befits a good mountaineer he delights not only in the high places of earth, as when on Monte Silvio he sees:-

Peak beyond peak, range beyond arid range
Flecked with cold glacier, burning, desolate;
Uplifted on the ruin of slow change,
Defiant of the lightning and the hate:
Signs of those lives apart, divinely strange,
That soar to meet the fierce extremes of fate;
While from their strength the smooth green vales descending
Curve in soft sunlight to their summer ending.

And in the lesser heights:-

Only a hill: earth set a little higher
Above the face of earth: a larger view
Of little fields and roads: a little higher
To clouds and silence: what is that to you?
Only a hill; but all of life to me,
Up there, between the sunset and the sea.

But in Nature`s every phase:-

Sun and rain and the smell of grass and trees,
Song of birds and the depth of the green cool stream
Rushing of wind and the slanting yellow gleam
Of sunset, these are pleasures, and only these.

Nor do his verses fail to move “in perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood”; and the lines, too long to quote here, beginning “He meets me on the mountain side “are a very pæan of mountain climbing, and these its morning hymn: –

We ask not aught that ordered life hath given,
That wisdom may ensue
Or vision bequeath:
For us the precious things of heaven,
And the dew,
And the deep that coucheth beneath.
We ask no blessing of wealth, nor any boon
Save one – and one –
The heart of the boy, and health,
With freedom to enjoy
The precious things brought forth by the sun,
And the precious things thrust forth by the moon;
Earth’s fullness, and the chill of snow-fed fountains,
The rustling of wings,
And our men’s wills,
The chief things of the ancient mountains,
And the precious things of the lasting hills.

---

TAIL PIECES : -The tail pieces are by Mr. Percy Robinson and represent Clapham Church, (p. 125), Clapdale Farm, (p.140), Hill Inn, (p.153), Clapham Waterfall, (p.166), Trow Gill, (p. 173), Hu1l Pot, (p.176), Gaping Ghyll Camp. (p.185), Clapham Lake, (p. 211), and Gaping Ghyll, (p. 214).