PREFACE
The following pages were mostly written with pencil in the railway train when the writer was returning from Alpine holidays. The letters were published in the Cambridge Chronicle as a record of the mountaineering season, and extend over the past five years.
A few serious remarks on the climbing foot, and on accidents, are added separately, and little attempt has been made to retouch these yearly letters. Being “touched for the evil” has been known, according to the court wags, to kill a feeble son of Tom Esmond’s. There being little but evil in the lad’s composition, the royal touch which expelled the evil from the patient was a fatal performance. Fearing it might prove so for my poor tracts, they remain much as they were originally printed. Only of this I feel assured, that similar notes, put into my hands when I began climbing, would have been read by me with avidity.
If one of these papers be found now and then somewhat technical, and to savour of another craft, more useful even than mountaineering, that possible usefulness must be my excuse for these digressions.
The series of pictures to illustrate the chapter on the climbing foot I hope will prove of interest. Mr. Stearn, the photographer, of Bridge Street, Cambridge, has caught the expression in the infant’s foot, which I kept in position with my finger, and the remarkable adaptation of the tiny infant’s foot for climbing and all-four progression is very well shown; also those by Captain Abney of the Swiss guides have come out exceedingly well.
These notes may be found acceptable to any novitiate, who, after making his first climb, can feel what Meredith’s hero in The Amazing Marriage so well expresses to his comrade:
“I shall never forget the walk we’ve had. I have to thank you for the noblest of pleasures. You’ve taught me—well, a thousand things; the things money can’t buy. What mornings they were! and the dead-tired nights! Under the rock, and up to see the snowy peak pink in a gap of thick mist. You were right: it made a crimsoning colour shine like a new idea. Up in those mountains one walks with the divinities, you said. It’s perfectly true. I shall remember I did. I have a treasure for life! Now I understand where you get your ideas. The life we lead down there is hoggish. You have chosen the right.”
A small matter will suggest pleasant memories of mountaineering to those (harmless degenerates, according to Max Nordau) who see the Mer de Glace in every frozen puddle, as a child sees pictures in the fire.
Many a man helping a dish of Devonshire junket on his table, thinking of Forbes’s viscous theory, watches for the place opposite the first gap made by the spoon, where in the junket there forms a chasm parallel with the side, still leaving a fringe or shelf attached to the edge of the dish—for him at the moment that crack is a bergschrund—there he finds at one point a bridge convenient for crossing, at another an impossible yawning crevasse.
Such a man will not find these notes dull, for he can enjoy the plainest junket, and though he finds recorded few new things, yet pleasant thoughts will be suggested of the past, and infinite possibilities for the future.
Cambridge, May 1, 1896.