II. OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF A CHAMOIS: AND INCIDENTALLY OF SOME OTHER MATTERS
Those who know Rosenlaui will also know that finely pointed little peak, an outlying spur of the Wetterhorn, that looks straight down into the front windows of the hotel—the Dossenhorn. That was my first climb. I confess that it was nothing very thrilling, though I enjoyed it thoroughly. We had a guide—an aged, aged man, whose downhill, bent-knee walk was if anything slower than his very slow but quite automatic and invariable upward pacing. We had a rope, which appeared to me perfectly unnecessary, and was a great nuisance to the airily independent spirit and body of the novice. Two ice-axes lent to our party (of five) an air of considerable distinction. Very little of the day’s happenings have remained to me. I still remember how very easy the rocks of the last arête were; how fine the Wetterhorn looked across the snow plateau; how I wondered why my uncle, a considerable climber in his day, wore trousers instead of knickerbockers; how I ran down most of the way home after unroping; and how, in my innocence, I plunged my face, scarlet from its exposure all unvaselined to the snow-fields, into a basin of cold water—with what results those know who have tried it. Among all this intolerable deal of bread, however, we had a halfpenny worth of something more intoxicating. There is a long snow slope to be crossed slantingly before the col and the hut are reached. It is not at all steep, sloping up to the lower border of the rock pile that forms the pyramidal top of the mountain; but the old guide had ordered the rope, and so there we were plodding diagonally upwards in single file.
All of a sudden there was a rattle, and then a stone leapt off the rocks above to bound down the snow slope some four hundred yards ahead of us. The old guide looked round, and said: ‘Chamois.’
This set us all agog—two or three had never seen the chamois on his native heath. However, the brown coat of the chamois is a good piece of cryptic colouring; he—or they—remained absolutely invisible against the brown rocks. But we had startled him, and he went on moving—for some reason towards us, as we soon discovered when a second stone came down. The third alarmed us a little, for it crossed our path not fifty yards ahead of the leader; so we resolved to halt and keep our eyes open for the next. This was not long in coming; it came with a bound off the rocks, and seemed to be heading for the gap between the last two on the rope. It must have been going at a great pace, for it devoured that snow slope in great hungry leaps, clearing eighty or a hundred feet at a bound, though never rising a yard above the snow; it hummed as it came, with a deep buzzing sound. Altogether it was extremely alarming (I was one of the two hindermost), and it was a considerable relief to see, after it was half-way to us, that it had a slight curl on it, and an outward curl, which caused it to hum past five or six yards behind the tail of our procession. The chamois passed, still invisible, on his way, and we on ours, discussing what would have been the best thing to do supposing his aim had been straighter.
It was that scene that came into my head years later. I had been trying to master some of the rudiments of geology, of which science I was lamentably ignorant, and had at least begun to get into my head the idea of denudation—how the shapes of mountains as we see them are as much due to cutting away as to heaving up—and was grasping the strength of the denuding forces that would go on thus cutting and cutting until nothing was left but one flat plain, did they not thus once more liberate the forces of upheaval. In my textbook there were examples given of the many and various activities working together this work of destruction—wind and sun, rain and frost, sand, rivers, little plants—‘and chamois!’ came suddenly into my mind. A little nail will serve to hang a large picture; and so the whole idea of denudation was fixed in my brain by that one Bernese chamois.
It perhaps, more than any other single thing, taught me to see the transience of the hills. For here, as so often elsewhere, the judgments of the natural man must be unlearnt. ‘The hills stand about Jerusalem,’ says the natural man,—‘The Eternal Hills!’ They are not eternal; they are as transitory, as much slaves of Time, as anything with life. The title is but one more witness to the arrogance, the unimaginativeness of man, who thinks that everything is of the same order of magnitude as he himself; and if he does not notice the hour hand move while he trips along some fraction of the circumference of the seconds dial—why, then, it must be motionless!
But man possesses also a brain, and therein an intelligence, a logical faculty, by means of which he discovers presently that things are not always what they seem; and one of these apparent contradictions is that the mountains must be changing, rising up and wearing down, even though he cannot perceive it directly; and yet even though he can prove that it must be so, it is still very difficult for him to realise it happening.
Our intelligence, indeed, although it thus transcends the senses’ immediate judgments, has to go back to them and ask their aid if it is to attain to fullest knowledge. It is a very imperfect instrument, so built up on the foundations of the five senses that if we cannot feel, hear, taste, smell or, more particularly, see what there is to be dealt with, but only reason about it, we may know quite well that reasoning has led to the only right conclusion, but yet do not feel fully and unquestioningly the rightness of it. We all believe the moon to be a globe; but I must confess that on my first sight of her through a telescope, I experienced a veritable shock of surprise and pleasure to realise, as I saw the craters passing from full face in the centre to profile at the edge, how globular she really was. With the mountains no such ocular demonstration is possible to us. I say to us, for to our descendants it may be. You have but to take a series of photographs of some peak from exactly the same spot at intervals of fifty years or so; then, putting these together in their order, run them through a cinematograph, and you would see your everlasting citadel crumble, shrinking before your eyes like a pricked balloon. Such a condensation of events has already been practised to render such slow processes as the growth of twigs or the complex unfolding of the egg more patent and striking; and there is no reason why it should not be applied to matters of centuries instead of days.
To-day we cannot have the change rendered thus visible to us. We have only indirect methods to help us, methods which demand reflection and imagination. Imagination and reflection, however, are processes demanding more mental energy than the average man is willing to expend, for the average man is mentally of extreme laziness. So the mountains remain eternal, to the average man.
But there is no harm in trying to exercise powers of reflection and of imagination, if I may persuade you to it. Stand on the bridges at Geneva and look at the Rhone slipping down from the lake, clear and blue with a wonderful and almost unreal blue. Then walk down to the junction of the Rhone and the Arve, and see that other river, turbid, greyish-white, a regular glacier stream; identity and name may be taken from it in the union, but it still has strength to rob the robber of his own especial beauty. That discolouring flood—what is it? As you walk back again, the top of Mont Blanc comes gradually from behind the Grande Salève into sight. If you reflect, you will know that those white waves were white from carrying away what only yesterday had been a part of those famous mountains; to-day it is dust, and nameless; to-morrow it will be laid down upon the ocean floor, there to be hardened, kneaded, and baked into the bricks that shall build other, as yet unchristened, hills. If you imagine, you will see in the mind’s eye those same summits, thus continually attacked, gradually shrinking; preserving their beauty to the last, no doubt, like our lovely lake mountains, which though in respect of their former height they be but as roots when the trunk is fallen, yet in themselves show not a trace of decay, and lift their heads as strong and fresh as ever. Yet they dwindle, and will in the end be mountains no more; they will no more have form and shape, no more be named and almost live, endowed with that strong appearance of vivid and obvious personality; mere undulations, they will no more exercise the mountain power upon the mind of man.
What else will help you to see the transience of the hills? Go and stand by a mountain stream where it runs in quick swishing rapids; as I have done by the Drance de Bagnes, and heard sounds as of groaning and muffled giant hammering—great boulders grinding each other in the press of the current, and moving always downwards. Go and look at the enormous moraines that wind down into Italy—each would be a range of hills in England. Had not the Alps another aspect before these were heaped up? And yet, say the geologists, great cenotaphs of the ice were raised in but a fraction of the time since the Alps were born. Try to tackle a rock-and-ice gully with strong sun on it, or (preferably) stay on one side and watch the stones come down: down they come like that every sunny day.
Look at the Matterhorn, and be told how like it is to Strasburg Cathedral; but rock spires are not built upwards like ones of stone and mortar; they are monoliths, cut out of the solid rock. The stony layers of the rock, once lying flat and soft upon the sea-bottom, then hardened, then gripped and crumpled by the ageing earth like so many sheets of wet paper, now are cut through, and show their free edges on the steep flanks of the mountain. Fixed long ago in waves and curves, now they are immobile, but they treasure within themselves the forms which the ice and the sun are to reveal. As if the sculptor were to have but half the shaping of his work, and the block of marble almost of itself disclose its hidden Oenus, or turn a Hercules planned into a Hylas accomplished, so the rock masses contain within themselves no infinite possibility of forms—there is, to start with, a quality of mountain concealed in the rock, so that the aerial sculptors may work as they please, and never find a Dent du Midi in the Mont Blanc range, or fashion a Weisshorn from the Dolomites. But that is another story. Even though the rocks thus decree that the instruments of their destruction shall be as well instruments to reveal their hidden beauties, yet destruction none the less it is. How gigantic a destruction those cut, upcurving layers of rock can testify.
But in the same way as our mind can know and yet not feel the mutability of the mountains, so it may know and yet not grasp their size and its extent. Here again the new lesson is hard to be learnt by brain alone: ‘Everest 29,002, Mont Blanc 15,786, Scawfell Pike 3210’—the figures convey but a part. The hills must take the mind by assault through the breaches of sense.
Those moments come but rarely. I have seen the west face of Skiddaw once, and once Schiehallion from the Struan road, towering as high as any Alpine peak might do; and Donkin’s famous photograph of the Weisshorn gives one something of the true feeling. But the most complete revelation came to me at the head of the Swiss Val Ferret.
We had already begun to appreciate the bigness of things, but rather through our own littleness than for any unusual grandeur revealed in them. As you walk up the deep, close valley, you have on your right, in contrast to the monotonous dry ridge of even middle height to the left, a succession of broad bluffs or buttresses that sustain the east end and guard the eastern glacier gateways of that great Cathedral of Three Nations, the massif of Mont Blanc. There is one below and one above the end of the Saleinaz glacier, and on the side of each a lesser bluff, an inward, forward-projecting pillar that narrows the gateway to a mere postern, with only glimpses of the broad aisle above. Both these doorposts bear the same name—Tita Moutse or Tête Moutze; a very good name, certainly, but you would think that the dwellers at Proz-de-Fort, just between the two, might find it confusing, even though on Barbier’s map one is printed black and upright, the other thin and in italics. It is difficult to render these distinctions in speaking—and perhaps they have not all got Barbier’s map. However, that is not our concern at present. Farther up is another big buttress (rejoicing in the name of Treutze Bouc), and another, and then the Glacier de la Neuvaz, with the Châlet Ferret on the other hand, and feather beds for weary travellers.
These buttresses, and especially the Treutze Bouc, are calculated to annoy the walker. There they stand, looking no bigger than a buttress of Snowdon or Saddleback; there as here the mountain torrents cut away the ground in the same way, and the same broad-faced bluffs are left. As with bluffs, so with ships: it is almost impossible to grasp the size of a big liner out at sea, her build is the same as that of any other steamship, and there is no standard of comparison. Here in the Val Ferret one learns by bitter experience and blistered feet. The road winds on and on, across torrent-beds, through alder-woods, along hot slopes—and the summit of Treutze Bouc is not yet opposite. After this lengthy demonstration of the disadvantages and unpleasantnesses of size, the mountains at last relent and show the other side of the picture.
I shall never forget the impression of colossal grandeur that showed itself at a turn of the road opposite the gate of the Glacier de la Neuvaz. Nothing was lacking in the chain. In the foreground, below a grassy bank, flowed the Drance de Ferret—only a smallish stream, but big enough and swift enough unbridged to stop such a small animal as man from gaining its other side. Across it lay a fallen pine; and from this, better than from the standing trees, you realised to what a height the pine-trunks grow. Of these there was a thick wood filling up the level bottom left by the receding glacier; the green sea extended back and back until the tops of the separate trees were not to be made out, and the whole wood tapered away in perspective like a band of clouds towards the setting sun. In the end it turned a corner to the right—a thin green line beyond the grey terminal moraine. This corner filled a little indentation in the hill behind. The eye travelled up naturally from the green line of trees to the green slope, and saw that slope as part of a great rounded hill, rather like a bit of the Downs in general appearance; but had it been hollow you could have gone on pouring your Chanctonburies and Sinoduns and Beachy Heads and Hogs backs into it, and they would have rattled about like small-shot inside. The stream of trees let you see how big it was, as hills on the horizon show the greatness of the setting moon. I think the hill was nameless. Beyond it, in another plane of distance, rose another peak—this one brown, of bare rock, and rather jagged; the vegetation had ended on the part concealed behind the green hill. Up and up the eye travelled, and was amazed to find that if the green had been but a spur of the brown, so the brown was but a spur of the white. Mont Dolent arose from, behind it like the pursuing peak in the Prelude. All its rocky middle and its snowline were in their turn hidden by the brown spur before them; only the white slanting chisel edge of the summit soared up to sight. Stream—tree—wood—mountains: one, two, and three ... each formed a stepping-stone to the one beyond, making it possible for the whole grandeur of the peak to slip down, as it were, and find place within the narrow limits of the brain waiting at the other end.
There it was able to take up its station beside that other thought which entered there, not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, but by the swift chamois and the mountain torrents. The two, holding mutual colloquy, together tell what Wordsworth learnt in another fashion, that the mountains are
‘Huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men.’
But live they do, in their own way—not only in their form and individuality, but in the constant cycle of their changeableness. They approach to being closed systems, independent in some degree of the rest of the world; partial individuals, they have a share in determining their future selves. Once raised to mountains, they contain within themselves the germs of their own destiny; and if not possessing such power as true life possesses of blossoming into a predetermined form, scarcely to be altered by all the efforts of the outside world, yet at least marking down beforehand the limits beyond which the outer influences cannot mould them, preordaining the main succession of their future history, and the essential quality of the forms they are to take. And again, though they have not the true vital property of reproducing their kind by means of a mere particle of their own substance, that grows, and in its growth takes up the atoms of outer matter and moulds them to its will, they have a kind of reproduction scarcely less strange, where like generates not like, but unlike. In their decay they are laying new foundations. Grain torn from grain of solid rock, boulder from boulder is swept away; layer after layer of grains or boulder is laid—‘well and truly laid’; rock system piled upon rock system; till the time comes, and all this is upheaved into a chain of peaks which, though their every particle were taken from the substance of that older chain, will be like it in being a mountain range, but in that alone. So they have their being, in a different and vaster cycle than man’s, their life only another fragment of that change which is the single fixed reality.
And what is the moral of all this? You may well ask; for I do not know that I know myself. Proceed to the fact that our mountains are but crinkles on the rind of a small satellite of one star among the millions, and we deduce the littleness of man: which has been done before. Point out how, in spite of all their size and their terrors, they fall one by one to the climber, and we with equal facility prove his greatness: which also others have successfully attempted. Insist on their mutability, and it merely takes us back to Heraclitus and his πάντα ῥεῖ. Perhaps one moral is that feeling as well as reasoning, reasoning as well as feeling, is necessary to true knowledge; a conclusion which would appeal to followers of M. Bergson, but hardly falls within the scope of this book.
The chief moral is, I expect, that the mountains can give the climber more than climbing, and will do so if he but keep his eyes open. From them there will come to him flashes of beauty and of grandeur, light in dark places, sudden glimpses of the age, the glory, and the greatness of the earth.