As for Balmat, he became a guide, and in this capacity earned a very fair income. Having accumulated some capital, he cast about for a profitable investment. Two perfect strangers, whom he met on the high road, solved his difficulty in a manner highly satisfactory as far as they were concerned. They assured him that they were bankers, and that they would pay him five per cent. on his capital. The first of these statements may have been true, the second was false. He did not see the bankers or his capital again. Shortly after this initiation into high finance, he left Chamounix to search for a mythical gold-mine among the glaciers of the valley of Sixt. He disappeared and was never seen again. He left a family of four sons, two of whom were killed in the Napoleonic wars. His great-nephew became the favourite guide of Mr. Justice Wills, with whom he climbed the Wetterhorn.
CHAPTER V
MONTE ROSA AND THE BÜNDNER OBERLAND
The conquest of Mont Blanc was the most important mountaineering achievement of the period; but good work was also being done in other parts of the Alps. Monte Rosa, as we soon shall see, had already attracted the adventurous, and the Bündner Oberland gave one great name to the story of Alpine adventure. We have already noted the important part played by priests in the conquest of the Alps; and Catholic mountaineers may well honour the memory of Placidus à Spescha as one of the greatest of the climbing priesthood.
Father Placidus was born in 1782 at Truns. As a boy he joined the Friars of Disentis, and after completing his education at Einsiedeln, where he made good use of an excellent library, returned again to Disentis. As a small boy, he had tended his father’s flocks and acquired a passionate love for the mountains of his native valley. As a monk, he resumed the hill wanderings, which he continued almost to the close of a long life.
He was an unfortunate man. The French Revolution made itself felt in Graubünden; and with the destruction of the monastery all his notes and manuscripts were burned. When the Austrians ousted the French, he was even more luckless; as a result of a sermon on the text “Put not your trust in princes” he was imprisoned in Innsbruck for eighteen months. He came back only to be persecuted afresh. Throughout his life, his wide learning and tolerant outlook invited the suspicion of the envious and narrow-minded; and on his return to Graubünden he was accused of heresy. His books and his manuscripts were confiscated, and he was forbidden to climb. After a succession of troubled years, he returned to Truns; and though he had passed his seventieth year he still continued to climb. As late as 1824, he made two attempts on the Tödi. On his last attempt, he reached a gap, now known as the Porta da Spescha, less than a thousand feet below the summit; and from this point he watched, with mixed feelings, the two chamois hunters he had sent forward reach the summit. He died at the age of eighty-two. One wishes that he had attained in person his great ambition, the conquest of the Tödi; but, even though he failed on this outstanding peak, he had several good performances to his credit, amongst others the first ascent of the Stockgron (11,411 feet) in 1788, the Rheinwaldhorn (11,148 feet) in 1789, the Piz Urlaun (11,063 feet) in 1793, and numerous other important climbs.
His list of ascents is long, and proves a constant devotion to the hills amongst which he passed the happiest hours of an unhappy life. “Placidus à Spescha”—there was little placid in his life save the cheerful resignation with which he faced the buffetings of fortune. He was a learned and broad-minded man; and the mountains, with their quiet sanity, seem to have helped him to bear constant vexation caused by small-minded persons. These suspicions of heresy must have proved very wearisome to “the mountaineer who missed his way and strayed into the Priesthood.” He must have felt that his opponents were, perhaps, justified, that the mountains had given him an interpretation of his beliefs that was, perhaps, wider than the creed of Rome, and that he himself had found a saner outlook in those temples of a larger faith to which he lifted up his eyes for help. As a relief from a hostile and unsympathetic atmosphere, let us hope that he discovered some restful anodyne among the tranquil broadness of the upper snows. The fatigue and difficulties of long mountain tramps exhaust the mind, to the exclusion of those little cares which seem so great in the artificial life of the valley. Certainly, the serene indifference of the hills found a response in the quiet philosophy of his life. Very little remains of all that he must have written, very little—only a few words, in which he summed up the convictions which life had given him. “When I carefully consider the fortune and ill-fortune that have befallen me, I have difficulty in determining which of the two has been the more profitable since a man without trials is a man without experience, and such a one is without insight—vexatio dat intellectum.” A brave confession of a good faith, and in his case no vain utterance, but the sincere summary of a philosophy which coloured his whole outlook on life.
The early history of Monte Rosa has an appeal even stronger than the story of Mont Blanc. It begins with the Renaissance. From the hills around Milan, Leonardo da Vinci had seen the faint flush of dawn on Monte Rosa beyond—
A thousand shadowy pencilled valleys
And snowy dells in a golden air.
The elusive vision had provoked his restless, untiring spirit to search out the secrets of Monte Rosa. The results of that expedition have already been noticed.