The Alps

by Arnold Lunn

Before leaving, De Luc observed that the party were standing on a cornice. A cornice is a crest of windblown snow overhanging a precipice. As the crest often appears perfectly continuous with the snow on solid foundation, cornices have been responsible for many fatal accidents. De Luc’s party naturally beat a hurried retreat; but “having gathered, by reflection, that the addition of our own weight to this prodigious mass which had supported itself for ages counted for absolutely nothing, and could not possibly break it loose, we laid aside our fears and went back to the terrible terrace.” A little science is a dangerous thing; and it was a mere chance that the first ascent of the Buet is not notorious for a terrible accident. It makes one’s blood run cold to read of the calm contempt with which De Luc treated the cornice. Each member of the party took it in turn to advance to the edge and look over on to the cliff below supported as to his coattails by the rest of the party.

De Luc made a second ascent of the Buet, two years later; but it was not until 1779 that a snow peak was again conquered. In that year Murith, the Prior of the St. Bernard Hospice, climbed the Velan, the broad-topped peak which is so conspicuous a feature from the St. Bernard. It is a very respectable mountain rising to a height of 12,353 feet. Murith, besides being an ecclesiastic, was something of a scientist, and his botanical handbook to the Valais is not without merit. It is to Bourrit, of whom we shall speak later, that we owe the written account of the climb, based on information which Bourrit had at first hand from M. Murith.

Murith started on August 30, 1779, with “two hardy hunters,” two thermometers, a barometer, and a spirit-level. They slept a night on the way, and proceeded to attack the mountain from the Glacier du Proz. The hardy hunters lost their nerve, and tried to dissuade M. Murith from the attempt; but the gallant Prior replied: “Fear nothing; wherever there is danger I will go in front.” They encountered numerous difficulties, amongst others a wall of ice which Murith climbed by hacking steps and hand-holds with a pointed hammer. One of the hardy huntsmen then followed; his companion had long since disappeared.

They reached the summit without further difficulty, and their impressions of the view are recorded by Bourrit in an eloquent passage which recalls De Luc on the Buet, and once more proves that the early mountaineers were fully alive to the glory of mountain tops—

“A spectacle, no less amazing than magnificent, offered itself to their gaze. The sky seemed to be a black cloth enveloping the earth at a distance from it. The sun shining in it made its darkness all the more conspicuous. Down below their outlook extended over an enormous area, bristling with rocky peaks and cut by dark valleys. Mont Blanc rose like a sloping pyramid and its lofty head appeared to dominate all the Alps as one saw it towering above them. An imposing stillness, a majestic silence, produced an indescribable impression upon the mind. The noise of the avalanches, reiterated by the echoes, seemed to be the only thing that marked the march of time. Raised, so to say, above the head of Nature, they saw the mountains split asunder, and send the fragments rolling to their feet, and the rivers rising below them in places where inactive Nature seemed upon the point of death—though in truth it is there that she gathers strength to carry life and fertility throughout the world.”

It is curious in this connection to notice the part played by the Church in the early history of mountaineering. This is not surprising. The local curé lived in the shadow of the great peaks that dominated his valley. He was more cultured than the peasants of his parish; he was more alive to the spiritual appeal of the high places, and he naturally took a leading part in the assaults on his native mountains. The Titlis and Monte Leone were first climbed by local monks. The prior of the St. Bernard made, as we have seen, a remarkable conquest of a great local peak; and five years later M. Clément, the curé of Champery, reached the summit of the Dent du Midi, that great battlement of rock which forms a background to the eastern end of Lake Geneva. Bourrit, as we shall see, was an ecclesiastic with a great love for the snows. Father Placidus à Spescha was the pioneer of the Tödi; and local priests played their part in the early attempts on the Matterhorn from Italy. “One man, one mountain” was the rule of many an early pioneer; but Murith’s love of the snows was not exhausted by this ascent of the Velan. He had already explored the Valsorey glacier with Saussure, and the Otemma glacier with Bourrit. A few years after his conquest of the Velan he turned his attention to the fine wall of cliffs that binds in the Orny glacier on the south.

Bourrit, who wrote up Murith’s notes on the Velan, was one of the most remarkable of this group of pioneers. He was a whole-hearted enthusiast, and the first man who devoted the most active years of his life to mountaineering. He wins our affection by the readiness with which he gave others due credit for their achievements, a generous characteristic which did not, however, survive the supreme test—Paccard’s triumph on Mont Blanc. Mountaineers at the end of the eighteenth century formed a close freemasonry less concerned with individual achievement than with the furthering of common knowledge. We have seen, for instance, that De Saussure cared little who made the first ascent of Mont Blanc provided that the way was opened up for future explorers. Bourrit’s actual record of achievement was small. His exploration was attended with little success. His best performance was the discovery, or rediscovery of the Col de Géant. His great ambition, the ascent of Mont Blanc, failed. Fatigue, or mountain sickness, or bad weather, spoiled his more ambitious climbs. But this matters little. He found his niche in Alpine history rather as a writer than as a mountaineer. He popularised the Alps. He was the first systematic writer of Alpine books, a fact which earned him the title, “Historian of the Alps,” a title of which he was inordinately proud. Best of all, in an age when mountain appreciation was somewhat rare, he marked himself out by an unbounded enthusiasm for the hills.

He was born in 1735, and in one of his memoirs he describes the moment when he first heard the call of the Alps: “It was from the summit of the Voirons that the view of the Alps kindled my desire to become acquainted with them. No one could give me any information about them except that they were the accursed mountains, frightful to look upon and uninhabited.” Bourrit began life as a miniature painter. A good many of his Alpine water colours have survived. Though they cannot challenge serious comparison with the mountain masterpieces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they are not without a certain merit. But Bourrit would not have become famous had he not deserted the brush for the pen. When the Alps claimed him, he gave up miniatures, and accepted an appointment as Precentor of Geneva Cathedral, a position which allowed him great leisure for climbing. He used to climb in the summer, and write up his journeys in the winter. He soon compiled a formidable list of books, and was hailed throughout Europe as the Historian of the Alps. There was no absurd modesty about Bourrit. He accepted the position with serene dignity. His house, he tells us, is “embellished with beautiful acacias, planned for the comfort and convenience of strangers who do not wish to leave Geneva without visiting the Historian of the Alps.” He tells us that Prince Henry of Prussia, acting on the advice of Frederick the Great, honoured him with a visit. Bourrit, in fact, received recognition in many distinguished quarters. The Princess Louise of Prussia sent him an engraving to recall “a woman whom you have to some extent taught to share your lofty sentiments.” Bourrit was always popular with the ladies, and no climber has shown a more generous appreciation for the sex. “The sex is very beautiful here,” became, as Mr. Gribble tells us, “a formula with him as soon as he began writing and continued a formula after he had passed his threescore years and ten.”

We have said that Bourrit’s actual record as a climber is rather disappointing. We may forget this, and remember only his whole-hearted devotion to the mountains. Even Gesner, Petrarch, and Marti seem balanced and cold when they set their tributes besides Bourrit’s large enthusiasm. Bourrit did not carry a barometer with him on his travels. He did not feel the need to justify his wanderings by collecting a mass of scientific data. Nor did he assume that a mountain tour should be written up as a mere guide-book record of times and route. He is supremely concerned with the ennobling effect of mountain scenery on the human mind.

“At Chamounix,” he writes, “I have seen persons of every party in the state, who imagined that they loathed each other, nevertheless treating one another with courtesy, and even walking together. Returning to Geneva, and encountering the reproaches of their various friends, they merely answered in their defence, ‘Go, as we have gone, to the Montanvert, and take our share of the pure air that is to be breathed there; look thence at the unfamiliar beauties of Nature; contemplate from that terrace the greatness of natural objects and the littleness of man; and you will no longer be astonished that Nature has enabled us to subdue our passions.’ It is, in fact, the mountains that many men have to thank for their reconciliation with their fellows, and with the human race; and it is there that the rulers of the world and the heads of the nations ought to hold their meetings. Raised thus above the arena of passions and petty interests, and placed more immediately under the influence of Divine inspiration, one would see them descend from these mountains, each like a new Moses bringing with them codes of law based upon equity and justice.”