ALPINE ASCENTS.
Why? Because the innocents who do it dearly love to start out, the males with their knee breeches and horrible spiked shoes, and the females with their hideous dresses, and after the ascent is either made, or not made, it is a pleasant thing to be photographed in groups in these costumes. Thousands of these photographs are taken, for home consumption.
Everybody likes to be photographed in the act of doing what they can’t do. The stupid man who never looks into a book always wants to be taken with one elbow upon a pile of books, and his fore finger thoughtfully upon his forehead, as though he were devising a plan for the payment of the national debt; the young sprout who buys a double-barreled shot-gun, which is destined never to take animal life, always rushes to be photographed in complete sporting costume, shot-gun, game-bag, dog and all; and where was there ever a militia officer who did not want to be photographed in full uniform, as though he had served with credit through the great rebellion?
So these Alpine climbers, these Mt. Blanc ascenders, would no more leave Chamonix without being photographed in costume than they would leave their letters of credit behind them.
Photography is an unconscious liar. It is as unreliable as history.
Mt. Blanc was first ascended in 1786; then in 1787; again in 1825. Since then the trip has been made several times, two ladies, even, having gone to the very summit.
The guides and souvenir dealers in Chamonix are full of stories of the dangers incurred in making the trip. They say that some forty or fifty years ago a couple of guides made a misstep, and were hurled down a chasm. An attempt was made to recover the bodies but without success. They were never found as a whole. Some thirty or forty years afterward, portions of their clothing, with a few bones, were found in a glacier, having been gradually worked from the place they were killed, by the slow but continual motion of the ice. They didn’t show us the shoes nor the bones, so we did not feel obliged to believe the story.
Accidents! There have been enough of them to deter any sane man or woman from attempting the perilous ascent. The scientists who ascend these dizzy heights, which a goat hardly dares essay, may be excused, for the real scientist is bound by his profession to risk his life any time to establish or demolish