“Where ignorance is bliss
’T were the height of folly to be otherwise,”
fits no situation better than mountain climbing. I have said in the bitterness of my soul, on some cloud-splitting peak, as I tried to gulp enough air to fill a small corner of my lungs, that the man who belonged to an Alpine Club was prima facie a fool. Scaling mountains for some definitely profitable purpose, like finding or working a silver mine, or getting a wide view so as properly to map out the region, or for a knowledge of its fauna and flora, is disagreeable but endurable, because you are sustained by the advantages to accrue; but to toil up there for fun—bah! Yet people will go on doing it, and those who know better will follow after, and the heart of the grumbler will grow sick as he sees of how little avail are his words and the testimony of his sufferings.
It was so this time. Admonitions that upright distances were the most deceiving of all aspects of nature; that the higher you went the steeper the slope and the more insecure and toilsome the foothold; these, with other remonstrances, were totally unheeded, and three misguided mortals decided to go. Then the growler yielded—what else could he do? He had survived many a previous ascent, and could not afford to assume a cowardice that really didn’t belong to him. So he chose that horn of the dilemma, and left the reader to the conclusion that in telling this tale, after the previous paragraph, he “writ himself down an ass.”
All went but the Musician. Among the gentlemen were divided the photographic camera and materials, and the whisky, while the Madame set off sturdily with field-glasses over her shoulder, and a revolver strapped around her shapely waist. Dinner was ordered for two o’clock, and up we started. The Madame wrote to her friend about it as follows (the letter, I declare, smelled of camphor):
“I assure you, my dear Mrs. McAngle, that not more than a hundred feet had been gone over before the inexperienced of our party began to feel the effects of rarefied air, although thus far it was easy enough walking. There was no path, of course, and we simply tramped over a grassy slope sprinkled with flowers and covered by trees that shaded us from the sun. Gorges which were hardly perceptible as such from the valley, now proved to be uncomfortably deep gashes in the broad mountain-side, and tiny streams came down each one of them, to water dense thickets along their banks. In one place, about a thousand feet above our starting point, we came across the remains of a camp made by some man who thought he had found precious metal. Dreary enough it looked now, with its dismantled roof and wet and moldy bed of leaves.
“By this time breathing has become a conscious difficulty. I speak in the present tense, my dear, because the recollection is very vivid, and it seems almost as though I am again trudging over those sharp-edged rocks. Every ten minutes further progress becomes an utter impossibility for me, and rest absolutely necessary; but one recuperates in even less time than it takes to become exhausted, and starts on again. Nevertheless I can not go as fast as the gentlemen, who have no skirts to drag along.
“Now the comparatively easy climbing is over. Flowers and grass have grown scarce, and almost all the trees have disappeared. Nausea is beginning to annoy me, and I was never more glad in my life than now, when I discover some raspberry bushes and eagerly gather the ripe fruit, whose pleasant acid brings moisture to my parched mouth and comforts my sad stomach, for there is no water or snow here, and I know it would not be best to drink if there were.
“Even the berries are gone now. Far above and on all sides I see nothing but fragments of rocks. For centuries, wind, frost, rain and snow have been hard at work leveling the mountains. They have broken up the hard masses of yellowish white trachyte, and the dikes of black basalt into small pieces—some as minute as walnuts, but most of them much larger, with sharp-pointed edges that cut my feet. Across these vast fields the wild sheep, thinking nothing of jumping and gamboling over such steep slopes of broken stones, have made trails that cross and criss-cross everywhere. Availing ourselves of these is some help, as we all settle down to persistent, never-ending climbing.
“Up, up, up. You have forgotten how to breathe; your back and head are aching; you have found a stick, and lean more and more upon it; you look down on the back of a hawk far below you with sullen envy; you devoutly wish you had never come, but will not give up. At length a stupor creeps over you. You never expect to reach the top, but you do not care; old long-forgotten songs go through your brain and seem to try to lull you to sleep. You see in the distance one of the strong ones reach the summit and wave his hat; you are beyond sensation, and it is all a dream. Finally you stagger over the last ledge and throw yourself down on the top and feebly call for—whisky. Mrs. McAngle, I am a teetotaller; I hate whisky! But just then I would have given half my fortune had it been necessary for the one swallow which did me so much good.”