Ski-runs in the High Alps

by F. F. Roget

But were they as free from their ancient fears as they were willing to undergo fresh trials? I might well have my doubts when, this time, their father expressed a desire to see me before his boys acquiesced. The accident which attended our last expedition had left its mark in the minds of the people. The man with the broken leg had unfortunately hobbled about so long, on crutches, all over the country side, that this sight had rudely shaken the confidence which they were beginning to repose in me, as bringing into the country fresh means of earning a little money during the winter months.

The old Marti lady, particularly, whose heart had no eye—if this is not an Irish bull—for economic advantages that ran counter to the conservative character of her domestic affections, watched me wickedly from her doorstep, while her husband interviewed me in the village street. Here we stood, with the villagers round us, looking a picture truly symbolic.

An old father, clothed in authority by his age and experience, the preserver of the traditions of the past in his house, as in the village community, and bearing within himself the true doctrine of the guiding corporation; his sons, with their minds in that half-open condition which is that of so many young peasants of the present day, when they may be compared, without thereby losing anybody’s esteem, to oysters opening to the sunlight the shells out of which they cannot grow; the mother, anxious for those nurtured at her breast, the coming founders, as she hoped, of a domestic hearth like unto the old; a man from the outside, dropped maybe from a higher sphere, but disturbing the even tenour of their lives, and presenting in a new light to their awakening consciousness their sense of inferiority and perhaps of misdirected adherence to the past; lastly, the onlookers and passers-by, a homely throng, bearing witness, after the style of the Greek chorus in the village comedy.

I proposed to the old man that his sons should come again with me unhindered. We were a small party, and made up of such elements that there was but little chance of the last accident being repeated. But it had got to his ears that I had privately consulted with his sons as to pushing on from the Diablerets to the east over the Sanetsch and Rawyl passes. I had to confess that such was the intention of myself and of Marcel Kurz. Whereupon the old man held up his hands and his wife hurried to his side.

In the end it was decided that Ernest Marti should accompany me and my friend with provisions for one day only, and that on the next day the other brother and a porter would meet us on the Sanetsch pass. Unwilling to inquire at once what this porter arrangement might portend, lest the whole affair might be stranded on that inquiry, as a ship might do on leaving the stocks, we agreed to the suggestion. The conference broke up, each party being satisfied that it had gained one of its points.

Our ash planks carried us up without a hitch to the confines of the glacier. At the Oldenhorn hut, however, another of those sights awaited us which had made the brothers Marti feel queer. They of the Synagogue spent the witching hours of the next night in a drunken snowballing orgy. They pushed an enormous bolt of snow against the door of the hut during our peaceful slumbers therein. Never mind. We opened the window, got out through it into the snow, bored our way to the outside, and slipped down on to the ice. There was some spectral light in the air when we came out. The Oldenhorn battlements crackled and crepitated a little. When the sun lit them up from behind, it looked for a moment as if they were manned with a fringe of tittering monkeys. As I have said, there was a strange play of light in the air. But the snowballing might have been the work of avalanches. There is as a rule a natural explanation to be given of phenomena of this kind.

While the Oldenhorn pyramid glowed in the morning light, a veil of mist hung over the Zan Fleuron glacier. The mist in no ways interfered with our run. We flew like birds over the scene of the January accident. On the pass we sat down and waited. Victor Marti was to come up. But who was to accompany him up the pass, in the guise of a porter, with a further supply of provisions? We required no such thing as a porter—nor even guides, for the matter of that; but if I acted upon that view, the game was up. Local men would be slow in taking up the cry, the new cry: Winter mountaineering! So we looked for the expected two.

The mist still hung on the pass between us and the sun. Now and then the sun shone vaguely, as through cotton wool. When the wind broke the mist up in rifts a patch of blue would look down upon us benignly. At last, low down in the north, a black speck showed itself to our straining eyes. Then the speck divided up. There were two men, and something moving along close to the ground. This turned out to be a dog, dragging along a pair of ski. The dog got on very well on the hard frozen snow. But when about to leave the wind-beaten tract, he floundered and got no further. On inspection with my binoculars, the porter turned out to be none other than Father Marti, come to fetch his bairns. But we never quite knew why the dog was made to bring up an extra pair of ski.

The position was peculiar; the would-be porter could not cover the distance which separated him from us. We might have snapped our fingers at him and parodied the biblical phrase: “Thus far shalt thou come and no farther.”