There is in the vestibule of the University buildings at Geneva, on the first floor, a magnificent plaster model of Switzerland, true to scale. Each time I cast my eyes upon this model I more fully realise how exactly the author’s execution of the relief, based on science, corresponds with the runner’s conception, based on experience. In its own unvarnished language, the model says: “By me know the Alps, and by them know thyself and be modest, thou hast not done so much after all.”
So the general public may now understand why the runner sees the Alpine world in his own perspective. The real reliefs are printed on his mind. A summer tourist, who instead of fitting foot-rules to his feet, pegs or stumps along, can with difficulty enter into the runner’s notion.
Orographic conformation and questions of exposure are ski-running matters. The runner studies the relievo in the light of two or three truisms resting on experience, which are as conditions determining the rational use of ski and assuring the pleasure of the runner.
1. The runner aims at rising rapidly, because he cannot draw from his ski a full measure of pleasure except from the moment when the ski cease to be the means of carrying his weight uphill, and become merely a means of velocity.
2. While rising as abruptly as he possibly can, the runner seeks out—for this tiresome operation is seldom avoidable—the declivities whose exposure marks them out as unsuitable for a good run down. No wonder. It is not to his interest to throw away, as it were, good slopes by employing them for work uphill. Now, steepnesses turned to the south, south-west, and west, afford poor running, viewed, of course, in their generality.
Here meteorology—or, in plain English, weather—is more important than geography, because warm winds, whether they blow soft or wild, beat upon those faces. When not actually dangerous, such defective slopes are convenient for rising to the high levels. The runner who knows how to take advantage both of meteorology and orography shows himself possessed of an advanced knowledge of his craft.
3. The best running hills are those whose gentler slopes are exposed north and east. The winds from those quarters are not warm winds, though they too have their own way of spoiling the snow. At any rate, the sun—which has even in winter powers for mischief—is too low on the southern horizon to interfere with the powdery condition of snow facing north. But there is not much gained in mapping out one’s tour in the manner indicated if one is landed for the descent on abrupt, though northern or eastern, slopes.
ON THE TOP OF THE FINSTERAARHORN.
To face p. 80.