Ski-runs in the High Alps

by F. F. Roget

Be this as it may, I hope I may never be uncharitable enough to desire, for ski-ing parties, an encounter with those ice-slab pyramids.

The caretaker who in winter keeps watch over the Schwarenbach Hotel had just come down to join in the New Year festivities. He announced that there was on the heights a fresh layer of snow 30 inches deep. Stoller, a guide of some reputation, whose advice we applied for, was of opinion that we should put off our departure till the 2nd of January. The advice might be sound, but I did not like it because I knew how badly the men I might be about to engage were likely to spend their time on New Year’s Day. As a matter of fact, when we did enter the Gasternthal, we found nothing like the amount of snow that we were told would impede our way. From Stoller, who had just returned from a week’s engagement to teach the rudiments of ski-ing to a Swiss club, we heard that all guides with first-class certificates were away climbing, and that he, having only just returned, would not be available. We engaged three men, under his advice and under that of Egger, for whom Arnold Lunn had a valuable letter of introduction from his father. One of these men had a guide’s certificate, the other two were porters.

I took three men because I wanted to carry sufficient commissariat for six days, which the raid was supposed to last, with a margin in case of a check being put on our progress by a change in the weather or some accident that could not be foreseen. I hoped to force my way through without touching any inhabited spot before we reached Guttannen. We went down to Kippel, because our progress was so smooth and easy that it would have been a pity to sleep in a chalet at Guggi just for the pleasure of not stopping in a decent hotel.

None of our men had been beyond the Aletsch glacier. This I did not mind, having previously gone over the whole route in summer. Provided those men carried their loads from hut to hut, we should be satisfied.

Arnold Lunn says in the Isis that we arrived in Kandersteg just in time for a fancy dress ball, and aroused considerable curiosity as to what we were supposed to represent. At dinner he sat next to a man who, lost to all sense of local colour, had come dressed as a nigger minstrel. This was on New Year’s Eve.

Next day we pottered round Kandersteg, one of us receiving much useful advice as to how to fix on his ski, from a lady who was under the quite pardonable impression that she was addressing a novice, while the other was considered enough of an expert to instruct another lady who had the good taste not to be so sure of her own knowledge.

We left Kandersteg on the morning of January 2nd. As usual in those early starts, we had plenty of time, the five of us, to try and find out of what stuff each and every member of the party was made. It was my first expedition with Arnold Lunn. I was entitled to think he would take my measure as curiously as I was about to take his. Two of our men turned out to be quite satisfactory, but the third was destined to become the butt of our satire. I am not prepared to say that he had spent New Year’s Day in those excesses which I dreaded, because I have since been told by old Egger that Adolf—as we shall agree to call him—was in bad health when he undertook to serve us. Whatever might be the cause, whether excusable or not, he showed himself throughout in the colours in which he is painted—maybe somewhat to the amusement of our readers—by Arnold Lunn and myself.

Those who mountaineer for sport are very much like schoolboys, or they become schoolboys for the nonce. The printed records of mountaineering are to a great extent records of the kind of humour that overgrown and elderly boys—if I may so describe those of us who have gone through public school-life and wish to preserve some of its characteristics in a sphere where these may be as harmless to others as comforting to themselves—would be expected to cultivate.

For us, in the course of a constant fellowship of seven days, Adolf soon represented quite a definite and rather objectionable specimen of the human kind. We found him lazy, slow, clumsy, ever ready to take undue advantage. Some one, who had evidently made a close study of political types, dubbed him the Socialist, and the title stuck. For my part, anxious to secure for him a place among types ranking in a higher class, I placed him, under the name of Thersites, in a gallery of classical portraits in which I allotted to Arnold the part of fiery Achilles, and to myself that of the worldly-wise and cunningly cautious Ulysses.