The last three hours of our walk lay along the névé of the Tschingel glacier, a snow valley bounded on the north by the cliffs of the Blümlisalp, on the south by the gently rising Petersgrat.
“The last lingering rays,” writes Arnold Lunn, “faded from the snows, but the sunset was soon followed by the rise of the full moon, a moon undreamt of in our English skies, so bright that I read with ease a page of my note-book. Those who have only seen her ‘hurrying with unhandsome thrift of silver’ over English landscapes have little idea of her real beauty. Before we reached the hut we had been climbing fourteen hours uphill, loaded with heavy sacks. Yet such was the mysterious fascination of the moonlit snows that we made no attempt to hurry. Again and again we stopped, lost in silent wonder.
“Straight ahead, the Jungfrau, backed by the slender cone of the Eiger, rose above a sea of shadows. The moonlight slept on her snowy terraces, steeping in silentness her cliffs and glaciers, and revealed the whole as a living monument of incarnate light. A hut stood in a cirque of snow. Here the wind had played strange havoc, torturing the billows and cornices into fantastic shapes. Anything more weirdly beautiful than the glancing sheen of this hollow I cannot conceive. Its colour could only be compared, if at all, to the fiery blue of Capri’s grotto.”
The writer of the above lines, whom we shall not tire of quoting in this chapter, does not overpaint the picture. What could be more beautiful, more entrancing, than the Tschingel terrace, by moonlight, in the middle of winter? Standing on a balcony little less than 10,000 feet high, we were able to read our maps, after ten o’clock at night, as plainly as at noonday.
To the furrowed and broken ribs of the Blümlisalp clung several small glaciers, suspended in the couloirs like swallows’ nests in the eaves of a ruined castle. The sharp pyramid of the Eiger shone beyond the white cupolas of the airy Jungfrau, as though they had been the distant walls and minarets of an Oriental city. The snows about us were alive with a smooth and soft radiance. The sky was transparent, and as yet hung about with light veils. Silver clouds fluttered about the peaks, and when they floated into the moonlight from behind them, they flashed forth like fishes when the sun plays upon their scales. Layers of purple and crimson haze rested upon one another along the horizon. The play of light and shade upon the black patches and white spots of the visible world showed them, according to whither you looked, wreathed in smiles or puckered up in frowns. Buttresses, cliffs, abysses swam in a bluish mist, in which the twinkling rays of a million stars danced as sparkling dust.
It is a law of this world that what is unbecoming—τα ου δεοντα of Greek comedy—must ever come to underline and show off the most beautiful sights by giving them a contradictory background. For Arnold and myself, the last three hours of that day were spent on one of the most beautiful walks we can remember. But Adolf had been completely knocked up long before. During the self-same last three hours he experienced a great desire for sleep, and the burden of his refrain was not, “How grand! How beautiful!” but “Very, very tired!” Sometimes he dozed; sometimes he half uttered swear-words, which issued from his throat like stones rattling down a mountain gully. I had to send one of the other men to his help. Whether we shouted to him Thersites or Circe, or the Socialist, he cared not. What went to his heart, and as it were broke his wind, was that we had left his tea-house far behind and would not take him back across the beloved threshold. A miserable Alpine hut awaited his tottering footsteps. He staggered through the doorway and collapsed on the mattresses, sleeping at last when to sleep was decent. What was it to him that every curve in the swelling snows, every crag and buttress of the Blümlisalp cliffs was lit up by the mellow rays of the mountain moon?
Of the night spent in the Mutthorn hut nothing need be said, except that it seemed to us a perfect night. At 5.30 the alarum went off, and, if Arnold Lunn’s story be trusted—and it must be, in the absence of any other accountable person, as I was asleep at that moment—the ring of the bell was accompanied by an ill-sounding German epithet. A guide stumbled to the door, threw it open, and muttered in more parliamentary language: “Abscheuliches Wetter.” Arnold says—and I must trust him in this again, for I was still asleep—that a sense of sickening disappointment, such as climbers know so well, fell upon the waking inmates of the hut, a definition which must be taken to exclude Adolf and myself. Arnold stepped outside and discovered heavy grey clouds blowing up from behind the Eiger, sniffed a gust of south-westerly wind, laid his finger on sticky snow, and, in thus feeling the pulse of the weather, became aware of a high temperature.
He says: “We sulkily despatched our breakfast and started up the slope leading towards the Petersgrat. Suddenly Professor Roget caught sight, through a gap beyond the Blümlisalp, of the still lake of fog hanging quite undisturbed over the plain of Switzerland and above lake Thun. I should like to say that he gave a cry of surprise, but, alas! the professor has his emotions under strict control, and was content to rapidly communicate to us his analysis of the apparent bad weather. These unauspicious phenomena were merely local disturbances, which would vanish after dawn. The westerly breeze was only a glacier wind, the grey clouds only the effect of the intense solar heat collected the day before and blending throughout the night with the cold air from the snows. As long as the Nebelmeer remained undisturbed, no bad weather need be feared. Every sign of evil actually vanished an hour after sunrise.”
On the Petersgrat we could fancy ourselves on the top of the globe. We were standing on the highest point of a curved surface, shaped like a balloon, and on all sides it seemed to fall away into immensity. Beyond, rose in gigantic outline the summits of the Alps and, still further, in long sinuous lines curving in and out of sight, the Jura, the Vosges, and all that distant girdle that hangs loosely about the outskirts of Switzerland. The winter fog filled up the intervals. Afar, there was not a breath of wind, not a whirl in the air.
The phenomenon that alarmed my party was that which is well known under the name of Foehn, a phenomenon which may assume almost any dimensions, sometimes general enough to embrace the whole of the Alps, and sometimes so closely circumscribed that you might almost compare it to the motion in the air produced by a small top spinning round on the palm of your hand.