“The church door was carved by the hand of some long-forgotten genius, carved with a delicacy of execution surprising in this remote corner of the Alps. We stopped for breakfast in some cheese-making chalets high up in the valley. Here we exchanged some remarks on cows and kindred subjects and gently chaffed the cheese-makers on the proverbially high stature of the men of Ried. But one realised throughout the barrier which one could never pass. We could form little or no conception of the world as seen through their eyes. To them these mountains must seem a waste by-product, an inexplicable freak on the part of the Creator. They regarded us and our ski with that amused tolerance that everyone extends to those idiosyncrasies which are not personally annoying.
“This rugged conservatism is nowhere so accentuated as among those who are shut off by mountain barriers from the ‘sick, hurry, and divided aims’ of modern life. Theirs is the spirit so gently satirised in Utopia. These things they say pleased our forefathers and ancestors: would God we might be as witty and wise!
“For six hundred years their forefathers had worshipped in the little church we had passed, sheltered by the hills from all breath of modern scepticism, apparently undisturbed by the thought that beyond them existed spirits who recklessly doubted the priest’s control over the economy of nature in such modest details as harvest rains. The Loetschenthal still possesses the strange pathetic beauty of those secluded Catholic valleys whose inhabitants seem to live a life as old as the hills themselves, and in which one poor priest and one little church stand forth as the only help, the only symbol of the world outside, and of ages not absolutely prehistoric.”
Arnold Lunn relates that after leaving the chalets he had an amusing talk with Theodore Kalbermatten, whom I had engaged to carry my sack up to the club hut. A fine-looking fellow, he showed a touch of that not ungraceful swagger which one notices in many guides and in which Lunn rightly sees nothing more than the unsophisticated pride that humble and well-meaning men take in the achievement of good work. But business is business. Lunn says very wittily that the conversation concluded with the inevitable production of a card, coupled with the caution that, though there were many Kalbermattens, there was but one Theodore Kalbermatten.
Anyhow, we were soon great friends with Theodore. The day was indeed long enough—like the glacier on which we were wandering—to make and undo friendships several times over. Circumstances lent themselves so well to mere strolling—think what it is to be able to cross the Bernese Oberland without once having one’s foot brought up against a stone—that we pressed our pace no more on this third day than on the preceding. We might have been Egyptian sages walking up and down in conversation outside the porticoes of Thebes with the hundred gates. Had we been told that what we stirred up with our ski were the burning sands of Africa which we mistook for Alpine snow, because our eyes were under the spell of mirage, it would have been ungracious on our part to pretend to know better, so much did we long for the coolness of the evening, for sea breezes and the dew at dusk, as Arabs might, returning upon their tired steeds to the secrecy of the oasis, after a raid in the desert.
All said and done, we found that we had spent twelve hours in reaching the summit of the Loetschenlücke pass. Arnold’s poetic gift found at every step fresh sustenance. He had discovered the beau ideal of a pass. “It was,” he says, “the only opening at the head of the valley, visible, with the whole length of the glacier, during the entire day. For twelve hours a little gap backed by blue sky told of a wonderful new world that we should see from the summit. Above us we caught sight of our goal, the Egon von Steiger hut, bearing the name of a Swiss climber who perished on the Doldenhorn, and built in his memory. This is the real ungrudging spirit of mountain lovers, the attitude which Mummery sums up so well. ‘The great mountains,’ he writes, ‘sometimes demand a sacrifice, but the true mountaineer would not forego their worship even though he knew himself to be the destined victim.’
“We had the whole day,” says Lunn, “to reach the hut, and without being lazy, were wise enough not to hurry, and, indeed, there was no temptation to rush on. The time was all too short to take in the wonders of the Anen glacier on our left, the stern beauty of the Sattelhorn cliffs on our right. Slowly the distant ranges climbed higher into the sky. Peacefully the morning merged into the afternoon, and the afternoon into the evening. We paused below the final slope to watch the glow creeping down the snows of Mont Blanc. Even the guides were impressed by the strange stillness, as—
‘Light and sound ebbed from the earth,
Like the tide of the full and weary sea,