To the depths of its own tranquillity.’
“I shall never forget the tantalising suspense of that last slope. For twelve hours a little strip of blue behind the sky-line had been an earnest of the revelation that was awaiting us. For some six hours we had been faced by this same long slope in front and above. Now only a few yards remained. We took them at a rush. At sunset exactly, the sky-line was beneath our feet and in one moment were set forth before us, backed by the Finsteraarhorn, the ‘urns of the silent snow’ from which the greatest of all the Alpine glaciers draws its strength. The rays of the risen moon mingled with the ebbing twilight and lent an atmosphere of mystery to our surroundings. For the moment we were no longer of the earth earthly, for the moment the Loetschenlücke became a magic casement opening into perilous snows ’mid faery lands forlorn.’
“Thus what, seen from a distance, was obtrusively—almost offensively—a pass, wore a peculiar fascination for that very reason. It grew upon the imagination with the magic of those corners one has only turned in one’s dreams.”
Like the historic gap between the Mönch and Jungfrau, it led to the solitudes of the Aletsch, which Lunn had never seen save as a white streak from distant ranges. Like all good mountaineers, who have usefully wasted hours over a map in keen and eager anticipation, he now could dwell with gladness upon the reality of the mental picture elaborated long ago, while contemplating certain white spaces on an old copy of the Siegfried map.
But the inevitable anti-climax that dogs the flight of all poets was awaiting us. “On this occasion it took the form of the club hut stove, and a more effective bathos has never been devised. Amongst the torments of the damned I am sure the smoking stove holds a proud place.” Some of last summer’s moisture had remained in the pipe. Our fire might have been of green wood and wrung from us copious tears.
“The guides for the space of some half-hour, wrestled and fought and prayed, Kalbermatten meanwhile keeping up a running conversation with his favourite saint. Adolf, with a wonderful sense of the fitness of things, chose the moment when supper was on the table to put in a belated appearance. His contribution to the evening’s work was a successful attempt to burn my thick socks,” writes Lunn, righteously indignant.
The temperature outside the hut was 8° Centigrade under zero on arriving and, very naturally, somewhat colder inside. At the Mutthorn hut we had noted 9° Centigrade under zero in the evening and 10° in the morning.
Our expedition unfolded itself from day to day with the monotony and exactitude of a scroll. On the 5th, by seven o’clock, an hour before sunrise, we were again on the slide eastwards. The lie of the land was nasty. Most of us turned a somersault or two, a performance at which those will not be astonished who have come down in summer from the Egon von Steiger hut to the Gross-Aletsch-Firn. Then badly conducted parties are daily watched from the Concordia huts, with no little curiosity. They flounder about till they are often heard calling for help, or seen disappearing in a crevasse, from which moment they are entitled, under the rules of the game, to a search party.
In his diary Lunn says that the Aletschhorn had shoved its head in front of the moon. The solitude was almost oppressive. “Never have I so realised the weakness of the cry that the Alps are played out and overcrowded. True, some thousands of climbers have explored their inmost recesses; but substantially they are little changed from the peaks that looked down on Hannibal:—
“‘Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke