But its author was in far too sulky a condition to appreciate a sunrise.
By nine o’clock, with our troubles well ended, we were all comfortably seated on the rounded edges of the famous breakfast-table, an erratic stone in the centre of that wonderful ice quadrivium marked on the maps as Concordia Platz, in which the stone in question expresses the altitude in four figures (2,780 metres). Carpeted in the purest white, surrounded by pyramids in the best assorted white marble architecture, set out with flying buttresses and domes in jasper, jade, and sapphire, the Concordia Platz did not betoken the symmetrical designing power of man, but perfect harmony in the work of Nature’s agents—sun, snow, rock, and ice.
What a perfectly beautiful city for the dead, these precincts and temple whence the handiwork of man was absent! And what a number of graves were laid under the pavement of this cathedral! Think of the tears shed for the many who came here, impelled by the desire to behold in this world a habitation pure enough for angels, and whose human strength gave way before the resistance opposed by the cruel guardians of this blissful abode!
During breakfast we discussed our plans. Our eyes were fixed upon the Jungfrau, partly because we had vaguely talked of the tempting ascent, but still more because, having come up here with ice-axes, regulation ropes, and ten-pronged climbing-irons, it was quite plain that a serious ascent entered into our programme. If I may put it frankly, pure adventure was not the purpose that brought me on the Concordia Platz. I wished to put to the test of reality, in the highest mountain rink of the Bernese range, the theory forced upon my mind by observations and experiences elsewhere.
I had learnt conclusively much that was new and interesting about winter conditions in the forest zone and on the denuded grazings that rise above them. The comparatively easy slanting and horizontal expanses of the ice-covered parts of the Alps had yielded some positive information to the winter pioneers now visiting them for the first time. Now I wanted to know, with ever-increasing accuracy, how those huge spurs of rock and ice that are thrown up into the sky from the glacier region behaved in winter. Hitherto they had been looked at and their condition judged from a distance. Conclusions come to in that manner were extremely unfavourable to their accessibility. One might, moreover, safely say that no scientific men had subjected the winter Alps to the same scrutiny as, in the years following the middle of the nineteenth century, made Agassiz, Desor, the Englishmen Tyndall and Sir John Lubbock, famous, and so many more whose hard and shrewd thinking about the physical complexion of the Alps has met with general acceptance.
In a humbler sphere, too, among men in daily contact with the Alps, such as guides and chamois hunters, there was till lately an absolutely ineradicable belief that the Alp peaks would oppose almost insuperable obstacles to those bold enough to grapple with them under winter conditions.
But neither scientific scholars nor practical men could exactly say why this should be the case. It was one of those vague impressions or beliefs which are more imperative in proportion as actual first-hand knowledge is scantier.
Most would tell you, when pressed, that in January the High Alps could not but be found smothered in the most stupendous quantities of snow that the frightened imagination could body forth, and that in those masses rock peaks and ice domes would be buried alike.
Once more, on the Concordia Platz, the notion I had formed as to the comparative scarcity of snow on the flanks of the leading summits of our Alps—those exceeding 10,000 feet—was about to be reported upon and tested by impartial eyes.