CHAPTER VII
THE GRAND COMBIN
The Panossière hut—Tropical winter heat—Schoolboys and the Matterhorn—Shall it be rock or snow?—The Combin de Valsorey—My third ascent of the Grand Combin—The track home—Col des Avolions—Natural highways of a new character—Twenty-three thousand feet ascended on ski.
On the sixth day of my expedition we left Lourtier shortly before 10 o’clock a.m., knowing full well that we were in no hurry, that we meant to thoroughly enjoy our day’s work, and that the hospitable door of the Cabane de Panossière would be no more difficult to open after sunset than before.
As soon as we had passed the last houses of Lourtier, we put on our ski, and, practically, did not remove them from our feet till eight o’clock that evening, allowing for two hours’ rest in the heat of the day, from two to four. We branched off from the Fionnay direction to turn to the right at Granges Neuves, crossing the bridge to Mayens du Revers, and hence rising towards the path that leads in summer from Fionnay to the Alpe de Corbassière. We thus reached, by two o’clock, after passing the wooden cross at the point 1,967, and just beyond the chalets of the Alpe de Corbassière, the point 2,227 of the map. We spent there two hours, under a tropical sun. Then we plunged down a gully to the west, on our right, so as to advance on ground which the sun had not softened, and rose again along the side moraine to the point 2,644, whence there lay before us a most romantic moonlit landscape.
The hut was still in darkness when I reached it, the last of the party, in order to enjoy the sensation of seeing the windows dimly lit by the candlelight within, and the smoke curling up out of the chimney. The impression was one of charming “cosiness,” in the middle of a more than Arctic landscape, and there was that sublimity above and around which beggars the art of description. A snow and wind-tight Alpine hut, well stocked with fuel and blankets, well supplied with plain food and wholesome drink from the provision bag of its guests, is, in midwinter, one of the snuggest “ingle-nooks” a natural epicure may wish for, and, strange to say, what he may therein find most pleasurable is the shade and coolness of the shelter, so fairly could I compare our tramp of that day to a trip in the “scrub” under the equator. Forsooth, the prejudice which still prevails against roaming in winter at high altitudes is a remnant of that state of mind which kept early explorers of the High Alps tramping round and round the foot of such hills as the Matterhorn, which Macaulay’s healthy “schoolboy” would now think nothing of rushing at, with his sisters trailing behind.
If it is possible, in sporting circles, to speak of the Zeit Geist without pedantry, we should say that the spirit of the time, in matters mountaineering, has undergone a remarkable change since the advent of Macaulay’s proverbial schoolboy.
Or is the change not rather a return to a healthier frame of mind?
It is quite true that in few sports is the extreme penalty, death, so constantly near at hand as in mountaineering. But is it not quite apparent, too, that the early lovers of the Alps were full-grown, leisured, and cultured men, whose training, occupation, or temper, had not properly prepared them to see the risk in its true proportions? From them a whole generation took the cue. Then came another, for which the taking of risks exceeding the modicum attached to a passive existence was the touchstone of manliness. They sought in the Alps opportunities for strenuous displays, as well as haunts where the harassed soul could take holiday. They are the generation which made of Switzerland the playground of Europe. It is they who brought mountaineering to the present period, when first ascents have become a hackneyed amusement, and schoolboys marvel at the facility of undertakings which, when attempted for the first time in bygone days, rightly called forth the admiration of the civilised world. Is it in the modern spirit that, on the morning of my seventh day, with the grand unconcern of an ever-victorious squad, hitherto scratchless, bruiseless, and unwearied, we took the route, well known to all of us, which leads up the Glacier de Corbassière to the Col des Maisons Blanches? On reaching the plateau which precedes the col, we made up our minds as to the choice between the two routes to the top of Grand Combin.