These notes may be found acceptable to any novitiate, who, after making his first climb, can feel what Meredith’s hero in The Amazing Marriage so well expresses to his comrade:
“I shall never forget the walk we’ve had. I have to thank you for the noblest of pleasures. You’ve taught me—well, a thousand things; the things money can’t buy. What mornings they were! and the dead-tired nights! Under the rock, and up to see the snowy peak pink in a gap of thick mist. You were right: it made a crimsoning colour shine like a new idea. Up in those mountains one walks with the divinities, you said. It’s perfectly true. I shall remember I did. I have a treasure for life! Now I understand where you get your ideas. The life we lead down there is hoggish. You have chosen the right.”
A small matter will suggest pleasant memories of mountaineering to those (harmless degenerates, according to Max Nordau) who see the Mer de Glace in every frozen puddle, as a child sees pictures in the fire.
Many a man helping a dish of Devonshire junket on his table, thinking of Forbes’s viscous theory, watches for the place opposite the first gap made by the spoon, where in the junket there forms a chasm parallel with the side, still leaving a fringe or shelf attached to the edge of the dish—for him at the moment that crack is a bergschrund—there he finds at one point a bridge convenient for crossing, at another an impossible yawning crevasse.
Such a man will not find these notes dull, for he can enjoy the plainest junket, and though he finds recorded few new things, yet pleasant thoughts will be suggested of the past, and infinite possibilities for the future.
Cambridge, May 1, 1896.
CONTENTS
| PAGE | |
| An Alpine Letter, 1895, | [1] |
| Mountaineering in Dauphiné, 1894, | [19] |
| Switzerland and Savoy in 1893, | [42] |
| An Alpine Letter, 1892, | [67] |
| A Month upon the Mountains, 1891, | [93] |
| On the Climbing Foot, | [119] |
| On Accidents, | [145] |
| Index, | [168] |