To avoid being a prominent object when on a mountain may be difficult, for self-effacement is not an easy thing. Moreover, on the plains a man may be killed, as offering the best conductor for the lightning, and determine the direction of the discharge, no tree or other high point being near.
The traveller should find a hollow place or hole as soon as possible, and stay there until the storm has abated. The sensitive aneroid may have given warning of the approaching clouds, a warning to take, as sailors say, “any port in a storm.”
The danger of standing under a tree is well known, but this applies rather to trees that offer a prominent mark. In large forests it appears that the lightning does not always single out the tallest trees, and the trees when struck are seldom set on fire, though foresters find the lightning a convenient excuse for their own carelessness.
In the huge forests of Russia and Norway, the pines, with their thousand masts and millions of pointed leaves, are said to act as protectors for themselves and to relieve tension for the whole district by their distribution.
Mr. Justice Wills sounds a true note of caution in the introduction to Mr. Dent’s Badminton book, when he says: “There are three things specially to be dreaded on the mountains as beyond human control and occasionally beyond human foresight: bad weather, falling stones, steep grass slopes, with herbage, either short or dry, or long and wet and frozen. I do not think it possible for any one who has not felt it to have any idea what very bad weather means in high places, even in places by no means of the highest; or to imagine the rapidity with which, under unsettled atmospheric conditions, the destructive forces of nature can be raised, and the worst assaults of the enemy delivered.
“Falling stones may come from the most unexpected places, and I have seen from my own Alpine home a whole flake of mountain side peel off without warning, and sweep with a cannonade of thirty hours’ duration a gully that I and mine have used for years as a highway to the upper world.
“Slopes of grass look so easy, and are so treacherous, that it is scarcely possible to secure for them the respect which they have a deadly fashion of enforcing. There are few other dangers which care and knowledge will not eliminate.”
It will be pardoned me, I trust, if, making a digression from the special to the general, I pass from Alpine accidents to consider others connected with climbing, which frequently occur to workmen. It was my sympathy with climbing which first drew my attention to the number of disabling accidents resulting to labourers from using only one hand in climbing ladders and carrying something, however slight, which hampers the other hand. There is no general understanding or training among workmen on this point. The weight could nearly always be so slung or balanced as to keep both hands free for climbing steps or ladders.
Scaffolders often run greater risks than bricklayers in attempting to climb ladders, using one hand instead of both. Under my care lately was a scaffolder who fell thirty feet, breaking his collar bone and several ribs, lacerating his right lung and the liver. From the latter injury, by an abdominal operation, I drained away several pints of bile and blood clots. He made a good recovery and returned to his wife and six children still able to earn a living for them. He tells me that never again will he carry a bundle of shavings under one arm when climbing a long ladder. On nearing the top, and in making the traverse to reach the platform, the slip occurred which was so nearly fatal. Both the balance and the grip were wanting at the critical point.