Here, then, is the function of mountains in relation to human life. To every one there is opened (if he knows it) his own doorway for stepping out into space—for detaching himself for a time from the heavy environment of customary thought. To many it is music that furnishes this passport; to others poetry; to some few the philosophic reverie, or deliberate practice of the yoga. I have ventured to speak of mountain climbing in a similar relation, and to suggest that, in certain aspects, it is indeed a form of ecstasy, a standing above, and out of, oneself. The mind, no less than the body, has its Snowdons and its Helvellyns—its Crib Gochs and its Striding Edges—and when we climb them we may rise superior, not only to the visible landscape but to ourselves, and survey from a new vantage-point the low-lying flats and pastures, or shall we say the tablelands (too often literally so), of our own tastes and habits. How many astronomers are busily intent on surveying the Mountains of the Moon! And shall we not devote at least equal attention to these Mountains of the Mind, which are far nearer, clearer, and more real to us? Their secret, maybe, we shall never fully read; it is at least our privilege to have guessed at it.
Thus it is that these our British highlands are sacred ground to some of us. We have gone on pilgrimage to them again and again, until the association has become, in a manner, a personal one; for there are instinctive sympathies with places as with people, and to many, as to myself, the connexion with certain mountains has been a deep and lasting influence. How many days, amounting to months and years of my life, have I spent in their company; and how often have I been keenly conscious of their presence, even when living far away from them in the din and dust of towns! Going back to these mountain shrines, after long and unwilling absence, we find that in heart we have never left them at all.
II
At the Shrine of Snowdon
It is commonly said that the approach to Snowdon begins at Capel Curig; but this is a very shortsighted and unimaginative way of regarding so rich an experience as a pilgrimage to the heart of Wales. To the true mountain lover, the approach begins at Euston Square. Yes, there, in the great busy station, when you have uttered the magic word, “Bettws-y-Coed,” and have received what looks like a mere railway ticket, but is, in fact, a passport to the enchanted fastnesses of the hills—from that moment, and all the day, as you glide swiftly through the broad fields of the Midlands, you see before you (if you are fitted to be a pilgrim at all) the distant ridges and cloud-capped peaks of Snowdonia, and hear the music of the streams.
For let it not be supposed that Capel Curig is, as other mountain hamlets are, a mere halting-place in the “circular tour” of North Wales. An old writer has called the place “an excellent inn in a desert,” but it is much more than that; it is an excellent desert round an inn. It is the special glory of the Capel that it lies, not in a sunken hollow, but on an open upland, some 700 feet above the sea, where the air, even at the hottest noontide, breathes crisp and bracing from the hills. The distance from Bettws-y-Coed is only five or six miles by road; in climate the difference is one that no mileage can express. From the low, moist woodlands you mount gradually up till you reach the point where the Llugwy river winds in a series of rocky falls round the base of Moel Siabod; then there is a bend, and yet another bend, in the valley, and you find yourself at St. Curig’s shrine. Great mountains are all around you, but there is a sense of space and freedom, with wild slopes of grass and rock stretching up and back to the higher ridges that lie behind. One is not oppressed, as so often in mountain districts, by the nearness of the overhanging heights.
By climbing one of the low hills that border the junction of the streams, you may learn the general features of the place at a glance. Facing westward, with your back to Bettws-y-Coed, you look into two bare, bleak, converging valleys, of which the southern is topped by the clear-cut peaks of Snowdon, the northern by the bulky range of Carnedd Llewelyn, while between them is the great mass of the Glyders. You are face to face with the wildest region of North Wales—a foreground of broad, marshy moorland, where you see little life but an occasional herd of black cattle, and a background of mountains that rise above 3,000 feet; yet the dreariness of the scene, so striking in its first impression, is relieved and varied, on fuller acquaintance, by the unsuspected tenderness that it enfolds. Simple and severe as the outlines are, there lies beneath them a wealth of loveliness that no intimacy can exhaust—lakes and mountain streams, unsurpassed for purity and freshness; secret nooks and lawns, and green terraces of turf, interspersed with grey crags and buttresses; and, crowning all, the great circle of mountains which for ever attracts and holds the eye without laying a burden on the mind.
Capel Curig, as a glance at the map will show, is the ideal centre for the exploration of Snowdonia, lying as it does at the junction of the two chief valleys, from which any of the mountain ranges may be approached; and there is in Capel Curig (for those who know it) the ideal cottage in which to spend a memorable fortnight among the hills. A more welcome resting-place, for one who loves a wild country, than this little home among the mountains, with the plash of streams and the cry of curlews all around, it would be difficult to imagine; but it is less as a resting-place than a starting-place that it is here referred to. Let it be supposed, therefore, that we have once more spent a night in the cottage, with the moon looking down on us from over the ridge of Siabod; that we have paid yet another morning visit to our bathing-place in the Llugwy, with the dipper and the grey wagtail flying up and down the stream, and that we are now starting out to make renewed acquaintance with the grim giants couched around.