with Nature. They love the struggle and the danger, the exercise and the excitement. They find health and good temper, jollity and good-fellowship, through their exertions. They glory shamelessly in useless scrambles which demand the sweat of their brow and the concentrated attention of their minds. They seek to emulate the chamois and the monkey in hanging on to rocks and insecure footholds. When they do not climb, they fill libraries with descriptions of their achievements, dull and unintelligible to the uninitiated, bloodstirring and excellent to the members of the brotherhood. They write in a jargon of their own of chimneys and buttresses and basins and ribs, of boulders and saddles and moraine-hopping. They become rampant at the thought of the stout, unworthy people who are now dragged to the tops by the help of rope-chains and railings. They sarcastically remark that they may have to abandon certain over-exploited peaks through the danger of falling sardine-tins. They issue directions for climbing calculated to chase away the poet from the snow-fields, as when Sir Martin Conway says that a certain glacier must be “struck at the right corner of its
snout,” and “its drainage stream flows from the left corner.”
They do not hesitate to admit that they would continue to climb even if there were no views to be enjoyed from the tops. “I am free to confess,” wrote A. F. Mummery, “that I would still climb, even though there were no scenery to look at.” And Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond echoes this sentiment in a defiant challenge to their uncomprehending critics. “To further confound the enemy,” she writes, “we do not hide the fact that were no view obtainable from the summit a true climber would still continue to climb.”
Why do they climb? The motives are many—the result joy. Yes, joy, even in the providential escapes and the “bad five minutes,” beloved by our naïve scribes of the ice-axe, in the perils and death which they court for the sake of adventure and exploration. Sir Martin Conway speaks of the systematic climber as the man for whom climbing takes the place of fishing and shooting. How depressingly banal! Yet Sir Martin Conway has written some of the finest tributes to the glories of the Alps, and has shown himself a master of artistic interpretation of their
wealth of beauty. Whymper excels in matter-of-fact history of climbs, yet there is an undercurrent of reverence for the mysteries of Nature's beauty.
The expert cragsman climbs to attain acrobatic efficiency, and may aim at nothing higher than inspired legs. Mrs. Peck climbed to establish the equality of the sexes. Mr. and Mrs. Bullock Workman climbed in the Himalayas with strong determination to name a mountain Mount Bullock Workman. They did, and the mountain, which attains 19,450 feet, is none the worse. Climbers are exceedingly human in their love of getting to the top before fellow-climbers. Here they follow the ordinary rules for human conduct in commerce, politics, and literature. There have been some loud and unseemly quarrels as to honours and fame attendant on the first successful conquest of a desirable peak. It has been generally held that if you cannot get a mountain to yourself you can at any rate devise a new route. But I cannot bring myself to speak harshly of such failings. The utmost I will say is that it were better if such enthusiasm were tempered with a little humour.
Mark Twain saw through that deadly seriousness
of the pure climber. He saw the fatuity of mere peak-hunting. It impressed him strongly even on the Rigi-Kulm. “We climbed and climbed,” he writes in A Tramp Abroad, “and we kept on climbing; we reached about forty summits: there was always another one just ahead.”
But the pure climber is always a fountain of delight, even though he does not see himself as others see him. The pages of Conway, Mummery, Sir Claud Schuster, and Bruce abound in gems of nature-lore, ever fresh and ever alluring. As I search for more self-revelation in my books by mountain-lovers, I find myself observed through the window. It is only a cow on her way to the hollow tree into which the water courses out of the earth. But the cow brings me back to the strenuous Alpine life, and I find myself concluding, as I replace the books on their shelves, that I do not care why men climb so long as they climb in spirit and body.