“The vast triangular shadow of Le Cervin stretched before us across the Furgg and the Théodule glaciers as far as the Gorner glacier. At our left the Zermatt valley already lay in a bluish darkness; it seemed as if the night were emerging from those depths. A moment later and the whole amphitheater of snow-covered cliffs shone with a divine glory. Only two tints, but those graduated in a thousand delicate shades, were used in this mighty painting. One was a soft deep azure, the azure of the invading shadows; the other a pure ethereal gold flung forth by the last rays of the sun. In the sky the two tints intermingling, shed a splendid violet reflection on the zenith.”
A slight hint at the dangers to which the climber is exposed was afforded just before they had left the couloir for the shoulder. A projecting knob on which they had set foot slipped away and went bounding down the side a thousand meters: “The Cervin counted one more wrinkle!”
When they reached the arête they had their last chance for resting:—“Before us towered the escarpment of rugged red rocks and above them the last heights of Le Cervin, the crest of which was invisible. On both sides of the arête were blood-curdling abysses. Seated on a narrow ridge, surrounded by precipices and near the scene of one of the most tragic of Alpine accidents, we passed in silence one of those moments that refuse to be forgotten. About a hundred meters higher, on the steep slope, must have occurred the fall of the four unfortunates who were dashed to pieces during the first ascent. I tried to revisualize that dreadful drama. I failed; the abyss had resumed its eternal silence. What meant to it the fall of those four men, full of life, youth and intelligence? Only the least of the avalanches that furrow it in a season.”
The two men roped themselves together, and using the extremest care to get a foothold either in the ice or on bosses of the rock, they mounted to the very edge of the vertical wall which measured the whole height of the Cervin. The summit, says Javelle, is only the culminating point of a sharp, notched arête about a hundred meters long. On the south side is a frightful precipice out of sight. “It is impossible to stand on the slender summit; its crest is too sharp and the wind playing over it usually crowns it with needles of ice. With his ax Knubel made a hole in the ice a little lower down. This was our seat, and what monarch ever had such a throne?
“All around the summit lay an immense bottomless void, above which stood the circle of the giants of the Valais—Monte Rosa and her proud rivals, the Mischabel, the Weisshorn, the Rothorn, La Dent Blanche; then all the Alps with their maze of gigantic ramifications from the Viso group to considerably beyond the Ortler, an innumerable army of glittering or somber peaks, the immense undulating line of which was lost in the blue at the two ends of the horizon. To the north extended the unbroken profile of the Jura; then beyond, merging into the sky, the hills of France toward the Haute-Champagne or the Franche-Comté.”
After half an hour on the peak, Javelle and his guide started back and in safety reached the valley of Zermatt. Since then one might almost say familiarity with that wonderful peak has bred contempt. Javelle, himself, in a later article describing another ascent, complains:—“To-day alas! for the true lovers of the Cervin, the whole of this side of the noble mountain seems to be profaned.”
Already it has been planned to build a railway up Le Cervin. The day of conquering mighty peaks in the Alps is past. Scarcely one is now left for the adventurer to grapple with and the Alpine guides are finding profitable fields in the vastly mightier mountains of the Himalaya or the Canadian Rockies.
For the old and the lazy, for delicate women, the electric cars that climb Mont Blanc, and so many others of the Alpine mountains, give the effect of the height and the enormous stretch of horizon; but still, even though the Alpine Club builds shelters and attaches aerial ladders and climbing chains, there is something exhilarating in the actual climbing of lofty mountains, and that the danger is not wholly eliminated is shown by the reports that come every summer of some unfortunate parties who try to “negotiate” those jealous giants of the skies. And when one is standing or sitting on one of their peaks one can say with John Stuart Blackie:—
“I love the eye’s free sweep from craggy rim;
I love the free bird poised at lofty ease