So he hires a guide and sets forth for the Breithorn, perhaps, or some such high and safe-reputed peak. He hits upon a day when the weather turns bad. Winds buffet him; rain and snow drench him; he labours through soft snow; he is bewildered by fog. If the sun shines for a few moments, it is only long enough to scorch the skin off his face and ensure him a few days of great discomfort to follow. He has no view from the summit. He returns wearied out to his inn.
MELCHIOR ANDEREGG
Born 1828. A celebrated Alpine guide; with the late Sir Leslie Stephen made many first ascents, including the Rympfischhorn, Alphubel, Oberaarhorn. Also well known for his wood-carving.
Yes!—and thenceforward the alpine fever masters him. He is caught and makes no effort to escape. His keenest desire is to be off once more into those same high regions—once more to feel the ice beneath his feet—once more to scramble up clean crags fresh from nature's sculpturing and undefiled by soil or vegetation. With each new ascent he becomes eager for more. The summers are all too short for his satisfaction. He goes home to read about other people's climbs, to study maps and guide-books, to lay out schemes for future seasons. Dauphiny, the Graians, the Engadine and Tirol—he must give a season or seasons to each. Thus is the climber fashioned out of an ordinary man.
Each new votary of the peaks in turn experiences the same sudden conversion, expects to be able to explain his new delight to his lowland friends, and in turn discovers the same impossibility. He learns, as we all have learned, that the delight is not translatable into words; that each must experience it for himself and each must win his own entrance into the secret alone. The most we can do is to awaken the inquisitive sense in another, who beholds the visible evidence of our enjoyment and wonders what its source may be. In that fashion the infection can be spread, and is spread with the extraordinary rapidity that the last half-century has witnessed.
What climber does not recall the enthusiasm of his first seasons? the passionate expectation of the coming summer, the painful awaiting for the moment when his foot should once again crunch the ice-corn of the glacier beneath its hob-nailed sole? Gradually that enthusiasm passes and is replaced by a settled mood of calmer, but no less intense, satisfaction. But does the æsthetic delight in the beauty of the mountains remain through all these experiences undimmed? Not always. In the first view of them it is the beauty of the snowy peaks, of the great white walls, that appeals to the eye. Ignorant of the meaning of every detail, the details are almost unseen. It is the whole that is beheld in the glory of its whiteness. The wonder of the silver snow beyond the green and beneath the sky invades the mind of every new spectator. Small need be our surprise that unsophisticated, semi-civilised peoples have always believed the snowy regions to be part of the other world—the home of ghosts and fairies, or of demons and dragons. "Not more awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred Death," says Ruskin in the passage above quoted, thereby manifesting how close in its instincts is the sympathy between genius and the purely natural man. Almost universal is the feeling aroused by a first sight of a great snowy range that it is unearthly. Mystery gathers over it. Its shining majesty in full sunlight, its rosy splendours at dawn and eve, its pallid glimmer under the clear moon, its wreathed and ever-changing drapery of cloud, its terrific experiences in storm, all these elements and aspects strike the imagination and appeal broadly to the æsthetic sense. Nor are they ever quite forgotten even by the most callous of professional mountaineers.
STORM COMING UP OVER LAKE OF LUCERNE
Sketch made from Flüelen.