CHAPTER III
HOW MOUNTAINS ARE MADE
"OLD as the hills" is not a comparison that would be considered apt if invented to-day, for we now know that, geologically speaking, the greatest mountain ranges are of recent elevation, and that even low hills are seldom of great antiquity. It was not till men became climbers, and so grew to have an intimate acquaintance with mountains in detail, that a recognition of the rapid degradation which all mountains are suffering was clearly obtained. To look at the Matterhorn from below is to behold an apparently everlasting tower, yet its base is strewn with ruins, and its flanks are continuously swept by falling masses of rock.
The realisation of this different point of view, which we must presently discuss in more detail, forms a clear mark of division between the attitude towards mountains, of men in the pre-scientific age and to-day. Our forefathers naturally regarded the hills as eternal and everlasting. They defined the beginning of things in such phrases as "Before the mountains were brought forth." The tops of peaks, actually their newest feature, were hoary-headed to them. This was indeed partly due to their limited idea of the stretch of time into the past. Six thousand years, which to us seems but a day, was an eternity to them. Of course six thousand years is a brief period in the life of a mountain. Judged by such a standard it may be called eternal, and that was the kind of meaning they attached to the word. Mountains have grown young as our notions of time past have extended. If we could lengthen our time-span, the interval of time (about one-tenth of a second) of which we are simultaneously conscious, if we could extend it to years instead of a fraction of a second, we should actually see the mountains changing. In a sense that is what we have imaginatively accomplished.
Pre-scientific man possessed no such power. Dwellers in mountain countries beheld the peaks apparently ever the same. Each summer, as it stripped away part of the winter accumulation of snow, revealed the same apparently unaltering features. They knew nothing of the movement of glaciers. They regarded snow-mountains as accumulations piled up continuously from the beginning of the world and destined to go on increasing till the end. I remember reading in the comparatively recent book of travel written by an Anglo-Indian, how he went up some Himalayan valley and came to the glacier at the head of it. He attempted to go no further. He conceived himself to have reached the limit of possible advance. He mounted some way up the hillside and looked along towards the head of the valley; all was ice—an accumulation fallen from the cliffs on either hand for thousands of years and some day destined to fill the trough to the brim—such was his notion of the thing he was looking at.
Changeless, eternal, forbidding, still, silent, and horrible—thus the snowy ranges appeared to the pre-scientific gaze. To us they seem the very reverse. We know them to be ceaselessly changing, of relatively short persistence, the theatre of movements of all kinds both violent and slow—not places of death by any means, but the home of an active, a beneficent, and a formative life—not regions cut off and unrelated to the lowlands and habitable world, but the very parent of such, the laboratory where soil is made, and the head of water collected that distributes it below; the counterbalance of the denuding forces that would level the earth with the ocean; regions beneficent as they are beautiful, and as necessary to the well-being of the habitable world as is the richest and most fertile plain.
AT MEIRINGEN
Ridge above the Brünig Pass in distance.
He that would know mountains and mountain regions aright must know them as the theatre of change, the domain of action. He must not merely look upon peaks as they are, but must conceive of them as they have been and will be. As this kind of knowledge grows and becomes instinctive within him, it will alter his attitude towards Alpine panoramas and broaden his grasp of the significance of mountain physiognomy.