The Alps

by Sir William Martin Conway

Now is displayed in all its magnificence the daily drama of the dawn. While the mists yet lie cold and grey in the deep valleys, they glow against the eastern horizon, where all the spectrum is slowly uprolled, more and more fiery beneath, as it tends to red, and cut off below by the jagged outline of countless peaks, looking tiny, away off there on the margin of the world. Low floating cloudlets turn to molten gold. The horizon flames along all its fretted eastern edge, a narrow band of lambent light, a smokeless crimson fire. The belt of colour grows broader; it swamps and dyes the cloudlets crimson. Long pink streamers of soft light strike up from where the sun is presently to appear. The great moment is at hand. All eyes rove around the view. At last some near high peak salutes the day; its summit glowing like a live coal drawn from a furnace. Another catches the light and yet another. The glory spreads downwards, turning from pink to gold, and from gold to pure daylight, and then—lo! the sun himself upon the horizon! a point of blinding light, soon changing to the full round orb. The day has come, and the long shadows gather in their skirts and prepare to flee away.

Now comes the climber's most perfect hour. He shares the strength and promise of the young day. The fresh crisp air seems to lift him from the earth. The sense of the very possibility of fatigue vanishes. He rejoices in his might. He looks forward with confidence to no matter what difficulties may lie ahead. The snow is hard and crisp beneath his feet. The ice-crystals merrily crepitate as they break up, when the bonds of frost are withdrawn. And now the patch of rocks, or other convenient resting place, where breakfast is to be taken, is soon attained. Packs are cast off. It is an hour of perfect delight. The heart of the upper regions has been reached. The fair world of snow opens on every side. The valleys and habitable places are all forgotten. The scenery is superb. At such a time and place who would exchange with folks below, be they never so prosperous?

It is soon time to be on the way once more. The fulness of the day gradually comes on with all its pains and glories. The sun climbs triumphantly aloft and sheds its burning radiance all around. Foreground details vanish in excess of light, but the distances grow more distinct. What is nearer stands out before what is more remote. The eye ranges afar and feasts upon the widening panorama, which about noon, let us hope, suddenly becomes complete, for we are on the top. No daylight is now too brilliant to reveal all the multitudinous effect of what is spread abroad to be beheld. The burning snowfields are below. The mere foreground of our vision is miles away. We look down into sunlit valleys sprinkled with tiny dots of houses and narrow lines of roads. We gaze afar over ridge beyond ridge, it may be to some wide-stretching plain or ultimate crest of remotest ranges. All swims in light, and we triumph in its very exuberance.

Then follows the afternoon of our descent. We plunge into ever-thickening air as we go down. It is penetrated with the dust and flurry of the day. As the hours advance it sheds an ever mellower tone upon the views. Fatigue seems to invade the earth itself as it does our own limbs. We gain the grassy places once more, as the sun begins to lose its towering eminence of place. The rope and all its strenuous suggestions has been discarded, and at length the most toilsome parts of the expedition are over. We can fling ourselves upon the grass by some babbling brook, with the clanging of cattle-bells not far away, and the haunts of men pleasantly adjacent. The peaks we have sought out are not yet very far away. We can still follow the traces of our own footsteps upon their flanks. Their spirit is in us. All that we have so recently seen and felt is still present in our minds, as we gaze with newly instructed eyes upon the places we have visited.

A MOUNTAIN PATH, GRINDELWALD

The last walk remains, down through the gathering trees, through new-mown hay-fields, past little farms clustering on the hillside—down and ever down into the embrace of the narrowing earth, which holds out arms of recognition to us, her children and the special votaries of her shrines. When at length the mellow evening light is warm upon the hillsides, and the rich shadows are creeping down upon it, we reach the village where we are to rest. There, as we sit before some hospitable inn, and gaze yet once again back to the heights whence we have come, the sunset fires are lit upon them when the shades of night already fill the valleys. For a moment the topmost summits facing west glow with the gold and fade to the rose that ushered in the day and now glorify its close. The colour is withdrawn. The warmth fades out of all the view. Pallor supervenes, and "layer on layer the night comes on."

Such are the normal effects and sequences of a fine Alpine summer day; but days of that sort are rare. Usually what we call "weather" intervenes to break the normal sequence with surprises that should not be unwelcome. I have thus far referred mainly to the drama of the sunshine; but more varied, more fascinating, more adventurous is the drama of the clouds, those mist mountains that come and go, forming ranges loftier than the hills, whiter than the snows, but endowed with the two-fold gifts of inaccessibility and evanescence. Them we can neither climb nor map. Clouds we have with us everywhere, but it is among mountains that we learn to know them, how they form and fade, mount aloft or drift asunder. The mountain clouds have a plainlier realised individuality than those that pass over cities and plains. Their positions and relative altitudes are more easy to fix, their changes more readily perceived.

It is not my intention here to analyse at length the characters and forms of clouds from the picturesque point of view. That has been most suggestively and eloquently attempted by Ruskin in various chapters of Modern Painters, which every mountain-lover should have read. One correction only of that fine description of mountain-clouds will I venture to make, the point being of some importance. "I believe," wrote Ruskin, "the true cumulus is never seen in a great mountain region, at least never associated with hills. It is always broken up and modified by them.... The quiet, thoroughly defined, infinitely divided and modelled pyramid never develops itself. It would be very grand if one ever saw a great mountain peak breaking through the domed shoulders of a true cumulus; but this I have never seen."

Whether it be true that cumulus cloud is never formed in the Alps I cannot say, my own notes not being accessible to me at this moment and my memory at fault; but this I can assert, that, in the heart of the great ranges, Himalayas and Andes, they frequently and magnificently occur. Never shall I forget the piled splendours, the divided and involved intricacies of rounded forms, the stupendous mass of the great towers of white cloud which I have often seen, with their level bases just upon or just above the summits of mountains more than 20,000 feet high, and their sharply outlined crests 15,000 or even 20,000 feet higher. Such clouds are only formed in warm uniformly ascending air currents, undisturbed by variable winds. They never form about peaks, but they form beside or above them. Often in Bolivia have I seen these great towers of mist rise with majestic deliberation behind the long white crest of the Cordillera Real, till they reduced the snowy peaks to mere pigmies at their feet. Then the afternoon wind would take them and bend them over the range like waves about to break. White island masses would sever themselves one by one and, passing the crest of the watershed, would drift away over the high plateau. If cumulus is formed in the Alpine region, its base would doubtless there also lie above the level of the snows, and the form of the clouds would not be realised by an observer in the mountain region. From Turin or Milan, gazing northward, immense masses of cumulus are often seen, but I have never yet been able to discover whether their bases rest on the snows or whether they merely lie above the foothills and lake-district.