The Alps

by Sir William Martin Conway

Finally, spring is the time of spilling waters, of torrents brimful and overflowing, of voluminous cascades, of gurgling brooks everywhere—a time, too, when the waters are bright and crystalline, and when the valleys and lower slopes are as vocal with their song as the upper regions are with the deeper diapason of falling snow. If, amongst all these voices, the winds blow shrilly and the storms not infrequently rage, the effects produced, however uncomfortable they may be to the touch of the comfort-loving body, are essentially harmonious in a grand and glorious fashion.

From spring to summer there is no step in Alpine regions. It is merely that as the year advances the level of spring rises. At the edge of the ever-retreating snow it is always spring. Even in August you have but to climb to find it, but it reigns then over a narrow belt and is not a land-encompassing mood. What turns spring into summer for the eye is not easy to indicate. Shall we be far wrong if we say that, in the first instance, it is the flowers? The little venturesome plants of spring, that blossom at the very edge of the withdrawing snow, themselves withdraw when they have smiled upon the world. They are followed by the bright carpet of early summer—the June carpet, which few mountaineers ever behold. It is lovely everywhere—loveliest perhaps in the Maritime Alps, or along the sunny Italian face of the Alpine wall. You must see it before the scythes get to work on the first hay crop, and even before the grass is full grown—a sheet of many colours—not, however, a mere chaos of all kinds of blossoms, but something far more orderly than that. For there is generally some predominant plant at a given spot, luxuriantly blossoming at a particular time, and all the rest do but serve to embroider it. Here indeed may be a sheet of one kind of blossom, there of another. It is as though some one had passed by and tossed fair Persian carpets down in different places, carpets of different design, but all in the same general style.

LOWER GLACIER AND GRINDELWALD CHURCH

June 3, 1903, the valley thickly covered with flowers; for four days heavy clouds hung low over peaks and ridges. Only a glimpse such as this to be seen at intervals in the slow swaying fringe of the cloud-curtain.

Even at this period greens are predominant, for the flowers are not to be discovered from a distance. And what greens they are—these shrill verdancies of early summer—the despair of artists, the joy of Nature's friends! Later on they will tone down to a more paintable key, but at first they transcend the powers of paint, having in them something almost of the shine of flame. Their coming is sudden. They descend upon the broad bosom of fertile valleys and the wide skirts of gentle slopes, as the daylight descends when the sun grows high. Yesterday all was brown; to-day the greens have come, exultant, exuberant, with the star-flowers spangled amongst them. Then indeed it is good to be alive. The voice has gone out to the valley—"Arise, shine, for thy light has come"—and the valley responds to the call.

With July the full summer is there, and the summer crowd at hand. The longest days are passing. The freshness is wearing off from the valleys. Now heat, dust, and flies drive men aloft. It is the reception period of the high peaks, when they differentiate themselves plainly from the region below, and alone retain the perfect purity of the winter world. In winter the great mountains stretch themselves visibly down to the valleys. Then Mont Blanc begins at Chamonix, the Matterhorn at Zermatt. But in summer the high peaks seem to be planted aloft on the green world. The Matterhorn is reduced to a pyramid standing on the Schwarzsee Alp. Thus in summer, though the actual peaks themselves look larger, they are more removed out of the way. You must mount afar before you come to their apparent foot. You thus acquire the sense of their belonging to a world of their own. In winter snow glories are at your door. In summer you must labour to behold them, and when beheld they are emphasised by contrast with the fertile world you have left. That is why (apart from all questions of comfort and safety) summer climbing is more impressive than winter. It presents more stages, more variety. In winter-time all is winter; but in summer it is summer in the valleys, spring on the alps, and winter above the snow-line; only autumn is not there.

Autumn, in fact, is the rarest of the seasons. Its effects are the most evanescent. That is one of its special charms—that, and the tender sadness that pertains to the passing away of things which have flourished and had their day in glory. October in the Alps is a season perhaps more generally delightful in these days than any other period of the year. Then the great summer crowd has gone, and there is room in the caravanserais and on the footpaths. The country-folks have leisure for a word with the wayfarer, and the painful sense of over-pressure is gone. In October the Alps are almost as they used to be in the sixties—a spacious region where a man may find himself alone, or almost alone, in the face of Nature. He cannot now, indeed, heal the scars that the crowd have furrowed upon the face of the earth, nor remove the ugly buildings and defacing embankments that have been raised to dam and form reservoirs or canals for the human flood, but with that exception he can possess the landscape in peace.

October, again, is sometimes a month of much fine weather and of skies marvellously clear. If the days are short, they are yet long enough for early risers. Evening and morning are brought within the limits of a normal man's possible activity, so that he may enjoy both the splendour of sunrise and sunset without transgressing the daily hours of healthy wakefulness. The October sun does not climb so far aloft as does the royal monarch of the midsummer sky. If the effulgence of day is thus rendered less overpowering, in return the shadows spread wider and retain a richer colouring in their depths. More modelling is visible upon the hillsides and the snow-fields in the bright hours; there are bluer noontide shadows and perhaps even a bluer sky also.