The Alps

by Sir William Martin Conway

THE BREITHORN FROM SCHWARZ SEE

Whatever the dignity of these great walls, when suitably beheld, the peaks they belong to, if their summit crests are long and flat, are not comparable for individual beauty of form with the snow domes or the ridged pyramids. They have, however, an importance and perform a function of their own in any large mountain panorama of which they form a part. Before me as I write there chances to lie Donkin's photograph of the view from the New Weissthor, looking down the Gorner glacier. The pyramid of the Matterhorn is on the right; the wall of the Breithorn is in the midst; the curdled snow-face of the Lyskamm is near at hand on the left. It is not by any means a perfect natural composition, yet it does fix the attention, and a moment's thought shows that it does so by the marked contrast between the forms of the Breithorn and the Cervin. Blot either of them out and the character of the view is changed.

I well remember standing, one very clear day, on the summit of a relatively high peak in the icy heart of Spitsbergen and surveying a vast panorama. The peaks in it being all actually small (though not appearing so) and the area of the panorama very large, the multitude of peaks in sight was numerically much greater than in any Alpine panorama, not excluding even that from Mont Blanc. In one direction the mountains happened to be all of one character. Each was similar in form to its neighbour. Some distance further round was another group formed of peaks as various as are the Alps. It was at once obvious how much the variety added to the picturesqueness. The same lesson can be learnt from the top of Monte Viso. Look southward and you will behold, ridge behind similar ridge, a remarkable uniformity. Face northward and round to the east, the effect is one of infinite variety. Such variety, contrast of walled peak with pyramid, of pyramid with dome, here thronged together, there sundered by some wide stretch of lower elevation, entertains and stimulates the observer's mind.

Sometimes the repetition of a form with only slight change has the value of emphasis, or, as in the case of minor ridges dividing couloirs or side glaciers, it binds the composition together and forms a kind of warp and woof for Nature's detailed embroidery. The value of repetition is instinctively felt by most in the case of a pair of peaks, standing side by side and visibly linked together by some high connecting ridge, or apparently linked by what seems to be a ridge but is really produced by foreshortening. They are frequently named "the Twins." A notable instance of such a pair is the Dom and Täschhorn. Stand anywhere commanding a view down the Zermatt valley, where you can see this pair of peaks defining it on the right, and the Weisshorn's delicate and single pyramid opposed to them on the left, and you will at once recognise how much the great pair and the single peak gain by contrast with one another. Or climb (I should now say take the train) to the Gorner Grat and look abroad to the south. How much less effective would be the panorama if the two long walls of the Breithorn and Lyskamm had a third similar wall between them instead of the coupled domes named Castor and Pollux.

THE LYSKAMM

From the Riffelberg. Gorner glacier below.

It would be easy to continue this fanciful classification of Alps and discussion of types for another fifty pages, but it would serve no useful purpose. Long before this the reader has probably been objecting that it is an unscientific and incomplete classification, and that most peaks could be made to enter all the categories if regarded from suitable standpoints. Such, in fact, may be the case. My object in thus writing has merely been to suggest cross-routes and byways for the memories, fancies, and future observations of my readers. The mountains for us who love them are the playthings of our fancy. We may do with them what we please. They excite in us the sense of beauty, and we try to tell of the emotions we have felt in their presence. Those emotions quickened by them, how we know not, in fact arise in us. We are free to make of them what we please, to give them any kind of play. They are then bound by no scientific laws. A mountain may be a chunk of granite heaved up by I know not what play of forces and carved out by a perfectly orderly denudation; but to me, if I please, it is a Maiden, an Ogre, a Golden Throne. I can endow it with a character, and reckon up friends and foes to it amongst its neighbours. Or I can call it a fairy palace, and people it with sprites and dancing creatures of gossamer clothed in the dawn. No one can say me nay. Now and again, perhaps, I may whisper my dream to a sympathetic friend—but not often. For the most part we keep such heart-frolics of a happy hour in the inaccessible places of their origin.

Brother climber! we have secrets of our own, you and I—secrets that we never told to one another, even when we stood side by side together on the mountain-top. But there was a thrill within each of us, was there not? and each knew that with the other it was well.