The moraines and scattered stones that are frequently encountered on the dry glacier are more interesting than beautiful. It is well to make the acquaintance of the medial moraines and to scramble over them, first for the wider view that one gets from the top, and next in order to realise their dimensions, always larger than one expects. Seen from a distance medial moraines look smaller than they are. The eye must be educated to realise their true dimensions. When that has been accomplished, the great scale of the glacier that carries them can be felt, but not before.
There is generally a breeze blowing over a dry glacier, so that when the pleasant luncheon-hour arrives, a sheltered spot must be sought out, one open to the sun and protected against the breeze, with good water near at hand, and stones of convenient dimensions for seats and tables. Experienced wanderers will detect such spots far sooner than novices. It is with them as with good camping grounds: they are not easy to identify at a glance, but they are well worth hunting out.
So also is it with points suitable for photography. A dry glacier is full of details for a camera, and yet how few good photographs does one see taken at this level among the mountains, unless they be distant views. Nowhere are there better foregrounds to be discovered; yet when they are looked for, how hard it is to find them. The composition is generally faulty in the inexperienced amateur's picture. But those who are experienced in the art seem to find suitable foregrounds everywhere. It is the result of much taking thought.
Generally it happens that the return from a day's glacier wandering leads up the hillside along the margin, so that as we ascend, the area of our adventures spreads itself out below, and the eye can range over the whole of it at once. We look for the place where we lunched, for the broad streams with difficulty crossed, for the large pools we looked down into. They are not often discoverable. What looked so important near at hand has shrunk to an insignificant unidentifiable detail. The river is one of hundreds of the same kind. The pools are innumerable. The moraine stretches along for miles, and one of its mounds seems like another. We thus begin to realise the size of the great icy expanse. Our track over it has revealed but little of the multitude of sights there are to see. We have but glanced at a few samples out of countless thousands. Were we to return on the morrow we could not retrace our steps, nor find again the objects we saw to-day. For a moment the grand scale of the glacier imposes itself upon us, but before night has gone we shall have forgotten it. Only by coming again and yet again does it gradually sink into our understandings and become a part of the habit of thought with which we approach the Alps.
CHAPTER X
ALPINE PASTURES
IT is to be feared that the reader, whose persistence has availed to carry him thus far through the adventure of this book, may bring an accusation against me, on the ground that each form and type of scenery, as in its turn it has come to be discussed, has been described in language of too superlative praise, as though it and it alone were pre-eminent above all other Alpine forms and types. Let me forthwith confess that the accusation is well founded; for the fact is that, whether the attention be turned upon peaks of rock or domes of snow, upon cliffs or aiguilles, upon snow-fields or ice-falls, upon passes, alps, or valleys, the kind under immediate consideration always seems the finest, the central type and the most beautiful. We quit the valleys for the high snows in search of beauty. From the heights we return to the valleys on the same quest. Everywhere we may find it, and to find it is all we need ask; for it is like pure gold, whereof no fragment is intrinsically more precious than another. Each new-found nugget seems for the moment best of all.
THE CASTLE OF ZÄHRINGEN-KYBURG, THUN
Beauty is not the prerogative of any zone or level of the mountains more than of any other. It is of different kinds in different regions, but not of different degrees. Some kinds may appeal to one man more than other kinds, but these in their turn will be preferred by a man of different disposition, and neither can boast that his taste is superior. Youthful vigour may find the keen consciousness of beauty most readily arising after difficulties have been overcome. Age may feel its sense of beauty deadened by toil. In neither case is the power of appreciation to be regarded as a test of the quality of the beauty perceived; it is merely an indication of the character of the person perceiving it.