The Alps

by Sir William Martin Conway

Few mountain regions in the world, outside of the Arctic and Antarctic solitudes, are thus denuded of human interest. The mountains of the Old World and the New have been inhabited over a large part of their valley-area; but often the inhabitants have been people about whom little is known. It is one of the great charms of the Alps that they have long been the home of a fine group of peoples. "Your country," I once remarked to a citizen of a South American Republic, "ought to be the Switzerland of South America." "I will make it so," he replied, "if you will fill it for me with the Swiss."

Throughout the large Alpine area various races have dwelt and dwell at the present time. The character of the population changes from valley to valley, and there is no small variety, not merely in dialects, but even in languages. There is a similar variety in habits, in domestic architecture, in costume, and in bearing. Much of these differences in the character of the inhabitants we are wont to impute in our thoughts to the mountain districts themselves. When we talk of the charms of the Italian Alps, are we not thinking of the attractiveness of the people, and the picturesqueness of their abodes and places of worship, as much as of the luxuriance of the valleys, the sparkling of the waters, and the mere beauty of the hills? The spirit of the people seems to infuse itself into our memory of the mountains about them, as much as the character of the mountains has affected the nature and disposition of the people. Which, I wonder, borrows most from the other—the Lake of Lucerne from the old Tell legend, or the legends from the landscape of the lake?

An essential part of the human interest in the Alps grows out of the length of time through which history has concerned herself with them. The history of the Alpine valleys has only been written, or begun to be written, in recent years. Early visitors to Zermatt no doubt were conscious of the deep impress made by man upon the valley landscape, but they could not interpret, as we now can, the meaning of much that they saw. But when the local archives were searched and the traditions written down, when it was realised that the life now being lived by the peasantry was in all essentials the same life that had been lived by their ancestors for hundreds of years, ancestors bearing the same names and owning the same properties that are still borne and owned by their living descendants, what an increase of interest that gave to a place.

A CORNER OF THE TOWN OF ALTDORF

The traditional scene of William Tell's exploits. Here Gessler ruled and the shooting of the apple took place. A place of patriotic pilgrimage of the youthful Swiss.

The old tales about the village deep in Tiefenmatten, about the pilgrimage that used to cross the Col d'Hérens, about the frequented routes over Theodul and Weissthor—does it not add a new charm to the places themselves to hear them told? Who is not interested to remember, when standing on the Theodul pass, that Roman coins have been found there? Climbers have taken fully as much interest in the question of where the Old Weissthor route lay as in actually climbing the passes. I well remember the keen delight that came to me when I discovered that a pass I had crossed, as I supposed for the first time, between the Fillarkuppe and the Jägerhorn, was in fact the real Old Weissthor itself, a well-known mountain-route centuries ago. To rediscover an old track like that is far more delightful than to invent and carry through some entirely new expedition.

Correspondingly with the future as with the past—to make an expedition for the first time that others will often repeat is a lasting source of pleasure; but to make one that no sane person ever repeats or is likely to repeat is poor fun. I have had many opportunities of making new expeditions in the Alps and elsewhere, and have availed myself of a few; but none ever gave me the continuing satisfaction that I derive from the Wellenkuppe near Zermatt, a mountain that I invented, climbed, and baptized, and that immediately became and has since remained a most popular scramble.[4]

[4] Its summit had previously been touched by some unrecorded route by Lord Francis Douglas, in an attempt to climb the Gabelhorn; but for twenty years no one had thought of the peak, which had no name.

Some part of the popularity of the ascent of Mont Blanc from Chamonix is due to the fact that the mountain is the highest in the Alps; part is due to the fascinating beauty of the ice and snow scenery passed through; but far the greatest attraction is the long and interesting history of the climb. No one, I suppose, ascends Mont Blanc without a thought of Balmat and De Saussure, and at least some dim consciousness of the number of early climbers who mounted by the way he takes, and felt all the strange emotions and high excitements they so naively recorded. What would the Tödi be if robbed of the memory of Placidus à Spescha? Even a Mont Ventoux can attain dignity and importance by association with so great a man as Petrarch.