It is, however, to the passes rather than to the peaks of the Alps that history clings. Allusion has been made to the Weissthor and the Theodul, and many other minor passes similarly recorded might be mentioned; but it is the great passes, the deep depressions in the main range, that are chiefly memorable from the historical standpoint. Modern climbers unwisely neglect these great routes, or confine themselves to such as are tunnelled. John Ball and his contemporaries made a point of knowing as many main passes as they could. It was their pride to be able to say, not that they had climbed so many peaks, but that they had traversed the Alpine chain by so many great passes. Old literature is therefore fuller of accounts of the historic passes than are most present-day volumes, which regard them as a subject outworn.
To mention the historic passes is to call up the name of Hannibal. Here is no place to revive that old discussion as to the situation of Hannibal's pass. Historians have not yet entirely convinced one another on the matter. But if a general certainty had been arrived at, if we could feel perfectly sure that Hannibal and his host had actually trod a particular route, it cannot be denied that that route would be well worth following, book in hand, for its historic interest alone.
Some, perhaps many, of my readers will have traversed the Great St. Bernard, the Summus Penninus of antiquity. Few who have done so will have been oblivious, as they went, of the many great men in whose steps they were treading. Celts, Romans, Saracens, mediæval warriors, statesmen, saints, bishops, and monks streamed in their day across this col. Here passed Charles the Great and other Holy Roman Emperors, Lanfranc too, and the saintly Anselm in all the fervour of his young enthusiasm. The reader will forgive me for quoting once again Bishop Stubbs' translation of the letter of a Canterbury monk describing his passage of the pass in February 1188:—
"Pardon me for not writing. I have been on the Mount of Jove; on the one hand looking up to the heavens of the mountains, on the other shuddering at the hell of the valleys, feeling myself so much nearer heaven that I was more sure that my prayer would be heard. 'Lord,' I said, 'restore me to my brethren, that I may tell them, that they come not into this place of torment.' Place of torment indeed, where the marble pavement of the stony ground is ice alone, and you cannot set your foot safely; where, strange to say, although it is so slippery that you cannot stand, the death (into which there is every facility for a fall) is certain death. I put my hand in my scrip, that I might scratch out a syllable or two to your sincerity—lo, I found my ink-bottle filled with a dry mass of ice; my fingers too refused to write; my beard was stiff with frost, and my breath congealed into a long icicle. I could not write the news I wished."
PONTE BROLLA
Over the Maggia, near its junction with the Melezza, looking up the Val Centavalli.
Mr. Coolidge, in that store of Alpine learning, his book entitled Swiss Travel and Swiss Guide-Books, reminds us that the first known guide-book was written for the crowd of pilgrims crossing this same pass, by no less unlikely a person than the Abbot of Thingör in Iceland, about 1154. There was a building on the pass before the year 812. A century later the Little St. Bernard was similarly provided. The Simplon was thus equipped before 1235, the St. Gotthard before 1331, and the Grimsel before 1479. Modern Swiss travellers may not be aware of these facts in detail, but it is impossible for any intelligent man to frequent the Alps and not become conscious of the antiquity of the relation between man and the mountains.
Sometimes traces of visibly ancient ways are encountered, as on the Albrun pass, for instance, or the Monte Moro. The sight of such a fragment of old paved way instantly carries the mind back into the past, and animates the route as with a ghostly procession. Thus, too, I found it in Bolivia and Chile, where remnants of the old paved Inca road, that traversed a large part of the continent from north to south, are often to be met with. The sentimental value of such relics is incalculable. They, as it were, hypnotise the mind and induce a mood in which we see the nature that surrounds us in a new way. They remove from the traveller the sense of isolation, and form a link between him and the countless generations that have gone before. He shares with them the toil of the way, and looks abroad on the scenes that they beheld.
Still more interesting and rich in a historic sense are the Brenner and other passes over the Eastern Alps, which are known to have been important trade-routes in the age of bronze. Over them successive immigrant waves of humanity poured into Italy. Over them at a later date passed emperors with their armies. No route bears the evidence of its rich historical associations more visibly than the Brenner. An aura of antiquity rests upon its villages. Its many castles, its ancient churches, its noble village streets, its countless monuments, all tell the same tale. I never can cross the Brenner without having Albrecht Dürer by my side, who four times made the transit, sketch-book in hand, and whose careful and beautiful drawings of some of the views still exist in perfect preservation.