IN THE VAL D'AOSTA
The presence of man, not as a traveller through the Alps, but as a long-settled resident there, deriving his subsistence from the soil, is an important scenic factor in yet another respect. The difference in aspect between a well-peopled mountain region and one sparsely or not at all inhabited is more striking to the eye than the inexperienced might be prepared to expect. The amount of landscape modelling that one man can effect in a lifetime is small, but a community of men, working generation after generation for many centuries, can effect much.
The trained eye can perceive the effect almost everywhere in the Alps; the untrained must learn to look for it. Take, for example, such a well-known large grassy area as the slope descending from the Matterhorn to the Zermatt valley, between the Gorner glacier on one side and the Zmutt glacier on the other. If man had not laboured for centuries on that slope, it would be ragged with fallen and protruding stones. The grass upon it would be rough and uneven, or entirely replaced by stunted rhododendron, juniper, or the like bushes. Now it is all smoothed and tended. The loose stones are gathered into walls, bordering the mule-paths or supporting the lower edges of the fields. Earth has been carried on to bare patches. Little hay-huts and other farm-buildings are planted about on suitably protected places. The grass is mown to a velvety fineness of texture. Irrigation channels are led in all suitable directions, and the glacier dust deposited along their beds has raised long grassy mounds, which in process of time have sometimes grown to a height of two or three feet. More important still, in smoothing off asperities and giving a rounded curvature to the general surface, is the continual deposit of the same dust which this artificially distributed glacier-water lays down all over the meadows. There results a suavity of outline, a delicacy of modelling, and a fine quality of grassy surface, which change the aspect of the whole slope, even when beheld from a great distance, so that it would be impossible to mistake it for a slope correspondingly situated in any uninhabited or uncultivated mountain region in the world.
IN THE WOODS OF CHAMONIX
What is true of the middle pastures is likewise true of the forests. Virgin hill-forests, such as one may see in the southern part of the Argentine or Chile, are very different in appearance from an Alpine wood, whether seen from far or near. Man, as we know only too well, has not treated mountain-forests wisely, and he is suffering the consequence to-day. But apart from cases of forest removal and the consequent changes of scenery thereby caused, the alteration in appearance produced by good forest management is very noticeable. Alpine woods have a gardened aspect. The mere sight of them is eloquent of the presence and activity of man, who here also has left unmistakable traces of his activity drawn broadly over every Alpine landscape.
In the regulation of streams and rivers, again, the hand of man makes its long, slowly acting presence felt in the Alps. Gaze from the Riffelhorn down the St. Niklausthal, and notice how mainly of human determination are all the minor forms of the valley-floor. It is easy to compare with a photograph of that well-known view one, say, of the Bush Valley in British Columbia, which has been revealed to us by the explorations of Professor Norman Collie and his friends. Such a comparison manifests, as no words can, the great effect upon valley scenery on a large scale produced by the activity of man.
It is only high aloft, close to and all above the snow-line, that man's energies have not availed to change the landscape. He has built a few huts there, but they are insignificant. He cannot turn a glacier from its course, nor can he dam it back in the event of its pleasing to advance. The great cliffs and débris slopes, the reservoirs of snow, the rivers of ice—these giant phenomena of the heights are beyond his governance, even if any material advantage tempted him to try meddling with them. The most he can do is to blast some small tunnel in ice or rock to control the outflow of a gathering of water, that might otherwise discharge itself with violence and work destruction far below.
