IN A GARDEN AT LOCARNO
Last gleam of the sunset on the hills above Lago Maggiore.
It is the great good fortune of the Alps, beyond all other snowy ranges, to possess both the region of utterly untamed nature above, and a larger area of humanly modified land below. A normal Alpine view includes parts of both regions. Looking up from beneath, you have the gardened world for foreground and the wild world for distance. Looking down from above the reverse is the case. The contrast is always charming. What more beautiful setting for a snow mountain can be conceived than that which surrounds the Jungfrau as beheld from near Interlaken? How pleasant it is, when resting at some fine noontide hour on the summit of a lofty peak, to look abroad over the peopled Italian plain, or down into some deep valley, dotted with farms and villages, with here and there a white church standing in the midst of châlets. It is only the works of modern man, his huge caravanserais, his railway stations, and his accurately engineered roads, that are wholly hateful—blots on the landscape defiling and degrading it. Let us hope that these hideous intruders are not destined to a long existence. It is not likely, much though we may desire it, that in our time the tide of touristdom will abandon the Alps. It has come to stay. It will increase rather than diminish. But with the advance of civilisation perhaps its manners and tastes will improve, and it may, at some far distant time, come to demand a kind of housing that will not utterly destroy the very beauty which it blindly travels to seek.
CHAPTER XII
VOLCANOES
TO the purely Alpine traveller, Volcanoes are not a matter of interest, because there does not exist a single volcano in the Alps, nor, so far as I am aware, even the ruins of one. Volcanic rocks there may be, but we are not concerned with rocks except in so far as mountains are built out of them. To the mountain-lover, however, in the broad sense—and it is for such I am writing—volcanoes are as interesting as any other definite type of peak, and I therefore propose to devote this chapter to a consideration of them from the picturesque and climbing point of view. For the European traveller there are volcanoes enough, both active and extinct, and that without going to Iceland. Most people have seen Vesuvius. Etna and Stromboli are frequently passed, and the former is not unfrequently climbed. Auvergne is a good place for a holiday. If ordinary tourists knew how well the volcanic Eifel repay a visit, they would oftener turn aside to them. Teneriffe is on the list of mountains most people hope some day to see. In my own mind, when volcanoes are mentioned, there always rises first the reminiscence of the great mountains in South Bolivia and Northern Chile, with their stately grandeur of scale and grace of outline.
Every one who has climbed Vesuvius has some idea of the nature of volcano climbing. It is by no means the best sort, and the Alps as a play-ground are none the worse for lacking it. From a climber's rather than a petrologist's point of view, volcanic rocks are liable to seem both very hard and very brittle. They fracture with an astonishingly sharp edge, which cuts, like a knife, the fingers and clothes of the climber. Notwithstanding their apparent hardness, which seems to promise for them an unusual durability, they crack up with great rapidity under the action of frost or of blows, and rapidly subdivide into small angular debris. The smoothness of the fractured surfaces, when fresh, reduces the friction between the fragments much below that normal to the debris of ordinary rocks, so that slopes of volcanic debris are very unstable. The foot sinks into them, almost as into sand, and they cut the boots and gaiters to pieces. To run down such a slope is pleasant enough, but to wade up it is the worst kind of purgatory, provocative too of more sins of language than it can possibly purge in the time.
The novice at volcano-climbing approaches his mountain with a light heart. However big it may be, it looks easy, and he promises himself a rapid ascent. The lower slopes of volcanoes are frequently most fertile, so that the first stages of the ascent may be along umbrageous paths or through vineyards and olive gardens. Ultimately the naked mountain has to be tackled, and then troubles begin, and they are the same all the world over. All that a volcano produces is toilsome for the foot of man. The slope continuously steepens. The disintegrated lava or the volcanic ash are alike disagreeable. The mountain is sure to be voted a fraud from the climber's point of view. Even Aconcagua, greatest of all volcanoes, is as rotten as the rest. There is hardly a firm crag on its mighty face.
PILATUS AND LAKE OF LUCERNE FROM THE SLOPES OF THE RIGI