Thunderstorms or blizzards may produce direct catastrophe. Of a blizzard we should have had premonitory signs; and if we are caught in it, we must just fight through it, and we may not afterwards justly blame the mountains. It is a foolish pride which thinks to show hardihood by persisting wilfully, among big mountains, against the threat or oncoming of evil weather.
But thunderstorms may take us unawares; and then our only refuge is retreat. Their chief menace lies along the edges of ridges and on outstanding points. If a storm threatens, we must get off the ridges and away from pinnacles as quickly as possible, even if it may mean cutting down an ice slope. Sometimes our first warning may be an electric shock, coming out of a dark and windless silence or through a warm oppression of slow-falling and separate snow-flakes, and thrilling us helplessly from heel to hair. If there is no other sign, and in the heart of the worst storms there is no flash and no thunder, the singing of our axes and the hissing crackle of the discharge from every point of the ridge will give warning that it is well to go elsewhere. We are generally advised to get rid of our axes. If we are on a big peak, this will mean our seeking scanty shelter not very far below the ridge where the storm caught us. Personally, I prefer to keep my axe, and use it to climb well down one of the flanking walls. While we remain on the ridge or near it, all points, including ourselves, are potential conductors, and it is awkward to get far down without an axe. We once came on a whole grove of axes abandoned on a summit. When we saw, later, the angle and the condition of the snow slopes that this party had been driven to descend without their axes, to escape from the storm, we realized what frightening things men can do if they are only frightened enough.
Thunderstorms apart, the perils of bad weather are indirect, and give us time to use precautionary rather than corrective skill. A very strong wind may of course blow us right out of our steps. I have only seen this actually happen once, to a light-limbed mountaineer, who pitched very neatly on the ice steps ten feet lower down. Ordinarily we cling on as we can, and evade the direct blast by moving on to the other side of a ridge. Wind will also pelt us with stones and icicles in unexpected places, or lacerate our faces with snow particles. But its principal effect is usually upon men’s nerves, who get ‘rattled’ and lose their collective rhythm. Continuous loud noise always interrupts communications, and breeds flurry or confusion. It is worth while taking shelter behind rocks, if only for a minute or two at intervals, to steady the nerves again.
Mist and fog can only harm us if our craft fails. We meet them by compass and the sense of direction. Wind can make a gracious exception to its usual offensiveness, and help us in mist. If we have noted its direction, and have observed that it is a constant and not a gusty or spinning wind, we can keep a straight course by keeping it always on the same cheek. Again, when he is approaching the crest of a ridge or a pass, what mountaineer has not had cause, in mist, or even in sun, to welcome the little rushes or breaths of wind that tell him the edge is near and assure him of his direction? After a weary plough up foggy snow terraces or a harsh struggle on mist-wet rocks, these soughs seem like the mountain, too, sighing with our relief, or like the end of our travail surprising our mournful faces with a kindly but derisive ‘pooh!’
Earthquakes are natural perversities outside the sphere of ordinary mountaineering prevision. Among mountains their danger is indirect or subsequent. They injure a number of good rock routes, and after a series of shocks we may expect some grievous deterioration in the condition of rock pinnacles and faces. Large masses will have been precariously loosened, and our ledges will be littered with poised blocks and cranky rubble. The peaks affected may require markedly cautious climbing for some seasons, until time and weather shall have tidied down the surfaces again. Some years ago certain of the Chamonix Aiguilles had to be left unvisited for a time on this account. As to how we should meet the uproar of the eruptive moments, it is difficult to suggest an approved method. A mountaineer of reputation relates how an earthquake caught him on the precipitous north face of the Dent du Géant; and how that proud pinnacle rocked so portentously that his feet were flung free, and he only saved himself by swinging perilously, like a pendulum, from his handholds. It is reassuring to feel that such exceptional circumstance does generally select the exceptional man, and that it invariably finds him inspired to deal with its crises imaginatively. For upon such natural inspiration it would be difficult to improve by devising any more formal code.
CHAPTER VII
ICE AND SNOW CRAFT
The Age for Glaciers.
Rock is the framework of mountains, and for those who discover their enthusiasm or train their activity among our western hills, rock craft must always remain the basis of mountaineering. Many of us would not be dissatisfied if the chances of time and leisure offered us no wider field. For our performance, there is more than a lifetime could hope even to examine between the precipices of our mounting uplands and the descending cliffs of our long sea coasts; and for our æsthetic pleasure, nature, through the medium of a soft and variable atmosphere, shrouds the settled lines of our hills with a delicacy of interrupted and changing colour, and a grave reticence of shadow, sun-break and mist, that leave nothing incomplete for the fulfilment of that sense of power and wonder whose realization gives something of the quality of religion to our feeling for great mountains. These ancient hills are at peace with their neighbours the fields, and rest tranquilly among them; content to contribute with their waters and pasture to the fertility, and with their mists and rocks and seclusion to the holiday pleasure of the land which in youth they were wont to cumber with the fragments of each fiery insurgence, or bury under the white burden of their glacial defeats.
In other lands, to modify the harshness and to order the exuberance of younger ranges, whose ambition would yet challenge the stars, nature has still to avail itself of the sterner and more primitive discipline of ice and perpetual snow. With this veil, constant but always renewing, it subdues the barrenness and the aggressive angularity proper to their period of immaturity and change, and preserves for them the aloofness that is at once the protection and the charm of free-growing childhood. It is a mistake to think of the Alps or the Himalaya as venerable because their heads are white: theirs are all the irrepressible impulse, the uneven humour, the unconscious cruelty and the overflowing vitality of froward but jolly children.
A mountaineer may be satisfied to nurse his athletic infancy upon home rocks, and he may be happy to pass the later years of his experience among the more elusive impressions and more subtle romance of our old and quiet hills. But in the storm years of his strength he should test his powers, learn his craft and earn his triumphs in conflict with the abrupt youth and warlike habit of great glacial ranges.