But there is no harm in trying to exercise powers of reflection and of imagination, if I may persuade you to it. Stand on the bridges at Geneva and look at the Rhone slipping down from the lake, clear and blue with a wonderful and almost unreal blue. Then walk down to the junction of the Rhone and the Arve, and see that other river, turbid, greyish-white, a regular glacier stream; identity and name may be taken from it in the union, but it still has strength to rob the robber of his own especial beauty. That discolouring flood—what is it? As you walk back again, the top of Mont Blanc comes gradually from behind the Grande Salève into sight. If you reflect, you will know that those white waves were white from carrying away what only yesterday had been a part of those famous mountains; to-day it is dust, and nameless; to-morrow it will be laid down upon the ocean floor, there to be hardened, kneaded, and baked into the bricks that shall build other, as yet unchristened, hills. If you imagine, you will see in the mind’s eye those same summits, thus continually attacked, gradually shrinking; preserving their beauty to the last, no doubt, like our lovely lake mountains, which though in respect of their former height they be but as roots when the trunk is fallen, yet in themselves show not a trace of decay, and lift their heads as strong and fresh as ever. Yet they dwindle, and will in the end be mountains no more; they will no more have form and shape, no more be named and almost live, endowed with that strong appearance of vivid and obvious personality; mere undulations, they will no more exercise the mountain power upon the mind of man.
What else will help you to see the transience of the hills? Go and stand by a mountain stream where it runs in quick swishing rapids; as I have done by the Drance de Bagnes, and heard sounds as of groaning and muffled giant hammering—great boulders grinding each other in the press of the current, and moving always downwards. Go and look at the enormous moraines that wind down into Italy—each would be a range of hills in England. Had not the Alps another aspect before these were heaped up? And yet, say the geologists, great cenotaphs of the ice were raised in but a fraction of the time since the Alps were born. Try to tackle a rock-and-ice gully with strong sun on it, or (preferably) stay on one side and watch the stones come down: down they come like that every sunny day.
Look at the Matterhorn, and be told how like it is to Strasburg Cathedral; but rock spires are not built upwards like ones of stone and mortar; they are monoliths, cut out of the solid rock. The stony layers of the rock, once lying flat and soft upon the sea-bottom, then hardened, then gripped and crumpled by the ageing earth like so many sheets of wet paper, now are cut through, and show their free edges on the steep flanks of the mountain. Fixed long ago in waves and curves, now they are immobile, but they treasure within themselves the forms which the ice and the sun are to reveal. As if the sculptor were to have but half the shaping of his work, and the block of marble almost of itself disclose its hidden Oenus, or turn a Hercules planned into a Hylas accomplished, so the rock masses contain within themselves no infinite possibility of forms—there is, to start with, a quality of mountain concealed in the rock, so that the aerial sculptors may work as they please, and never find a Dent du Midi in the Mont Blanc range, or fashion a Weisshorn from the Dolomites. But that is another story. Even though the rocks thus decree that the instruments of their destruction shall be as well instruments to reveal their hidden beauties, yet destruction none the less it is. How gigantic a destruction those cut, upcurving layers of rock can testify.
But in the same way as our mind can know and yet not feel the mutability of the mountains, so it may know and yet not grasp their size and its extent. Here again the new lesson is hard to be learnt by brain alone: ‘Everest 29,002, Mont Blanc 15,786, Scawfell Pike 3210’—the figures convey but a part. The hills must take the mind by assault through the breaches of sense.
Those moments come but rarely. I have seen the west face of Skiddaw once, and once Schiehallion from the Struan road, towering as high as any Alpine peak might do; and Donkin’s famous photograph of the Weisshorn gives one something of the true feeling. But the most complete revelation came to me at the head of the Swiss Val Ferret.
We had already begun to appreciate the bigness of things, but rather through our own littleness than for any unusual grandeur revealed in them. As you walk up the deep, close valley, you have on your right, in contrast to the monotonous dry ridge of even middle height to the left, a succession of broad bluffs or buttresses that sustain the east end and guard the eastern glacier gateways of that great Cathedral of Three Nations, the massif of Mont Blanc. There is one below and one above the end of the Saleinaz glacier, and on the side of each a lesser bluff, an inward, forward-projecting pillar that narrows the gateway to a mere postern, with only glimpses of the broad aisle above. Both these doorposts bear the same name—Tita Moutse or Tête Moutze; a very good name, certainly, but you would think that the dwellers at Proz-de-Fort, just between the two, might find it confusing, even though on Barbier’s map one is printed black and upright, the other thin and in italics. It is difficult to render these distinctions in speaking—and perhaps they have not all got Barbier’s map. However, that is not our concern at present. Farther up is another big buttress (rejoicing in the name of Treutze Bouc), and another, and then the Glacier de la Neuvaz, with the Châlet Ferret on the other hand, and feather beds for weary travellers.
These buttresses, and especially the Treutze Bouc, are calculated to annoy the walker. There they stand, looking no bigger than a buttress of Snowdon or Saddleback; there as here the mountain torrents cut away the ground in the same way, and the same broad-faced bluffs are left. As with bluffs, so with ships: it is almost impossible to grasp the size of a big liner out at sea, her build is the same as that of any other steamship, and there is no standard of comparison. Here in the Val Ferret one learns by bitter experience and blistered feet. The road winds on and on, across torrent-beds, through alder-woods, along hot slopes—and the summit of Treutze Bouc is not yet opposite. After this lengthy demonstration of the disadvantages and unpleasantnesses of size, the mountains at last relent and show the other side of the picture.
I shall never forget the impression of colossal grandeur that showed itself at a turn of the road opposite the gate of the Glacier de la Neuvaz. Nothing was lacking in the chain. In the foreground, below a grassy bank, flowed the Drance de Ferret—only a smallish stream, but big enough and swift enough unbridged to stop such a small animal as man from gaining its other side. Across it lay a fallen pine; and from this, better than from the standing trees, you realised to what a height the pine-trunks grow. Of these there was a thick wood filling up the level bottom left by the receding glacier; the green sea extended back and back until the tops of the separate trees were not to be made out, and the whole wood tapered away in perspective like a band of clouds towards the setting sun. In the end it turned a corner to the right—a thin green line beyond the grey terminal moraine. This corner filled a little indentation in the hill behind. The eye travelled up naturally from the green line of trees to the green slope, and saw that slope as part of a great rounded hill, rather like a bit of the Downs in general appearance; but had it been hollow you could have gone on pouring your Chanctonburies and Sinoduns and Beachy Heads and Hogs backs into it, and they would have rattled about like small-shot inside. The stream of trees let you see how big it was, as hills on the horizon show the greatness of the setting moon. I think the hill was nameless. Beyond it, in another plane of distance, rose another peak—this one brown, of bare rock, and rather jagged; the vegetation had ended on the part concealed behind the green hill. Up and up the eye travelled, and was amazed to find that if the green had been but a spur of the brown, so the brown was but a spur of the white. Mont Dolent arose from, behind it like the pursuing peak in the Prelude. All its rocky middle and its snowline were in their turn hidden by the brown spur before them; only the white slanting chisel edge of the summit soared up to sight. Stream—tree—wood—mountains: one, two, and three ... each formed a stepping-stone to the one beyond, making it possible for the whole grandeur of the peak to slip down, as it were, and find place within the narrow limits of the brain waiting at the other end.
There it was able to take up its station beside that other thought which entered there, not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, but by the swift chamois and the mountain torrents. The two, holding mutual colloquy, together tell what Wordsworth learnt in another fashion, that the mountains are
‘Huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men.’