Some might see in him the vices of the born grumbler; for with him the weather is rarely perfect, and when perfect it is too often about to break. But it is part of the climber’s vanity to be more weather-wise than Nature herself; and to all appearance he mildly resents even a change for the good which does not accord with his prophecy.
Further, the unexpected is not always evil; the climber may stumble upon a new route, and even the most hardened scoffer at such things will admit a secret delight in reading his name in the pages of Conway and Coolidge. The unexpected is always at hand. I went up one day to the hut on the south-west ridge of the Matterhorn, in a wind sufficient to take the horns off the oxen; and that night I lay awake, like Strepsiades,
ἐν πέντε σισύραις ἐγκεκορδυλημένος
listening to the wind howling and the clatter of stones and ice falling from the Great Tower upon the roof. Next morning the wind dropped at sunrise, and a warm, cloudless day followed, of that wonderful clearness which foretells the advent of bad weather. One more instance of the unexpected—and in this I have my justification: that day we were in a sense pilgrims, for we set out to discover a route by which men might pass direct from the Ober Steinberg to the Concordia. We started in light, rolling mist, and towards sunrise looked down upon a cloud-sea hiding the deep-cut valley of Lauterbrunnen. Then crossing a world of stones we climbed a steep, short glacier, and over a heap of avalanche-debris reached the lowest rocks of our mountain, the Mittaghorn. Here we had expected difficulty with a steep band of rock, but passed rapidly upwards without check to where the angle eased off. Then came trouble, for the rock became of a loose slaty texture, in places covered with ice. Higher up matters improved, until we reached the foot of a great overhanging wall of red rock, which turned us left along a narrow ledge and round jutting corners, to where a steep ice gully cut through the wall. I was left standing in a vast ice step, from which I could see nothing but the leader’s foot searching now and then for some cranny in the rock. Below me a great ice slope ran down with alarming steepness and then dipped over, beyond which I saw the green valley and our hotel; in the far distance I could see the ripples sparkling on the Lake of Thun, and above the sunlight was playing on a patch of rocks which had come no nearer after two hours’ hard work. On such occasions time passes slowly to those who only stand and wait, and I was right glad when they hoisted me over the rock wall and into the sunlight once more. To our disgust the summit lay still far off to our left, and to attain it we had to follow a narrow ridge of sloppy snow; on the far side of the peak we found crusted snow, to complete our tribulation. Thus we found both good and evil unexpectedly, and like Christian fell ‘from running to going, and from going to clambering upon hands and knees,’ until we wished ourselves trippers once more.
It is, above all, when the climber passes from one valley to another that the unexpected is liable to occur. He then experiences all the pilgrim’s joy of wandering, the uncertainty of the night’s lodging, the pleasure of tracing out the next day’s ascent on the far hillside. He will follow the line of path through the pine wood, and train his powers of observation, learning, moreover, to trust his own eyes in preference to the map. Though he may not see cities, he will see many men, and will find hospitality as unselfish as in the days when all travellers and pilgrims were objects of pity. He travels from place to place with a pilgrim’s desire to find the ideal peak or valley. There are not many that find it; and this failure in the search is due partly to the climber’s own natural restlessness, partly to his intense desire to see if the Happy Valley may not lie just round the corner. He feeds this discontent with his present circumstances, knowing that in so doing he gets the greatest joy. He is in no hurry to find this Happy Valley; nor, if he never find it, will he consider that he has climbed in vain.
IV
Both pilgrim and mountaineer may claim for themselves the virtue of enthusiasm. But if they be humble-minded men they will not deny the possible existence of other and nobler forms of enthusiasm. If this virtue of theirs be not identical with all excellence, it must be capable of definition or analysis in terms other than itself. The pilgrim’s answer is easily given: he goes out to seek recreation, in the fullest sense of the word, to introduce a new element into his life. ‘I go to free myself from the Wheel of Things by a broad and open road.’ Less easy to define is the τέλος of the mountaineer; under no moral compulsion, he endures the pilgrim’s hardships for a less definite end, yet returns year after year in search of discomfort. A writer endeavouring to analyse this enthusiasm has put it down as a mild madness, a drawback to mountain-climbing. It is in great part an enthusiasm for past and future: put the mountaineer among his hills, and he is no sooner in full training than he begins to anticipate with joy his return to civilisation. Place him once more at home, and he will be eager to return to his old haunts, will busy himself in planning for the next year. He climbs, as it seems, against his will.
Yet he sets out willingly in search of recreation, knowing that he will certainly find it through hours of toil. He finds also a very full pleasure, forgetting readily the early start and all the thousand inconveniences which afford copy for the scribbler. The moon in the pine woods, the early dawn in the upper snow, the descent of Mont Blanc towards the sunset are not for valley-dwellers; and to attain these rewards the mountaineer welcomes the opportunity of an enforced self-denial:—
‘Carnis terat Superbiam
Potus cibique parcitas.’
He shares also the pilgrim’s joy of solitude and contemplation in the long hours of silence, and the joy of friendly conversation with all manner of men at the close of day. He regards no day, however trying, as wasted which is spent above snow-line, and next day he can take his ease in the valley with a clear conscience. ‘It is pleasant,’ says Leslie Stephen, ‘to lie on one’s back in a bed of rhododendrons, and look up to a mountain-top peering at one from above a bank of cloud; but it is pleasantest when one has qualified oneself for repose by climbing the peak the day before, and becoming familiar with its terrors and its beauties.’ Herein lies a point of resemblance between pilgrim and mountaineer: to feel the need of qualifying for this repose, which loses half its value when it is not the reward of labour.