Finally, the mountaineer will learn two secrets by experience. He will discover the secret of those philosophers that have dominion over the young, that one may argue (on mountains as elsewhere) from any given premise with equally convincing logic to two contrary conclusions. This is the essence of the mountaineer’s freedom of mind; for wherever he may find himself he can advance many reasons for or against every proposal, as conscience-free as the pilgrim himself, calling in prudence to support equally his bold or his lazy wishes; which is a dangerous thing for all climbers, as Mr. Worldly Wiseman knows. He will learn also the secret of a true holiday, which the pilgrim possesses: that this lies, not in the abandonment of everything familiar in search of distraction, but in taking up some fresh and absorbing interest, which will continue from one holiday to another.
PASSES
BY
N. T. HUXLEY
(Balliol)
VI. PASSES
There are few people who are not at heart geographers; the passion may be repressed or forgotten, but it is probably ready to reappear, and elderly persons often surprise themselves no less than their youthful companions by the zeal with which they attempt to mould the face of the earth by amateur engineering: it is in early years, however, that the passion inevitably shows itself.
It was the chief delight of a community of cousins, brought together each summer at the sea-side, to spend as much of the day as the day left possible in altering in every conceivable manner, by dams, diversions, or channels, the geography of a wet strip of sand, which the tide in its next advance would restore to its old conformation. Sometimes operations, more ambitious in the durability of their materials, were begun in a stream inland; pools were made, and the stream diverted into a new, or perhaps a long disused, channel. Sometimes, too, a party of us would explore along a stream to its source, which we rarely reached, since even small streams are apt to extend farther than childish zeal will endure, though fired by the ambition of finding a real spring, entrancing to the dwellers among sluggish south-country rivers.
But it was with our first visit to the Alps that the revelation came. Here were streams without number, small enough to follow, during the course of a long picnicking day, up to real authentic springs, which bubbled clear and cold from the ground at our feet. Geography could be made and altered; our dams made pools where none were before, or caused the paths and water-courses of the neighbourhood to exchange their functions, so that the inhabitants of lonely chalets found their water supply miraculously curtailed, and visited the culprits up above with guttural wrath. Watersheds, things hard for the low-lander to comprehend—mere imaginary lines drawn across gently swelling sand-ridges or downs—gained new life when seen as the jagged ridge of the Engelhörner, or the great line of green hills north from the Schwartzhorn to the bastion of Tschingli over Haslithal.
With the magic of water was joined the mystery of the other side. If we followed any of the streams up and up, to the Engelhörner or the Schöniwanghörner, whither should we see the torrents going, when the rain that fell on the mountains streamed down the far side? The quest of the geographer was made concrete; and as water has been the chief power in the making of geography, so it is first to start the quest in a child’s imagination, and the best guide in the knight-errantry of childhood. But the streams that fell from the precipices of the Engelhörner and Wellhorn pointed out a course beyond our ambitions; not yet could we aspire to be climbers, and they still guard their secret, though ready to yield it, now the time has come, to an ambition strengthened with strengthened limbs. Even the grass slopes of the Schöniwanghörner were too high to cross; but the great day came when we started at six, with two mules, to cross the Great Scheidegg, so long a barrier at the head of the valley slung between Wetterhorn and Schwartzhorn, with Grindelwald as our object.
It was a water-following on a great scale; we started with the sound of the Reichenbach falls in our ears, and followed along the line of least resistance, made by the stream. Still before breakfast we passed the Schwartzwald, where the stream was already shorn of so much of its strength that it could be harnessed and made to pass through hollowed half tree-trunks to do the work of a saw-mill. Higher up was the region of bogs and grass slopes, each few hundred yards sending its half-buried tinkling trickle to join the head waters of the river itself. And then, without warning, the path took a final zig, and brought us to the top; and for the first time we saw part of the land of the other waters, with the other glaciers and snow-fields, grass peaks and stony ones, which gave them birth. We saw how the valleys bent round to Thun and Brienz, how the valley of Lauterbrunnen and the peak of the Jungfrau fitted on to a world whose horizon had been suddenly enlarged; looking for those places above all which had gained special interest and familiarity from the pictured slips in our chocolate packets.