That evening, after a hot trudge up from Grindelwald, and a cool descent along the home stream that somehow rested our tired limbs, we returned to Rosenlaui with a new sense of expansion and a vague feeling of the coherence of things, for the dead lines of the map had become actual and living before our eyes. Yet this feeling soon gave place to the disappointing yet somehow thrilling thought, that by enlarging our horizon we had only left ourselves ringed about by a wider circle of other sides, making it still less likely than before that we should ever solve the abiding questions of our childhood.
For four years the Alps remained a memory and a hope, till in 1907 the long horrors of the Certificate Examination were followed by the thrill of the night journey, enjoyed to the full owing to a constitutional inability to sleep, and a drive from Martigny to the upper part of the Val de Bagnes, a shut-in and self-centred valley presided over by the Combin. It was here that Italy became identified with the other side. Here I was first initiated as a climber, and taken up the Ruinette; and for two lazy hours on the top I watched the Italian mountains raise themselves up from the ever-thickening screen of mist with which the Lombard plains seemed to be hiding their secret. A few weeks later came twenty minutes’ actual walking on Italian soil, between the Great St. Bernard and the Col de Fenêtre. Italy lay at our feet, brought near to us by the road winding down visibly to Aosta, and by the first Italian notices of ‘Caccia Riservata,’ as well as by the southward-flowing water.
That day saw, too, the registering of a vow, fulfilled in the next year, to visit the country of the Gran Paradiso and the Grivola. Peaks there and around Mont Blanc fell before our onslaught, and we grew to be hardened climbers; while passes became mere incidents in the journey between one peak and another. But Geography was roused from her hiding-place by a walking tour two years later—part of the regular ‘Tour of Mont Blanc’ from Chamonix to Champex with variations. The Col du Bonhomme was unsatisfactory because, after much display, it failed to turn a watershed at the first attempt, and, after including the Col des Fours, left us still in the Rhone basin, with the Col de la Seigne between us and Italy. Geography was displeased, but her craving after completeness was satisfied by the long drive from Aosta up the Italian side of the Great St. Bernard. Two known regions were linked up, and of the remembered dips and corners of the road seen from the top, each had had its answer. Also I had a sense of triumph in having cheated the powers of the universe by taking several ounces of water in my soaked clothes across the watershed to the Swiss side of the Col de Fenêtre.
The passion still retained its childish power, but in a wider sense. By being children we had been nearly in the position of the first primitive inhabitants of such a country of mountain and valley: to them peaks are haunts of terror and danger, the parents of all the powers of destruction—winds, avalanches, and lightnings—which descend upon them; their situation makes them geographers by profession: at first their eyes are turned down stream, and communication only extends over the main valley and its tributaries, till a more venturesome spirit arises and uses the water as his guide, but now, ascending it, takes the line of least resistance over the passes to the peoples of the neighbouring river-basins; and ancient legends of hill tribes give a prominent place to watersheds, and great heroes are often made to conquer a monster which has been terrorising the valley, and fling him into some great lake at the head of the waters of the next basin. Did he not embody the terror of those frowning walls, and was not his conquest a victory indeed?
Thus the passes gained in importance, while the peaks were afar off and terrible: they were already in use when there filtered through to Herodotus across section after section of trade route the tradition, confused in its long journey, of a town of Pyrene and a river Alpis; when a new wave of inhabitants, scarcely pushing communication between valley and valley themselves, used their mountain hardiness to extract toll from the Roman merchants whose enterprise brought them across the St. Bernard and the Mont Cenis to Vienna and Lugdunum; and each traveller added to their importance and fame, while the local paths were linked up into great highways, joining country to country, and shrine to shrine, making a way for invasions, for pilgrims, or for traders. The pass where Xenophon’s men cried θάλασσα! θάλασσα! possesses a reality and interest of its own, not shared by the almost laughable description of the mythical peaks of Krophi and Mophi in Herodotus. But for us, even as children, there was a difference: the prowess and achievements of our elders made impossible the fear which our ancestors felt even for ‘Helm Crag, Helvellyn, and Butterlip Howe’—the last-named a small wooded eminence about two hundred feet high—yet we lacked the spiritual and bodily pride which the attainer of summits must possess. What climber has not known the moment when this has failed him suddenly, and he has realised the impudence of his presence among the mountain sanctuaries and of his trial of strength face to face with the mountain’s bulk; when he either expiates the crime of his intrusion by a great and tranquillising humility, or struggles, only to find all he sees assume a mask of grinning hatefulness? The attainer of summits follows a way which, even if definite, is none the less new and none the less formidable to each successive user: we children, like them, were pass-goers, enterers of a sanctuary of a different kind, one hallowed by the slow toil of generations, where the mountains could not resent intrusion, since it was the mark of their community of life with the humble folk whom they supported.
Even then we were no longer geographers by profession, still less now, when the Alps are to us no longer a barrier to be forced, but the playground of Europe, whither we in our sophisticated age make trains convey us; and it seems as if the amateur geography of our childhood were a mere survival, to be put away together with other childish things when we grow up to be ‘modern men,’ with the climber’s devotion to peaks, and the true modern appreciation of mountains. Shall we not come to treat passes as highest minima instead of lowest maxima, and so despise them; and will not our new mystical attitude make the partial survival in us of primitive man a bar to the growth of a right spirit?
For your true mountain lover professes himself a mystic: he is one of those that ‘live by places,’ and he waits upon the fruition of those moments in which his senses give him a sudden feeling of fellowship with his surroundings, when
‘A gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery....’
These moments, he will tell you, are an end in themselves, and not pursued for any moral strengthening of our social fibre for fighting the battles of life. Only in isolation from his fellows, from science, and from the interference of intelligence, when he adopts a ‘wise passivity’ of mere sensation, is this sense of fellowship granted him; and among the peaks, under the spell of his rhythmical bodily movements, he and the silent mountains stand face to face, as pure living sensation and lifeless matter, and each finds in the other a mysterious completion.
This is the creed he professes; but how rarely comes one who can practise it or achieve its enjoyment. Nearly all indeed share in some degree this passion for fellowship; nearly all live their lives as much by places as by people. The contrast is put by Wordsworth in one of the poems on the Naming of Places, that called ‘Joanna’s rock’:—