Oxford Mountaineering Essays

by Unknown

VIII. ROOF-CLIMBING AT OXFORD

In a book such as this, where the University of Oxford provides the one central sun round which, planet-wise, the diverse essays revolve, each all but breaking from all connection with the rest, and only just held back by that gravitating force—in such a book, it would be a pity not to seek to make that force more strong. In what way could this be better done than by some account of Oxford climbing, where the University provides not only the spiritual background, but the very physical basis of the theme?

Then, too, there is another reason for the attempt. The art of roof-climbing, at Oxford, alas! no less than elsewhere, is in need of defenders who will speak out for her. Herself still inarticulate, she needs the good offices of any champion she can find amidst the universal enmity in which she finds herself. Poor struggling wretch, in expectation of foes, she has found them: but has been deceived, too often, in those that should have been friends.

Indigenous authority, not, perhaps, without some show of reason, though here and there one of its Argus eyes may consciously wink at the art’s clandestine or unobtrusive practice, will yet trim the vials of punitive wrath for the foolish one who is discovered. That was to be looked for; but there is hardship when brother turns on brother (big bully on baby brother); climbers there are that have the Alps for their pleasure, and are privileged in acquaintance with the princely among mountains, who yet grudge the poor stay-at-home his sincerest flattery, tell him he is to be despised for his ascents, rebuked for his foolhardiness, and chastised for his disobedience.

Poor Cinderella of Climbing! May the Prince soon come, and cast his favourable glance upon her. Meanwhile let it be for me to play the part of Matrimonial Agency, display and recite her charms and publish them abroad, so that perchance they may thus catch the eye of the destined Sprig of Royalty.

With forethought, knowing the fastidious taste of these gentlemen in their search for a true princess, let us recite her personal charms—the glimpses of beauty and of cold unknown secrets which even her more humble wooer may find—her beauty, which is the reward, given to a mind tense and braced by the hard labour of unwonted muscles on slippery places. Imagine a prickly ridge of the horned and perforated tiles deemed suitable for roof-trees, gained by a climb up the body of a companion, laid flat along the sloping roof. All around are stone and brick ranges, peaks which more than their Alpine counterparts deserve to be called Clocher or Tour, showing in the darkness little of their dilettante symmetry of the artificial: the deep valleys between filled with their rivers of light, carrying their noisy freight along: cols in the near range vouchsafing their strange glimpses of the more distant: beneath, a wide and gloomy desert, with here and there lamp-posts for oases of our symbol of mountain-water.

Throughout, a jump in nearness to the stars, and a fellow-tingling unwarranted by a bare forty-feet approximation to them. By our own act we are cut off from men: the thickness of a single wall, if but it be the outer house-wall, dispossesses us of our humanity, and gives back our lost kinship with the stars.

Peak and col, valley, river, and pass—all are there: but the real, broad-sustaining Alps do not gape suddenly to a show of the imagined trolls of our story-books at work beneath, and full of unintelligible hatred against ourselves. While here, on our tile-summits and pipe-couloirs, we know the trolls for a reality, their life the very negation of the fount of our new spirit gained in the traverse from plastered side to plain of a wall; the rousing of their incomprehensible rage leading to pursuit and loss of our world.

Signs of their inhabitance are all around us: vents, traps for the feet, showing signs of the furnaces where they are ever at labour to fuse the dead message of the written page into living matter of a brain for the breathing hole of some typho of a senseless machine, whose groans are chained to the production of sweetest music in College organ-pipes; sudden lights flashed out by one of the trolls, to the displaying of a pair of legs spider-wise across the entrance to his lair, or the painted globe sphering the radiance shed upon the small-hourly labours of the troll of highest Matterhorn.

And yet the peril of them is greater in imagination than in reality—dazzled by the light in which he loves to bathe himself, he cannot see the wanderer on the heights, who may dance unobserved in the view of public streets. The troll-kind are like some power able to shake the earth, and to overwhelm life when the time comes, but now only manifesting a greater grandeur to the eyes—volcano, flame, or flood: engrossed in their own subterranean labours, they give scarce a thought to us, and we may even mock at them from without; discover yourself, however, and he becomes the arch-enemy, like the all-powerful earth-force, ready to annihilate those whom it supports, and yet some evil power they have had upon the Climber—they have lured him to desist from praises of his lady, and to run off in disquisitions upon their ugly selves. Thwart them, Climber, and return to your Princess! She has granted Beauties—she does not deny Adventures: no—you may meet with strange ones on the tops—unexpected sights that would lose half their strangeness if they had been known and sought.