Chalet life is a useful corrective for those who regard the Swiss as a nation of hotelkeepers and guides. We soon picked up the unlovely patois, and gradually worked our way into the life of the village. We made friends with the owner of the chalet, and spent long hours on the Grindelalp watching the evolution of cheese. We made shameless love to the daughter of the chalet, now a dignified matron. A deserted kine shed was fitted up as a temporary home, and my brother, despite his obvious reluctance, was required to accept the rôle of our offspring. On Sunday we joined the brown-coated congregation in the white-washed Zwinglian church, helped to swell the mournful drone to which Luther’s sonorous hymns are intoned, and listened with incurious awe to the torrent of language with which the ‘Gletcher Pfarrer’ drenched his fold.
Our imagination took its suggestion from those around us. We did not play at soldiers or enginedrivers, for our hero was an old guide. It is significant that we admired him not so much for his sixty odd ascents of the Wetterhorn as for a mythical reputation, which we probably evolved from our sense of the heroic proprieties, that he beat his wife and looked upon the wine when it was red. Inspired by our knight of the rope, we surreptitiously stole an old pick-axe and some forty feet of clothes-line, and daily made our way to the woods above. The will to believe is the greatest asset of childhood, the age of unconscious pragmatism, and we convinced ourselves that, but for the steps laboriously hewed from the yielding earth, we could never have ascended so grim a slope. One day we received a rude awakening. A little damsel followed us, smiled cynically at the elaborate preparations, and then ran lightly up the perilous incline, disdainfully dodging the steps. The moment held material for tragedy. We affected an air of scornful indifference, but the pick-axe was never disturbed again.
We found a more real scope for our climbing ambition on a boulder that the ice rivers of the dawn of time had left stranded in the woods. Some thirty feet in height, it fell away sheer on all sides and gave scope for some pretty problems. With vague memories of Bunyan we dubbed it ‘Hill Difficulty,’ and tried to believe that Apollyon lurked in the neighbouring wood. Apollyon was an actuality for whom we entertained a chastened respect. We thought then that every Alpine peak was formed of perpendicular cliffs scaled by infinitesimal handholds. Experience has shown that many of the climbs on this boulder were harder than any similar short stretch on, say, the Finsteraarhorn. Hill Difficulty, on which we learned our craft at the respective ages of six and four, was really a sound training-ground. More than once we were placed in positions of considerable ignominy, and, for our size, some danger. A twenty-foot fall head first might have had awkward results but for a helpful bush which often proved a friend. On one fateful occasion I remember weeping profusely and shouting for aid to my nurse, a humiliating experience for a mountaineer. She, worthy dame, declined to interfere, and beat me soundly on returning to earth.
When I look back on those long summers, and try to recapture the haunting vagueness of the first moods born of the hills, I am faced by the insufficiency of the written word to express sensations that seem the less definite in outline the more vividly their colour endures. But certain broad features stand out, and I am convinced by experience that the normal conception of childhood, as embodied, for instance, in The Child’s Garden of Verses, is radically wrong. Some of Blake’s detached verses, and the poetry—written at the age of seven—by Miss Enid Welsford, reflect truer glimpses of that mood of savagery and vague fear that enwraps the world of the imaginative child, a world in which there is little either of the cosy or the snug. Alarming actual incidents such as Grindelwald on fire often excite an abstract curiosity, whilst people and places intrinsically innocent may in a moment become charged with cosmic significance. Of fact and tradition the modern child is often a sceptic. Neither of us believed in fairies, though we accepted with indulgence the well-meant efforts of our elders to amuse. But to this day I cannot explain why there should ever have existed a well-marked boundary in the Grindelwald woods, beyond which there dwelt an unhealthy influence. I cannot understand what fixed this bourne, nor yet why a certain slope of scree and slag leading up to a cluster of rock and pine should even now seem laden with brooding fear. So, too, though we did not believe in the ice maiden, we yet felt that certain mountains were, so to speak, healthy and others provokingly sinister. The child in touch with Nature finds his own fairy land, and the mountains are the most potent magicians.
The inner secrets of the mountain fear are seldom revealed, for those that know are ashamed of the atavistic emotions that robbed them of self-control. For the possessing terror of the lonely hills is a thing by itself. It is most felt in childhood, and best known to the solitary intruder. I am not thinking of those trying periods whose horror is at least reducible to natural causes, of the slow advance from step to step across an ice-slope raked by falling stones, of the desperate race against darkness as night charged up from the valley, of the grim struggle when retreat was and advance seemed equally impossible:
νῦν δ’ (ἔμπης γὰρ κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο
μύριαι, ἃς οὐκ ἐστι φυγεῖν βροτὸν οὐδ’ ὑπαλύξαι)
ἴομεν.
The strain of such moments is at least healthy, but the uncanny terror that grips the lonely victim is not. Often it is independent of difficulty or danger. As a boy I had wandered up to that barren valley of barren boulders that closes in the head of the Val d’Arpette. There was no suggestion of gloom in the peaceful afternoon light that cast lazy shadows on the Clochers d’Arpette. I was perfectly happy. Suddenly the whole wilderness of forbidding stones seemed fraught with evil intent. There was no tangible reason for this transformation, but it was sufficiently real to produce a headlong flight. I still remember the compelling terror that drove me to bruise shin and elbow as I hurled myself from boulder to boulder in a desperate attempt to escape from a valley tenanted by the shades of dim derisive evil.
The Alps merit a patient novitiate, and the mountaineer who does his Matterhorn and Mont Blanc in his first season misses the essential charm of the hills. We spent some ten summers and four winters in the mountains before we even crossed the snow-line. But the bitterness of waiting was redeemed by the joy of long deferred fulfilment. We learned during those years the fascination of the lower hills, too often dismissed as tedious grinds fit to serve only as training walks or as exercise for an off-day in bad weather. They are worthy of a more loving study. There is a peculiar joy in working patiently upwards from the smallest of beginnings to the culminating reward of a great peak. The landmarks of our climbing history advanced very slowly. There was the triumph of the Little Scheidegg at the age of six, the proud moment when we passed the eight thousand level on the Brevent, and the tantalising approach to the magic ten thousand on the Schwarzhorn. Finally, at the age of fifteen, I crossed the line of perpetual snow, which for years had haunted our dreams and marked the heights of earthly ambition. The Aiguille du Tour may seem a slight victory, but the romance of the first night in a club hut, the first dawn seen from the upper snows, the first generous breadth of vision from a real mountain, are among the unforgettable things. Even the long deferred Matterhorn belongs to a less splendid category of memories.
Those years taught us how meaningless is the cry that the Alps are played out. Railways and cheap trippers, it is said, have robbed Switzerland of all charm. Grindelwald is simply Brighton by the mountains, and so on and so forth. For the railways I agree with Mr. Belloc. ‘They are the trenches that drain our modern civilisation. Avoid them by so much as a quarter of a mile and you may have as much peace as would fill a nose bag.’ Nor need we deny even to the cheap tripper the possible possession of a soul for the beautiful. The heritage of the hills should not be the monopoly of the cultured classes. In the Lötschenthal I once met four men of that class which has recently begun to desert Margate for the mountains. Their savings were devoted to this one fortnight in the Alps. Because guides are expensive they confined their wanderings to easy snow summits. Because the Climber’s Guides are expensive they spent long hours in the British Museum copying them out into notebooks. One should rejoice in the increased facilities of communication into lives otherwise lacking in colour of the saving inspiration of the snows.
The complaint that the Alps are over-run argues a barren lack of enterprise. The Wengen Alp is confessedly somewhat dense in the height of the season. This troubles me not at all. Within two hours of the Scheidegg lies one of the most ideal of Alpine summits. To the superficial observer the Tschuggen may seem an unattractive scree and slate peak, yet the actual top is a delightful yielding carpet of springy Alpine turf touched with the blue of late gentians. Who will, may spend untroubled hours here watching the clouds drifting across Jungfrau, and in the north the dark turquoise waters of Thun gleaming between the intervening hills. Solitary, remote, and secluded, they will scarce remember the proximity of the hidden hotel and its heterogeneous mob.