Oxford Mountaineering Essays

by Unknown

On the other side of the valley the Faulhorn is doubly starred in Baedeker, but fortunately the course of the double stars is so ordered that it does not light on the fairest of Alpine retreats. The treasures of this chain are hidden in its eastern wings, and you, friends, who find Grindelwald bourgeois, do you know that ‘very lovely, silent land’ hidden away behind the black pyramid of the Schwarzhorn? The long rampart that links the Grossenegg to the Krinne is perhaps the finest low-level wall in Switzerland; whilst shadowed by a fold in this curtain of rock lies one of the chiefest of Alpine wonders. Within the span of some thousand yards you can trace the life of a baby glacier that has never reached maturity. Meticulously fashioned, with névé, ice-fall, and crevasse on a perfect but diminutive scale, it recalls the dwarf trees of Japan in its miniature perfection.

So during the ten summers in which we explored this chain in all its moods we found for ourselves the essential romance of the mountains. We acquired a more extensive book knowledge of the topography and history of the greater peaks than most climbers we met. Scrambles in the Alps was the first book that I laboriously spelt out for myself. Alpine literature and Alpine photographs, such as Mr. Donkin’s, gave us a precocious knowledge of the Alps. I remember surprising a chance acquaintance by the certainty with which I located the views at an Alpine Club Exhibition, and his comment, ‘You seem to have been climbing for many seasons,’ had a certain bitterness for a boy who had not crossed the snow-line.

We had our foolish moments. A girl of fifteen returning from the Eiger, and seemingly careless of an experience for which we would have bartered our appetites, provoked a desperately absurd attempt on the Wetterhorn. Without rope or axe we found our way to the Gleckstein Hut. There we realised the impossibility of any serious attempt on the Wetterhorn itself, and turned aside towards one of the great buttresses below the main peak. By a nasty chimney and an arête which would prove trying to most unroped climbers we reached the top of our little peak. From our feet the great curtain of cliff that overshadows Grindelwald fell away in one curve to the pastures of the Scheidegg. A touch of uncertainty as to our chance of recovering the line of ascent added to the majesty of that compelling precipice. There were no traces of a previous visit, so we proudly erected a cairn, and then, more alarmed than we should have cared to confess, we cautiously retraced our steps down the ridge. On this and similar scrambles we may have learned something that is missed in a more orthodox novitiate. Occasionally we managed to borrow an axe, and derived much amusement from the tangled labyrinth of crevasses that can be found among the upper reaches of the Grindelwald glaciers. These expeditions were carried out somewhat stealthily, but an unusual and enlightened view of the educational value of the mountains allowed us considerable liberty of action.

The hopeless call of the skyline that we could never cross lent to the historic gap between the Jungfrau and the Mönch the mystery of those corners one can never turn in dreams. When at length we began to climb the greater peaks, fate took us to other ranges. But after years of waiting we at last solved the mystery of the other side, and a six-day journey across the glaciers of the Oberland on ski owed its inmost charm to the discoveries that answered the questions of those early years. Imagination had fashioned a mysterious conception of those fields of unknown snow behind the Jungfrau, and the last steps up the slope leading to the portals of the Lötschenlücke were quickened by the return of the child’s desire. And when at last the glory of the Great Aletsch snowfield, white with the softness of a winter moon, gave substance to the dream—‘Behold, the half had not been told.’

As a small boy I had compiled a guide-book, in which I had affirmed that ‘the Finsteraarhorn will test the powers of a first-class mountaineer.’ And now as we left our ski and passed on to its ascent, there was a touch of sadness in the ease with which we overcame the stronghold that to childhood had seemed almost impregnable. From the summit the little chalet of those earlier summers was just visible, and across the white recesses of the familiar lower ranges, and across the interval of years, our eyes seemed to meet the eager upward looks that had so often searched for the secrets of our present tranquil resting-place.

With such surroundings for our childhood it was almost inevitable that there should be little room for the sentiment with which others look back on school and home life. The snows are a jealous tutor, and resent a divided attention. It might be truer to say that Grindelwald was our real home and school. On the first day of summer and winter holidays we left for the Alps, to return only as term began. We never talked of ‘going,’ but always of ‘going back’ to the Grindelwald, where the chalet was the centre of our most enduring associations. The associations remained with us at school. My kindliest memories of Harrow centre round the Vaughan Library, comfortably remote from the minor annoyances of school life. The monitor’s key was a very real privilege, for it gave undisturbed possession of silent spaces whose full beauty was only revealed during a winter ‘first school’ when the sun shone in awakening glory through the windowed recesses that open on to terrace, fields, and the low-lying hills in the east. One shelf in particular proved a sovereign alchemist, and an intricate book knowledge of the Himalayas and Caucasus was accumulated with its help at the expense of the humaner letters.

The Grindelwald epoch was followed by three summers that gave us some experience of guideless scrambling among third-rate snow mountains. By judiciously choosing the worst of all conceivable routes we managed to discover educative difficulties where none need have existed. And if we are the only people who have found a dangerous route up the Wildstrubel, we may as well have the discredit attaching to that feat. The providence that cares for the young and very foolish preserved us among sundry and manifold perplexities. At least we brought the axe and rope out of the sphere of imaginative usage, and acquired an eye for country that we might not have gained on first-class peaks between guides. Just as the charm of the lower hills is too little understood, so also the fascination of these dependent courtiers of the greater monarchs is woefully ignored. These smaller mountains provide the most natural transition from the hills of mere imagination to the actual mountains of romance.

Let me instance the Glacier de la Plaine Morte, a field of névé on the route to no great peaks, and rarely visited. Its elusive magic is all its own. Just as the quiet spell of Wordsworth escapes those whose taste in poetry tends towards sound and fury, so the Plaine Morte is a useful touchstone to discriminate between the esoteric and exoteric school of mountain lovers. ‘Any goose sees glory’ in the ice-fall of the Rhone or the sweep of the Aletsch. But if a man can see nothing in the Plaine Morte but a somewhat featureless field of snow, he is not one of those to whom the precious things of the lasting hills will yield up their treasure. He is no dweller in the inner-most.

On the glaciers near Finse there is something of the like fascination. There, as on the Plaine Morte, the appeal consists in no outstanding feature, but in an impression of organic unity in a seemingly neglected world. On the Plaine Morte the effect is heightened by the insignificance of the shapeless bounding wall of low-lying shale slopes that cut off the greater peaks. Here also there is nothing to disturb by an assertion of disproportionate grandeur. There is the same secret and spacious charm on the Hardanger-Jokul, where the eye travels unarrested over dim white spaces of ice-capped plateaus only suggesting by a suspicion of haze the unseen fjords that sleep among their folds, and falling away like the rhythm of dying music to a far and grey horizon. In such places there is an uneasy feeling as of an unsought intrusion upon the quiet of a world withdrawn to die, a death with a wayward note of incompleteness:

‘As though some God in his dreaming had wasted the work of his hand
And forgotten the work of creation.’