The Plaine Morte is also associated with less seemly memories. Our first guideless venture above the snow-line took us to the Wildstrubel. We left at midnight without sleeping, and were dead tired when we started home. But our older companion should have known better than to give himself and two exhausted boys neat whisky as a pick-me-up. The next distinct memory is that of watching our friend carrying out his suggestion that he should lead. His movements did not seem governed by any concept of the shortest distance between two points, and after a few aimless curves he sat himself in the snow. There was much competition to avoid leading, as those that followed could doze peacefully, guided and led by the tension of the rope. Our intermittent slumbers provoked abrupt jerks on the rope, which as often as not induced a unanimous collapse, followed by a brief but peaceful repose on the glacier. My brother’s mind was divided between two obsessions. He identified me with a certain ‘Hetta,’ and was firmly convinced that I was leading towards the wrong end of the glacier. A violent death would have then seemed preferable to the mental effort involved in disabusing him of these fancies; and I accepted with resigned disregard his blandishments, at times unpleasantly affectionate, and his repeated attempts to change the line of march. As we dragged on I became acutely conscious of what are, I believe, two fairly common phenomena. Movement, continued in extreme exhaustion, set itself to the sound of an irritating jingle of words that worked its way into the subconscious mind, governed the swing of one’s limbs, and repeated itself monotonously till it seemed to be part and parcel of one’s being. Again weariness awoke that strange tendency to see faces in inanimate objects. Familiar countenances formed suddenly, and as suddenly resolved themselves into grinning boulders. Mr. Belloc may have had this in mind:
‘It darkens. I have lost the ford,
There is a change on all things made.
The rocks have evil faces, Lord,
And I am awfully afraid.’
Insufficient attention is paid to the curious data that mountaineering contributes to the psychology of exhaustion. Experiences of a different character were the outcome of another struggle on the Plaine Morte against overpowering weariness.
With a friend, a sound mountaineer, but a novice on ski, I had set out some years later to cross the hills from Montana to Villars. I left my friend on the Plaine Morte, and pressed on to reach the Wildstrubel for the sunset. Incidentally of all mountain memories that lonely sundown on the Wildstrubel is the most haunting. Adelboden was hidden, and from bourne to bourne there was no suggestion of life but for the deserted snow-gagged road to the Gemmi. A chaos of crag and snowfield, with no touch of colour to relieve the greyness, reddened for a few moments, and then sank back into the shadow as night crept upwards from the valley to the summit ridges. Darkness had fallen when I again reached the Plaine Morte, and one of those bitter winter breezes blew over the glacier. Mental and physical fatigue followed the inevitable reaction after thirteen strenuous hours. The monotony of surroundings has a hypnotic effect on tired limb and brain. The alternating spaces of shadow and snow, subdued by the glimmering light of the stars, the indefinite bounding wall with a dark curving of great hills beyond, possessed a rhythmic suggestion of sleep that I found difficult to resist. I tried counting steps, but only accentuated the rhythm. I vowed not to look up till I had reached the thousand, but nothing seemed to break the maddening reiteration of those undulating snows. And then my hands and feet suddenly lost sensation.
A steady sequence of thuds disturbed me; and I realised that my friend was chopping wood outside the hut some three miles away. That Inquisition torture, the slow succession of drops of water falling at intervals of a minute on the victim’s head, had, we are told, the effect of inducing a lively loyalty to the Catholic faith. I can well believe it, for I know that the regular fall of the beats carried across the glacier filled me with zealous and unreasoning anger. It added the last artistic touch to the monotony of the Dead Plain, for it followed a different rhythm, and proved almost more than I could stand.
The mountain gloom is often most pronounced below the snow-line.
One of our earlier climbs took us from the Wildstrubel Hut to the Wildhorn, and thence without incident to the head of the Rawyl gorge. Here the paths divide, the westerly to Sion, the easterly to Montana. At the dividing paths my brother and I started cheerily along that which leads to Montana. One of our two companions was a middle-aged man who considered that the experience gained in some camping expedition in Africa had given him an instinct for locality. He assured us that Montana would be found on the western flanks of the gorge. Analogous reasoning would lead one to look for Murren on the slopes of the Scheidegg. We did not like to break up the party, lest further knowledge won on the veldt should have even more disastrous results. So on we wandered, while the dividing gorge dropped ever further and further below. I do not know what provoked the final outburst. Perhaps they reminded us of our youth, a sore subject. They were the kind of men who ‘have no hesitation in contradicting those younger than themselves.’ At any rate we parted. They chanced upon a peasant who guided them home by midnight, a barren victory, for had they followed our advice we should all have been home by tea. Meanwhile we two scrambled down some fifteen hundred feet to the boiling torrent. This we crossed by a fallen tree. A faint track led thence to the lower of the two ‘bisses’ that run along the great sweep of the mountain-side. These ‘bisses’ are an ingenious attempt to harness the waters that would otherwise flow to waste, and to convey them at a uniform gradient through a country that is all ups and downs. The stream guided into troughs is carried across the face of the precipices. The troughs and planks, which afford a passage to the engineer and to chance but astute visitors, are supported on poles driven into the face of the cliff. Even in the daytime the lower ‘bisse’ is not oversafe, for the water escapes at intervals and trickles over the planks. By the time we reached it night—a sullen overclouded night—had fallen. Slowly we began to feel our way through the darkness, cautiously creeping along the slippery treacherous platform that hung poised above the thunder of the river. Childish nightmares had often centred round mountain cataracts, and to this day there is something uncanny in the turbid fury of an Alpine stream. We were soon filled with useless hatred for the unending tumult from below. Above the gorge a crag loomed out of the night and looked down upon us with malicious contempt. At such moments the mountains seem to develop a treacherous and repellent personality. There is something inhuman in the grim relish with which they seem to watch a desperate struggle.
‘The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand to see the game at bay.’
The shadowy lines of forbidding precipice crept upwards to dim clusters of twisted pine. Below us flashed the evanescent glimmer on the tumult of the torrent. Its monotonous shouting beat unceasingly about our ears. Something of the nightmare imagery that inspired Kubla Khan added a note of terror to the voice of the river as it forced its way, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.
To the monotony of the torrent was added the monotony of that interminable succession of planks, winding round the dark elbows of the ravine, always promising to disclose a securer path, but leading only to a like treacherous way. At last, in despair, we tried a short cut up through the woods. The trees rose out of a darkness that could be felt, and smote us in the face. We stumbled, fell, condemned ‘the nature of things,’ and gave up the unequal struggle to sleep till dawn.