II. OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF A CHAMOIS: AND INCIDENTALLY OF SOME OTHER MATTERS
Those who know Rosenlaui will also know that finely pointed little peak, an outlying spur of the Wetterhorn, that looks straight down into the front windows of the hotel—the Dossenhorn. That was my first climb. I confess that it was nothing very thrilling, though I enjoyed it thoroughly. We had a guide—an aged, aged man, whose downhill, bent-knee walk was if anything slower than his very slow but quite automatic and invariable upward pacing. We had a rope, which appeared to me perfectly unnecessary, and was a great nuisance to the airily independent spirit and body of the novice. Two ice-axes lent to our party (of five) an air of considerable distinction. Very little of the day’s happenings have remained to me. I still remember how very easy the rocks of the last arête were; how fine the Wetterhorn looked across the snow plateau; how I wondered why my uncle, a considerable climber in his day, wore trousers instead of knickerbockers; how I ran down most of the way home after unroping; and how, in my innocence, I plunged my face, scarlet from its exposure all unvaselined to the snow-fields, into a basin of cold water—with what results those know who have tried it. Among all this intolerable deal of bread, however, we had a halfpenny worth of something more intoxicating. There is a long snow slope to be crossed slantingly before the col and the hut are reached. It is not at all steep, sloping up to the lower border of the rock pile that forms the pyramidal top of the mountain; but the old guide had ordered the rope, and so there we were plodding diagonally upwards in single file.
All of a sudden there was a rattle, and then a stone leapt off the rocks above to bound down the snow slope some four hundred yards ahead of us. The old guide looked round, and said: ‘Chamois.’
This set us all agog—two or three had never seen the chamois on his native heath. However, the brown coat of the chamois is a good piece of cryptic colouring; he—or they—remained absolutely invisible against the brown rocks. But we had startled him, and he went on moving—for some reason towards us, as we soon discovered when a second stone came down. The third alarmed us a little, for it crossed our path not fifty yards ahead of the leader; so we resolved to halt and keep our eyes open for the next. This was not long in coming; it came with a bound off the rocks, and seemed to be heading for the gap between the last two on the rope. It must have been going at a great pace, for it devoured that snow slope in great hungry leaps, clearing eighty or a hundred feet at a bound, though never rising a yard above the snow; it hummed as it came, with a deep buzzing sound. Altogether it was extremely alarming (I was one of the two hindermost), and it was a considerable relief to see, after it was half-way to us, that it had a slight curl on it, and an outward curl, which caused it to hum past five or six yards behind the tail of our procession. The chamois passed, still invisible, on his way, and we on ours, discussing what would have been the best thing to do supposing his aim had been straighter.
It was that scene that came into my head years later. I had been trying to master some of the rudiments of geology, of which science I was lamentably ignorant, and had at least begun to get into my head the idea of denudation—how the shapes of mountains as we see them are as much due to cutting away as to heaving up—and was grasping the strength of the denuding forces that would go on thus cutting and cutting until nothing was left but one flat plain, did they not thus once more liberate the forces of upheaval. In my textbook there were examples given of the many and various activities working together this work of destruction—wind and sun, rain and frost, sand, rivers, little plants—‘and chamois!’ came suddenly into my mind. A little nail will serve to hang a large picture; and so the whole idea of denudation was fixed in my brain by that one Bernese chamois.
It perhaps, more than any other single thing, taught me to see the transience of the hills. For here, as so often elsewhere, the judgments of the natural man must be unlearnt. ‘The hills stand about Jerusalem,’ says the natural man,—‘The Eternal Hills!’ They are not eternal; they are as transitory, as much slaves of Time, as anything with life. The title is but one more witness to the arrogance, the unimaginativeness of man, who thinks that everything is of the same order of magnitude as he himself; and if he does not notice the hour hand move while he trips along some fraction of the circumference of the seconds dial—why, then, it must be motionless!
But man possesses also a brain, and therein an intelligence, a logical faculty, by means of which he discovers presently that things are not always what they seem; and one of these apparent contradictions is that the mountains must be changing, rising up and wearing down, even though he cannot perceive it directly; and yet even though he can prove that it must be so, it is still very difficult for him to realise it happening.
Our intelligence, indeed, although it thus transcends the senses’ immediate judgments, has to go back to them and ask their aid if it is to attain to fullest knowledge. It is a very imperfect instrument, so built up on the foundations of the five senses that if we cannot feel, hear, taste, smell or, more particularly, see what there is to be dealt with, but only reason about it, we may know quite well that reasoning has led to the only right conclusion, but yet do not feel fully and unquestioningly the rightness of it. We all believe the moon to be a globe; but I must confess that on my first sight of her through a telescope, I experienced a veritable shock of surprise and pleasure to realise, as I saw the craters passing from full face in the centre to profile at the edge, how globular she really was. With the mountains no such ocular demonstration is possible to us. I say to us, for to our descendants it may be. You have but to take a series of photographs of some peak from exactly the same spot at intervals of fifty years or so; then, putting these together in their order, run them through a cinematograph, and you would see your everlasting citadel crumble, shrinking before your eyes like a pricked balloon. Such a condensation of events has already been practised to render such slow processes as the growth of twigs or the complex unfolding of the egg more patent and striking; and there is no reason why it should not be applied to matters of centuries instead of days.
To-day we cannot have the change rendered thus visible to us. We have only indirect methods to help us, methods which demand reflection and imagination. Imagination and reflection, however, are processes demanding more mental energy than the average man is willing to expend, for the average man is mentally of extreme laziness. So the mountains remain eternal, to the average man.