The Alps Part 9

The pioneers in their turn have richly endowed the Alps with a further human interest. Why do so many people want to climb the Matterhorn? It is not a better climb than the Dent Blanche. The reason is because of the stronger human interest that the Matterhorn evokes. All who have any knowledge of Alpine history have read the story of the long siege, the triumphant conquest, and the dramatic tragedies of which the Matterhorn has been the scene. It is the fascination of those memories that draws men to the peak, and makes the climbing of it seem so desirable an adventure to so many people.

Thus also is it, more or less, all over the Alps. Each peak now has its story. Each ascent has been made before and described. Wherever we go now we find and recognise the traces of our predecessors. Here is an old tent-platform; we know who built it and when. This is the site of such an accident; that crag turned back such a party on such an occasion. The memory of bygone climbers is everywhere. It peoples the solitudes and humanises the waste places. These memories will grow mellower as they deepen into the past. The best stories will become cla.s.sical, and the scenes of them will be endowed with a prestige far beyond any that now attaches to them.

A very dull person looks interesting when beheld down a vista of several centuries. The memory of the first climbers of the great Alpine peaks will remain among the mountains to a far-distant future. I daresay my Illimani Indian was a crack-brained semi-civilised person, but I would sooner see him than a living Cabinet Minister. I can never think about his peak without recalling him. So is it with the bays of Spitsbergen. The whale-fishers were no doubt a coa.r.s.e lot of quarrelsome seamen, who stank of blubber most disgustingly; and yet if I could call Mr. William Heley from his grave, and hear how he emptied out the Dutchmen on one occasion and they emptied him out on another; if I could get him to show me his huts where they stood, and could hear him yarn about the fishery, how entertaining that would be, and how gladly would I exchange the morning newspaper for such talk. We cannot in fact recall these men, but in fancy we can and do. It is because we possess and exercise this power of fancy that the mountains, which have been in past times the scene of human activity and life, are so much more interesting to wander amongst, except from a purely scientific and adventurous point of view, than those which have not.

What is true of bygone individuals is no less true of bygone peoples.

Valleys that have been long inhabited and the high pastures that have been frequented of old are far more pleasant to visit than valleys that have scarcely beheld the face of man. We were made conscious of this difference in the Mustagh mountains of high Kashmir. There the secluded fastness of Hunza-Nagar is the home of an ancient civilisation. The gently sloping floor of the valley is divided into terraced fields, supported by cyclopean walls that might be as old as Mycenae itself. The villages are built upon their own ruins, who can say to how great a foundation depth? The paths are worn deeply into the ground. The Raja's castle, dominating his little capital, has a venerable aspect, and if not actually old, incorporates an ancient type. There are little ruins by the roadside and carvings upon the rocks. Where-ever you look, the marks of long frequentation are to be traced. Moreover, the people themselves bear the imprint of surrounding nature upon them. Their action in movement, their way of life, their adaptation to their environment--all imply old habit and deep-rooted tradition. The valley in which they are enclosed is the world to them. Its every feature has entered into their habits of thought. The surrounding mountains are a part of their existence, and borrow from man in turn a reflected glow of traditional interest.

From this man-impregnated valley we presently pa.s.sed over the mountains to the valley of Braldu, descending upon the highest village. Above that poverty-stricken place the traces of man were few. There were faintly marked tracks; there were even a few small ruined huts; but all that these indicated was the occasional pa.s.sage of hunters or the brief visits of shepherds or gold-washers. Once the glacier was reached, the last of these traces was left behind. It was impossible not to feel the contrast between this region and peopled Hunza. The scenery was not less, was even more stupendous, but the human interest was lacking.

There were few named spots, and hardly a remembered tradition. The scenery to the natives with us was not the home of their fathers, but the elemental earth. It might have been fetched from the other side of the moon, for all they had to tell about it. Two recorded parties had preceded us for a certain distance up this valley, and their ghosts alone peopled the solitude, but not a trace had they left upon the surface of the ground discoverable by us. If we had found even the remnants of one of their encampments, it would have animated the surroundings with the memory of man; but we saw none. The lack was a vacuum, an intellectual hunger, continuously felt.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 62. CHaTILLON, VAL D'AOSTA.]

Few mountain regions in the world, outside of the Arctic and Antarctic solitudes, are thus denuded of human interest. The mountains of the Old World and the New have been inhabited over a large part of their valley-area; but often the inhabitants have been people about whom little is known. It is one of the great charms of the Alps that they have long been the home of a fine group of peoples. "Your country," I once remarked to a citizen of a South American Republic, "ought to be the Switzerland of South America." "I will make it so," he replied, "if you will fill it for me with the Swiss."

Throughout the large Alpine area various races have dwelt and dwell at the present time. The character of the population changes from valley to valley, and there is no small variety, not merely in dialects, but even in languages. There is a similar variety in habits, in domestic architecture, in costume, and in bearing. Much of these differences in the character of the inhabitants we are wont to impute in our thoughts to the mountain districts themselves. When we talk of the charms of the Italian Alps, are we not thinking of the attractiveness of the people, and the picturesqueness of their abodes and places of wors.h.i.+p, as much as of the luxuriance of the valleys, the sparkling of the waters, and the mere beauty of the hills? The spirit of the people seems to infuse itself into our memory of the mountains about them, as much as the character of the mountains has affected the nature and disposition of the people. Which, I wonder, borrows most from the other--the Lake of Lucerne from the old Tell legend, or the legends from the landscape of the lake?

An essential part of the human interest in the Alps grows out of the length of time through which history has concerned herself with them.

The history of the Alpine valleys has only been written, or begun to be written, in recent years. Early visitors to Zermatt no doubt were conscious of the deep impress made by man upon the valley landscape, but they could not interpret, as we now can, the meaning of much that they saw. But when the local archives were searched and the traditions written down, when it was realised that the life now being lived by the peasantry was in all essentials the same life that had been lived by their ancestors for hundreds of years, ancestors bearing the same names and owning the same properties that are still borne and owned by their living descendants, what an increase of interest that gave to a place.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 63. A CORNER OF THE TOWN OF ALTDORF. The traditional scene of William Tell's exploits. Here Gessler ruled and the shooting of the apple took place. A place of patriotic pilgrimage of the youthful Swiss.]

The old tales about the village deep in Tiefenmatten, about the pilgrimage that used to cross the Col d'Herens, about the frequented routes over Theodul and Weissthor--does it not add a new charm to the places themselves to hear them told? Who is not interested to remember, when standing on the Theodul pa.s.s, that Roman coins have been found there? Climbers have taken fully as much interest in the question of where the Old Weissthor route lay as in actually climbing the pa.s.ses. I well remember the keen delight that came to me when I discovered that a pa.s.s I had crossed, as I supposed for the first time, between the Fillarkuppe and the Jagerhorn, was in fact the real Old Weissthor itself, a well-known mountain-route centuries ago. To rediscover an old track like that is far more delightful than to invent and carry through some entirely new expedition.

Correspondingly with the future as with the past--to make an expedition for the first time that others will often repeat is a lasting source of pleasure; but to make one that no sane person ever repeats or is likely to repeat is poor fun. I have had many opportunities of making new expeditions in the Alps and elsewhere, and have availed myself of a few; but none ever gave me the continuing satisfaction that I derive from the Wellenkuppe near Zermatt, a mountain that I invented, climbed, and baptized, and that immediately became and has since remained a most popular scramble.[2]

[Footnote 2: Its summit had previously been touched by some unrecorded route by Lord Francis Douglas, in an attempt to climb the Gabelhorn; but for twenty years no one had thought of the peak, which had no name.]

Some part of the popularity of the ascent of Mont Blanc from Chamonix is due to the fact that the mountain is the highest in the Alps; part is due to the fascinating beauty of the ice and snow scenery pa.s.sed through; but far the greatest attraction is the long and interesting history of the climb. No one, I suppose, ascends Mont Blanc without a thought of Balmat and De Saussure, and at least some dim consciousness of the number of early climbers who mounted by the way he takes, and felt all the strange emotions and high excitements they so naively recorded. What would the Todi be if robbed of the memory of Placidus a Spescha? Even a Mont Ventoux can attain dignity and importance by a.s.sociation with so great a man as Petrarch.

It is, however, to the pa.s.ses rather than to the peaks of the Alps that history clings. Allusion has been made to the Weissthor and the Theodul, and many other minor pa.s.ses similarly recorded might be mentioned; but it is the great pa.s.ses, the deep depressions in the main range, that are chiefly memorable from the historical standpoint. Modern climbers unwisely neglect these great routes, or confine themselves to such as are tunnelled. John Ball and his contemporaries made a point of knowing as many main pa.s.ses as they could. It was their pride to be able to say, not that they had climbed so many peaks, but that they had traversed the Alpine chain by so many great pa.s.ses. Old literature is therefore fuller of accounts of the historic pa.s.ses than are most present-day volumes, which regard them as a subject outworn.

To mention the historic pa.s.ses is to call up the name of Hannibal. Here is no place to revive that old discussion as to the situation of Hannibal's pa.s.s. Historians have not yet entirely convinced one another on the matter. But if a general certainty had been arrived at, if we could feel perfectly sure that Hannibal and his host had actually trod a particular route, it cannot be denied that that route would be well worth following, book in hand, for its historic interest alone.

Some, perhaps many, of my readers will have traversed the Great St.

Bernard, the Summus Penninus of antiquity. Few who have done so will have been oblivious, as they went, of the many great men in whose steps they were treading. Celts, Romans, Saracens, mediaeval warriors, statesmen, saints, bishops, and monks streamed in their day across this col. Here pa.s.sed Charles the Great and other Holy Roman Emperors, Lanfranc too, and the saintly Anselm in all the fervour of his young enthusiasm. The reader will forgive me for quoting once again Bishop Stubbs' translation of the letter of a Canterbury monk describing his pa.s.sage of the pa.s.s in February 1188:--

"Pardon me for not writing. I have been on the Mount of Jove; on the one hand looking up to the heavens of the mountains, on the other shuddering at the h.e.l.l of the valleys, feeling myself so much nearer heaven that I was more sure that my prayer would be heard. 'Lord,' I said, 'restore me to my brethren, that I may tell them, that they come not into this place of torment.'

Place of torment indeed, where the marble pavement of the stony ground is ice alone, and you cannot set your foot safely; where, strange to say, although it is so slippery that you cannot stand, the death (into which there is every facility for a fall) is certain death. I put my hand in my scrip, that I might scratch out a syllable or two to your sincerity--lo, I found my ink-bottle filled with a dry ma.s.s of ice; my fingers too refused to write; my beard was stiff with frost, and my breath congealed into a long icicle. I could not write the news I wished."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 64. PONTE BROLLA. Over the Maggia, near its junction with the Melezza, looking up the Val Centavalli.]

Mr. Coolidge, in that store of Alpine learning, his book ent.i.tled _Swiss Travel and Swiss Guide-Books_, reminds us that the first known guide-book was written for the crowd of pilgrims crossing this same pa.s.s, by no less unlikely a person than the Abbot of Thingor in Iceland, about 1154. There was a building on the pa.s.s before the year 812. A century later the Little St. Bernard was similarly provided. The Simplon was thus equipped before 1235, the St. Gotthard before 1331, and the Grimsel before 1479. Modern Swiss travellers may not be aware of these facts in detail, but it is impossible for any intelligent man to frequent the Alps and not become conscious of the antiquity of the relation between man and the mountains.

Sometimes traces of visibly ancient ways are encountered, as on the Albrun pa.s.s, for instance, or the Monte Moro. The sight of such a fragment of old paved way instantly carries the mind back into the past, and animates the route as with a ghostly procession. Thus, too, I found it in Bolivia and Chile, where remnants of the old paved Inca road, that traversed a large part of the continent from north to south, are often to be met with. The sentimental value of such relics is incalculable.

They, as it were, hypnotise the mind and induce a mood in which we see the nature that surrounds us in a new way. They remove from the traveller the sense of isolation, and form a link between him and the countless generations that have gone before. He shares with them the toil of the way, and looks abroad on the scenes that they beheld.

Still more interesting and rich in a historic sense are the Brenner and other pa.s.ses over the Eastern Alps, which are known to have been important trade-routes in the age of bronze. Over them successive immigrant waves of humanity poured into Italy. Over them at a later date pa.s.sed emperors with their armies. No route bears the evidence of its rich historical a.s.sociations more visibly than the Brenner. An aura of antiquity rests upon its villages. Its many castles, its ancient churches, its n.o.ble village streets, its countless monuments, all tell the same tale. I never can cross the Brenner without having Albrecht Durer by my side, who four times made the transit, sketch-book in hand, and whose careful and beautiful drawings of some of the views still exist in perfect preservation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 65. IN THE VAL D'AOSTA.]

The presence of man, not as a traveller through the Alps, but as a long-settled resident there, deriving his subsistence from the soil, is an important scenic factor in yet another respect. The difference in aspect between a well-peopled mountain region and one spa.r.s.ely or not at all inhabited is more striking to the eye than the inexperienced might be prepared to expect. The amount of landscape modelling that one man can effect in a lifetime is small, but a community of men, working generation after generation for many centuries, can effect much.

The trained eye can perceive the effect almost everywhere in the Alps; the untrained must learn to look for it. Take, for example, such a well-known large gra.s.sy area as the slope descending from the Matterhorn to the Zermatt valley, between the Gorner glacier on one side and the Zmutt glacier on the other. If man had not laboured for centuries on that slope, it would be ragged with fallen and protruding stones. The gra.s.s upon it would be rough and uneven, or entirely replaced by stunted rhododendron, juniper, or the like bushes. Now it is all smoothed and tended. The loose stones are gathered into walls, bordering the mule-paths or supporting the lower edges of the fields. Earth has been carried on to bare patches. Little hay-huts and other farm-buildings are planted about on suitably protected places. The gra.s.s is mown to a velvety fineness of texture. Irrigation channels are led in all suitable directions, and the glacier dust deposited along their beds has raised long gra.s.sy mounds, which in process of time have sometimes grown to a height of two or three feet. More important still, in smoothing off asperities and giving a rounded curvature to the general surface, is the continual deposit of the same dust which this artificially distributed glacier-water lays down all over the meadows. There results a suavity of outline, a delicacy of modelling, and a fine quality of gra.s.sy surface, which change the aspect of the whole slope, even when beheld from a great distance, so that it would be impossible to mistake it for a slope correspondingly situated in any uninhabited or uncultivated mountain region in the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 66. IN THE WOODS OF CHAMONIX.]

What is true of the middle pastures is likewise true of the forests.

Virgin hill-forests, such as one may see in the southern part of the Argentine or Chile, are very different in appearance from an Alpine wood, whether seen from far or near. Man, as we know only too well, has not treated mountain-forests wisely, and he is suffering the consequence to-day. But apart from cases of forest removal and the consequent changes of scenery thereby caused, the alteration in appearance produced by good forest management is very noticeable. Alpine woods have a gardened aspect. The mere sight of them is eloquent of the presence and activity of man, who here also has left unmistakable traces of his activity drawn broadly over every Alpine landscape.

In the regulation of streams and rivers, again, the hand of man makes its long, slowly acting presence felt in the Alps. Gaze from the Riffelhorn down the St. Niklausthal, and notice how mainly of human determination are all the minor forms of the valley-floor. It is easy to compare with a photograph of that well-known view one, say, of the Bush Valley in British Columbia, which has been revealed to us by the explorations of Professor Norman Collie and his friends. Such a comparison manifests, as no words can, the great effect upon valley scenery on a large scale produced by the activity of man.

It is only high aloft, close to and all above the snow-line, that man's energies have not availed to change the landscape. He has built a few huts there, but they are insignificant. He cannot turn a glacier from its course, nor can he dam it back in the event of its pleasing to advance. The great cliffs and debris slopes, the reservoirs of snow, the rivers of ice--these giant phenomena of the heights are beyond his governance, even if any material advantage tempted him to try meddling with them. The most he can do is to blast some small tunnel in ice or rock to control the outflow of a gathering of water, that might otherwise discharge itself with violence and work destruction far below.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 67. IN A GARDEN AT LOCARNO. Last gleam of the sunset on the hills above Lago Maggiore.]

It is the great good fortune of the Alps, beyond all other snowy ranges, to possess both the region of utterly untamed nature above, and a larger area of humanly modified land below. A normal Alpine view includes parts of both regions. Looking up from beneath, you have the gardened world for foreground and the wild world for distance. Looking down from above the reverse is the case. The contrast is always charming. What more beautiful setting for a snow mountain can be conceived than that which surrounds the Jungfrau as beheld from near Interlaken? How pleasant it is, when resting at some fine noontide hour on the summit of a lofty peak, to look abroad over the peopled Italian plain, or down into some deep valley, dotted with farms and villages, with here and there a white church standing in the midst of chalets. It is only the works of modern man, his huge caravanserais, his railway stations, and his accurately engineered roads, that are wholly hateful--blots on the landscape defiling and degrading it. Let us hope that these hideous intruders are not destined to a long existence. It is not likely, much though we may desire it, that in our time the tide of touristdom will abandon the Alps. It has come to stay. It will increase rather than diminish. But with the advance of civilisation perhaps its manners and tastes will improve, and it may, at some far distant time, come to demand a kind of housing that will not utterly destroy the very beauty which it blindly travels to seek.

CHAPTER XII

VOLCANOES

To the purely Alpine traveller, Volcanoes are not a matter of interest, because there does not exist a single volcano in the Alps, nor, so far as I am aware, even the ruins of one. Volcanic rocks there may be, but we are not concerned with rocks except in so far as mountains are built out of them. To the mountain-lover, however, in the broad sense--and it is for such I am writing--volcanoes are as interesting as any other definite type of peak, and I therefore propose to devote this chapter to a consideration of them from the picturesque and climbing point of view.

For the European traveller there are volcanoes enough, both active and extinct, and that without going to Iceland. Most people have seen Vesuvius. Etna and Stromboli are frequently pa.s.sed, and the former is not unfrequently climbed. Auvergne is a good place for a holiday. If ordinary tourists knew how well the volcanic Eifel repay a visit, they would oftener turn aside to them. Teneriffe is on the list of mountains most people hope some day to see. In my own mind, when volcanoes are mentioned, there always rises first the reminiscence of the great mountains in South Bolivia and Northern Chile, with their stately grandeur of scale and grace of outline.

Every one who has climbed Vesuvius has some idea of the nature of volcano climbing. It is by no means the best sort, and the Alps as a play-ground are none the worse for lacking it. From a climber's rather than a petrologist's point of view, volcanic rocks are liable to seem both very hard and very brittle. They fracture with an astonis.h.i.+ngly sharp edge, which cuts, like a knife, the fingers and clothes of the climber. Notwithstanding their apparent hardness, which seems to promise for them an unusual durability, they crack up with great rapidity under the action of frost or of blows, and rapidly subdivide into small angular debris. The smoothness of the fractured surfaces, when fresh, reduces the friction between the fragments much below that normal to the debris of ordinary rocks, so that slopes of volcanic debris are very unstable. The foot sinks into them, almost as into sand, and they cut the boots and gaiters to pieces. To run down such a slope is pleasant enough, but to wade up it is the worst kind of purgatory, provocative too of more sins of language than it can possibly purge in the time.

The novice at volcano-climbing approaches his mountain with a light heart. However big it may be, it looks easy, and he promises himself a rapid ascent. The lower slopes of volcanoes are frequently most fertile, so that the first stages of the ascent may be along umbrageous paths or through vineyards and olive gardens. Ultimately the naked mountain has to be tackled, and then troubles begin, and they are the same all the world over. All that a volcano produces is toilsome for the foot of man.

The slope continuously steepens. The disintegrated lava or the volcanic ash are alike disagreeable. The mountain is sure to be voted a fraud from the climber's point of view. Even Aconcagua, greatest of all volcanoes, is as rotten as the rest. There is hardly a firm crag on its mighty face.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 68. PILATUS AND LAKE OF LUCERNE FROM THE SLOPES OF THE RIGI.]

It follows that volcanoes are peaks of an unstable character. They are upstarts by nature, and they are easily pulled down. Among mountains they are the most short-lived. In their decay they lack the dignity of a peak of crystalline rock, that fights against disintegration and resists to the last, holding forth to the sky its splintered crags like pa.s.sionately protesting hands. There is no protest in a volcano. It yields willingly to decay. The debris of its upper rocks flow down its face almost like water. They grind together into dust and are blown away by the winds. The old moraines of Aconcagua ultimately turn into sand dunes.

Yet these mushroom monsters are not without their compensations. When active they enjoy a magnificence of public advertis.e.m.e.nt that no other kind of peak, even when it is the scene of a particularly ghastly accident, can ever hope to rival. They grow in height, or are blown to perdition, amidst earthquakes and terrific thunders. Lightnings flicker about them like the dartings of a serpent's tongue. The storm-clouds that envelop snowy peaks are nothing to the monstrous piles of smoke and darkness that wreathe the brows of an erupting volcano. Blasts of fire shoot from them, and for glaciers, their sides are flooded with molten lava. Few of us can hope to see such sights in the fulness of their glory.

When the mountain is full-grown, and its days of activity are done, for a while it reigns, a figure of perfect grace, a very queen for elegance and beauty of form. Who that has ever seen Vesuvius can deny this fact. Probably no snowy peaks in the world are more absolutely perfect in form than the white-clad giant volcanoes of Kamchatka, or, on a smaller scale, the peerless Fuji of j.a.pan. The outline of the cone, gently rising from the foot, and then steepening in its incomparable logarithmic curve, is the gracefullest that nature produces on a large scale. Even the effulgent domes of the greatest c.u.mulous clouds that, on a faultless summer afternoon, soar into the clearest blue sky, are not to be compared with volcanoes at their best. These have the aspect of works of art, made, as it were, expressly to incorporate an idea of beauty. They possess the symmetry of a fine crystal, but at the same time, a grace far beyond what is possible to any crystalline form. And then, how they soar! How their beautiful heads seem almost to float in the blue! How symmetrically the mists gather about their summits! At one time the base will vanish in the bright opacity of the lower air, and the top will be seen in sharp distinctness, like a floating island in the sky. At another, the summit will fade away, and the shadowed base will fill the vision with its purple solidity. And always there hangs about a volcano the memory of its fire-begetting, and the suspicion that all may not yet be over. It is, as it were, an inscribed finger-post, warning us of the molten core within. It is at once a memorial and a monition to those that dwell beneath it. It is the witness of past and the herald of future convulsions; yet, being such, it is itself in form the peacefullest and tenderest in nature. No woman's robe droops more delicately over her bosom than droops the once molten drapery of a volcano. Its aspect bears a double and opposed suggestiveness. Such are volcanoes in the day of their perfection, before the denuding forces have made inroads on the symmetry of their form.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 69. MONTREUX, LAKE OF GENEVA.]

Yet even then it is not well to approach them too closely, unless you would have the sense of their beauty supplanted by a different kind of emotion. The nearer you approach a snow-mountain, such as Mont Blanc, and the more intimately you penetrate its white recesses, and acquaint yourself with its details of creva.s.se and serac, the more conscious are you of the perfection of its finish and the loveliness of its details.

It is not so with a volcano at any time of its career. When it is newly fas.h.i.+oned and the lava streams are still in movement and smoking upon its sides, and the cinders and ashes of its recent ejection are piled upon it, to approach them is to behold sights more provocative of horror than of admiration. They appal, they create astonishment, but they do not attract. Cast your eye over the remarkable series of photographs by Dr. Tempest Anderson, published under the t.i.tle "Volcanic Studies," and you will have ample proof of this. Consider the Icelandic gorges, the outer crater of Teneriffe, or the views of recent volcanic energies displayed in St. Vincent--the mud-rivers, the sand-strewn valleys; here is enough to interest and more than enough to appal, but the kind of beauty a.s.sociated with a distant view of a volcano is absent. There is no grace, no charm, none of the sweet feminine outline which makes volcanoes the queens and fair ladies among hills.