valleys and glaciers they have traversed, and the scenery of the regions and ranges they have explored, in a way that would have been unintelligible two generations ago. What we now demand of a mountain explorer is not merely to tell us the adventures of his route, but to explain to us wherein the quality of the mountain scenery differs from that which is familiar nearer home. He must be prepared to answer many questions which would not have been asked till recently. Has he been to the Himalayas or the Andes? We want to know whether those great mountains look their size, and, if so, wherein the effect is manifested of a scale greater than the Alps. Is he returning from Sikhim? We shall ask him to tell us what the great peaks there look like when seen from the beautiful forest below. What are the atmospheric effects peculiar to the region? And, with yet more persistence, what is the quality of mountain form which distinguishes the great peaks there, so that, beheld merely through the medium of photographs, they so impress their individuality upon us?
CLOUD-BURST OVER LUCERNE
Knowing, as we do, the great variety of mountain scenery that can be found in the Alps, between the Dolomites of Tirol at one end and the crags of Dauphiny at the other, we expect to be told whether, in the case of the long Andes range, corresponding varieties are discoverable, and what and where they are. Such questions and multitudes more arise within us. It is much if a traveller can answer a few of them. At best he leaves us hungry. It is this hunger that impels us to travel afar ourselves, if fortune permit. Some indeed travel and explore for merely scientific reasons. They desire to add to knowledge and to diminish the area of the unknown. Some perhaps believe that they go merely in search of sport. The normal man is more complex. He has these ends in view to a greater or less extent perhaps; but, if he be a normal mountaineer, deep down within him there assuredly resides a true and hearty attachment to mountains and mountain scenery for the sake of their beauty. He may be too dumb to express it or too shy to admit, but we soon discover that the feeling is there, and that it is a dominant fact in his nature. He may not have analysed it. He may never speak of it, never perhaps even state it to himself, yet when we stand beside him on a mountain height, gazing abroad on the undefiled world of snow spread abroad at our feet, we find that we share with him a common feeling and embrace a common joy. After all, it is the beauty of the snows that takes us all back to them, and again back. Were that beauty blotted out, how many of us would be climbers? We are like anglers in this respect. We set an aim before us and pursue it with vigour and seem to be wholly intent upon it, but it is the beautiful, natural surroundings of our sport to which it owes its charm. Only the artist can make the realisation of that beauty his active aim, and activity is a necessity to most of us, so we employ ourselves actively in the world of beauty, and take her for the exceeding great reward of our seemingly needless and unprofitable toil.
CHAPTER III
HOW MOUNTAINS ARE MADE
"OLD as the hills" is not a comparison that would be considered apt if invented to-day, for we now know that, geologically speaking, the greatest mountain ranges are of recent elevation, and that even low hills are seldom of great antiquity. It was not till men became climbers, and so grew to have an intimate acquaintance with mountains in detail, that a recognition of the rapid degradation which all mountains are suffering was clearly obtained. To look at the Matterhorn from below is to behold an apparently everlasting tower, yet its base is strewn with ruins, and its flanks are continuously swept by falling masses of rock.
The realisation of this different point of view, which we must presently discuss in more detail, forms a clear mark of division between the attitude towards mountains, of men in the pre-scientific age and to-day. Our forefathers naturally regarded the hills as eternal and everlasting. They defined the beginning of things in such phrases as "Before the mountains were brought forth." The tops of peaks, actually their newest feature, were hoary-headed to them. This was indeed partly due to their limited idea of the stretch of time into the past. Six thousand years, which to us seems but a day, was an eternity to them. Of course six thousand years is a brief period in the life of a mountain. Judged by such a standard it may be called eternal, and that was the kind of meaning they attached to the word. Mountains have grown young as our notions of time past have extended. If we could lengthen our time-span, the interval of time (about one-tenth of a second) of which we are simultaneously conscious, if we could extend it to years instead of a fraction of a second, we should actually see the mountains changing. In a sense that is what we have imaginatively accomplished.
Pre-scientific man possessed no such power. Dwellers in mountain countries beheld the peaks apparently ever the same. Each summer, as it stripped away part of the winter accumulation of snow, revealed the same apparently unaltering features. They knew nothing of the movement of glaciers. They regarded snow-mountains as accumulations piled up continuously from the beginning of the world and destined to go on increasing till the end. I remember reading in the comparatively recent book of travel written by an Anglo-Indian, how he went up some Himalayan valley and came to the glacier at the head of it. He attempted to go no further. He conceived himself to have reached the limit of possible advance. He mounted some way up the hillside and looked along towards the head of the valley; all was ice—an accumulation fallen from the cliffs on either hand for thousands of years and some day destined to fill the trough to the brim—such was his notion of the thing he was looking at.
Changeless, eternal, forbidding, still, silent, and horrible—thus the snowy ranges appeared to the pre-scientific gaze. To us they seem the very reverse. We know them to be ceaselessly changing, of relatively short persistence, the theatre of movements of all kinds both violent and slow—not places of death by any means, but the home of an active, a beneficent, and a formative life—not regions cut off and unrelated to the lowlands and habitable world, but the very parent of such, the laboratory where soil is made, and the head of water collected that distributes it below; the counterbalance of the denuding forces that would level the earth with the ocean; regions beneficent as they are beautiful, and as necessary to the well-being of the habitable world as is the richest and most fertile plain.
AT MEIRINGEN
Ridge above the Brünig Pass in distance.
He that would know mountains and mountain regions aright must know them as the theatre of change, the domain of action. He must not merely look upon peaks as they are, but must conceive of them as they have been and will be. As this kind of knowledge grows and becomes instinctive within him, it will alter his attitude towards Alpine panoramas and broaden his grasp of the significance of mountain physiognomy.
Let us briefly consider the stages of formation and decay of a single group of mountains, not volcanic. If we go back to the very start, we may imagine their future site occupied by a plain. The slow cooling and consequent shrinking of the world involves the wrinkling of its surface, and the position of the wrinkles is determined by a variety of forces, as yet little understood, with which we need not concern ourselves. Suffice it to assume that our plain occupies the position of the next coming group of wrinkles. A single range or line of mountains hardly exists in the world outside of the commonplace cartographer's mind. Old-fashioned maps used to represent mountains by a kind of caterpillar meandering about on them, and thus gave currency to the notion that mountains are generally arranged along a single line—a notion, by the by, that (in the minds of politicians negotiating boundary treaties) has been prolific in costly disputes and misunderstandings.[2] Mountains generally exist in rows of more or less parallel ranges intricately jointed together, and they do so because, when the wrinkling that caused them began, it did not begin with a single wrinkle, but with a row of wrinkles, such as a soft tablecloth makes on a smooth table when parts of it are moved toward one another.
[2] Witness the Argentine and Alaska boundary disputes.