Chapter V: The Bernese Oberland From End to End (2)

“The guides for the space of some half-hour, wrestled and fought and prayed, Kalbermatten meanwhile keeping up a running conversation with his favourite saint. Adolf, with a wonderful sense of the fitness of things, chose the moment when supper was on the table to put in a belated appearance. His contribution to the evening’s work was a successful attempt to burn my thick socks,” writes Lunn, righteously indignant.

The temperature outside the hut was 8° Centigrade under zero on arriving and, very naturally, somewhat colder inside. At the Mutthorn hut we had noted 9° Centigrade under zero in the evening and 10° in the morning.

Our expedition unfolded itself from day to day with the monotony and exactitude of a scroll. On the 5th, by seven o’clock, an hour before sunrise, we were again on the slide eastwards. The lie of the land was nasty. Most of us turned a somersault or two, a performance at which those will not be astonished who have come down in summer from the Egon von Steiger hut to the Gross-Aletsch-Firn. Then badly conducted parties are daily watched from the Concordia huts, with no little curiosity. They flounder about till they are often heard calling for help, or seen disappearing in a crevasse, from which moment they are entitled, under the rules of the game, to a search party.

In his diary Lunn says that the Aletschhorn had shoved its head in front of the moon. The solitude was almost oppressive. “Never have I so realised the weakness of the cry that the Alps are played out and overcrowded. True, some thousands of climbers have explored their inmost recesses; but substantially they are little changed from the peaks that looked down on Hannibal:--

“‘Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.’

And on a winter night one feels more than ever the insignificance of such trifling excrescences as club huts and mountain inns. The parting _genius loci_ has, perhaps, been sent with sighing ‘from haunted hill and dale’; but I strongly suspect that these white solitudes of eternal snow are still visited by the court of the Ice Queen.”

To tell the truth, I rather hope that the feminine section of that court leave the Aletsch severely alone, for our remarks that morning would have stood trimming. Why? Because, fearing concealed crevasses on the Aletsch-Firn, we roped. It was a miserable experiment. At rapid intervals Adolf sat down, in the rear, of course, as he never could do anything else but tail. Four sudden jerks, and four more bold ski-runners bit the dust. At times, somebody in the front of the train followed suit, an inspiration which necessitated a rapid swing on the part of those behind. We swung, of course, in opposite directions, and the tangled skein that ensued was enveloped in a mist of snow with a few oaths darting about. No wonder, for such evolutions “excyte beastlie and exstreme vyolence,” as Lunn found it expressed in his mind, so elegantly stored up with classical quotations, and we rapidly came to the conclusion that there was “a good deal to be said for being dead,” oh, much more than for roped ski-ing with Adolf.

To face p. 149.]

Ski-running on a rope is only possible if every member of a party is a steady runner. I, for one, have always found its utility limited to providing a merry, rough-and-tumble entertainment, such as the Wiggle-Woggle, the Whirling Pool, and such-like helter-skelter performances in which ’Arry delights to jostle ’Arriet.

Meanwhile the quotation runs that:--

“The hunter of the East had caught
The mountain turrets in a noose of light.”

But its author was in far too sulky a condition to appreciate a sunrise.

By nine o’clock, with our troubles well ended, we were all comfortably seated on the rounded edges of the famous breakfast-table, an erratic stone in the centre of that wonderful ice _quadrivium_ marked on the maps as Concordia Platz, in which the stone in question expresses the altitude in four figures (2,780 metres). Carpeted in the purest white, surrounded by pyramids in the best assorted white marble architecture, set out with flying buttresses and domes in jasper, jade, and sapphire, the Concordia Platz did not betoken the symmetrical designing power of man, but perfect harmony in the work of Nature’s agents--sun, snow, rock, and ice.

What a perfectly beautiful city for the dead, these precincts and temple whence the handiwork of man was absent! And what a number of graves were laid under the pavement of this cathedral! Think of the tears shed for the many who came here, impelled by the desire to behold in this world a habitation pure enough for angels, and whose human strength gave way before the resistance opposed by the cruel guardians of this blissful abode!

During breakfast we discussed our plans. Our eyes were fixed upon the Jungfrau, partly because we had vaguely talked of the tempting ascent, but still more because, having come up here with ice-axes, regulation ropes, and ten-pronged climbing-irons, it was quite plain that a serious ascent entered into our programme. If I may put it frankly, pure adventure was not the purpose that brought me on the Concordia Platz. I wished to put to the test of reality, in the highest mountain rink of the Bernese range, the theory forced upon my mind by observations and experiences elsewhere.

I had learnt conclusively much that was new and interesting about winter conditions in the forest zone and on the denuded grazings that rise above them. The comparatively easy slanting and horizontal expanses of the ice-covered parts of the Alps had yielded some positive information to the winter pioneers now visiting them for the first time. Now I wanted to know, with ever-increasing accuracy, how those huge spurs of rock and ice that are thrown up into the sky from the glacier region behaved in winter. Hitherto they had been looked at and their condition judged from a distance. Conclusions come to in that manner were extremely unfavourable to their accessibility. One might, moreover, safely say that no scientific men had subjected the winter Alps to the same scrutiny as, in the years following the middle of the nineteenth century, made Agassiz, Desor, the Englishmen Tyndall and Sir John Lubbock, famous, and so many more whose hard and shrewd thinking about the physical complexion of the Alps has met with general acceptance.

In a humbler sphere, too, among men in daily contact with the Alps, such as guides and chamois hunters, there was till lately an absolutely ineradicable belief that the Alp peaks would oppose almost insuperable obstacles to those bold enough to grapple with them under winter conditions.

But neither scientific scholars nor practical men could exactly say why this should be the case. It was one of those vague impressions or beliefs which are more imperative in proportion as actual first-hand knowledge is scantier.

Most would tell you, when pressed, that in January the High Alps could not but be found smothered in the most stupendous quantities of snow that the frightened imagination could body forth, and that in those masses rock peaks and ice domes would be buried alike.

Once more, on the Concordia Platz, the notion I had formed as to the comparative scarcity of snow on the flanks of the leading summits of our Alps--those exceeding 10,000 feet--was about to be reported upon and tested by impartial eyes.

Our three Bernese guides could barely trust the testimony of their own eyes. They expected to see a Jungfrau embedded in snow from head to foot, stuffed out to a shapeless mass, bolstered out as with the seven petticoats of a Dutch _belle_. On the contrary, the Bernese Maid was more slim than they had ever seen her in summer. Almost entirely free from snow, she turned towards us a shoulder as smooth, bright, and pure as that of a Greek goddess that might have been clad in a close-fitting suit of silver armour. One of my men who saw her again last summer (1911), one of the two hottest recorded since 1830, found her less free from snow than she appeared on that January day, when she was actually melting away under the perfect downpour of solar rays towards which her face was turned.

Thus was an important doubt set at rest by the testimony of practical men. It would have taken us half the day to cut steps in the sheer ice that stretched from the Roththal Sattel to the very top. The near completion of the railway from Grindelwald to Jungfraujoch will make it quite easy to institute a series of regular scientific observations on this interesting subject.

So far as we were concerned, after five days of sun and inverted temperature it was out of the question for us to attempt the top slopes of the Jungfrau at that hour of the day. It was tacitly agreed to abandon it for the Finsteraarhorn. The same causes which turned the snow slopes of the Jungfrau to ice and rendered them impracticable would dry the rocks of the Finsteraarhorn, clearing them from the excess of snow which the winter winds might have piled up there. So we pressed on towards the Grünhornlücke, past the Concordia huts, ski-ing leisurely downwards on the Aletsch glacier.

The reader may easily picture to himself how much our ski were in tune with the wonderful surface over which we were passing.

“These rollings of _névé_,” relates Lunn, “are almost unique in the Alps. On other glaciers one’s attention is diverted to the surrounding peaks. But, as some one says, on the Aletsch the boundary mountains form an insignificant cup-lip to the glacier itself, which, to my knowledge, may be compared to the same on the Plaine-Morte only. The Oberland peaks, which from Grindelwald or Lauterbrunnen exhibit such a wonderful wealth of design, are comparatively tame from the basin of the Aletsch. When we think of the Jungfrau we always think of her as seen from the pastures of the Wengern Alp. Seen from the Aletsch she is not particularly striking. One’s whole attention is focussed on the broad, silent reaches of snow. From the Loetschenlücke, from the Jungfraujoch, from the Grünhornlücke, three vast ice streams flow down towards the Concordia, rightly so named, for, there, irresistible forces blend silently in perfect harmony and move downwards without a break.”

By three o’clock in the afternoon we passed by the huts which now form quite a township on the rocky spur which supports them. There is the Cathrein Pavilion, a regular little mountain hostelry, the new Swiss Alpine Club hut, and the old hut. Stowed away under the rock the ancestral hut of all might betray its site to curious Alpine antiquaries.

We could have walked straight into the township on that day, the rocks being dry and swept clean of snow, the effect of the sun only, as I can easily prove by the testimony of Mr. Schloss who, with his party, had to take refuge in the Swiss Club hut during the storm that had raged in the last days of December. He says: “We rammed the ski into the snow at the foot of these rocks, expecting to reach the hut, some 50 metres above us, in a few minutes. But the storm made the passage up the narrow path hewn out of the rock wall very unpleasant. It was covered with ice and snow, and the wind, blowing in furious gusts from the Jungfrau snow-fields, threatened every moment to hurl one or the other of us down on to the glacier below.” Let the reader take warning.

From the Concordia Platz we started up steep slopes to our next pass. But were they so steep? and did we climb at all? There is in words a forceful though conventional mendacity. In language the most honest catch themselves playing the part of gay deceivers. Did we have any occasion during that week to draw one laboured breath from our tranquil breasts? Restful and vigorous, we led the æsthetic life.

As on the previous evening, there was a tantalising interest, the same eagerness to look beyond the sky-line into the new world of snow. This time the pass revealed the Fiesch glacier and the great pyramid of the Finsteraarhorn. “Professor Roget,” writes my young friend, whose fancy I like to tickle by appearing before him in the _rôle_ of an old cynic, “having been here before, exhibited no indecent haste, and so I had some time to myself in the pass. The guides--to them also the country was new--were moved to unwonted enthusiasm on seeing the Finsteraarhorn. They said, ‘Eine schöne Spitze, die müssen wir morgen machen.’”

Indeed they might on the morrow. There it stood before us such as three times already I had climbed it in summer. A photograph would hardly show the difference in the seasons. The Finsteraarhorn could be ranked in the same category as the Combin de Valsorey and many others 12,000 feet high and upwards with rocky sides falling away to the south and west. Whenever they had a northern slope whereby they were accessible in summer, I had found that by that flank their top could be reached in winter with the help of ski and ice-axe judiciously blended, and that, on the other side, they would regale the tourist with the gymnastics of a scramble as diverting as in summer.

It was about two in the afternoon when our party assembled on the lip of the Grünhornlücke. This substantive, which has before now enjoyed our favour, I do not employ as a mere literary phrase. Let me say why.

High Alpine passes are like funnels up which the wind sweeps the snow. Most passes I describe in this book being parallel to the main range of the Alps, are most susceptible to winds blowing from the south-west and to north-easters. When the wind blows from the south-west the snow driven up the inclined funnel overlaps to the north-east and forms an overhanging lip in that direction. After a time intervenes a gale from the north-east. It drives up snow under the curve of the lip and fills the bend as with plaster. A time comes when, that space being filled up, the new snow is rolled up over the lip and then bulges out in a hanging cornice towards the south-west. That in its turn gets reversed, and so forth throughout the winter. On passes, therefore, cornices are not fixed. They shift from one side to another of the sky-line.

This may constitute a serious danger, either because the lip is curled over above you, and then you may have to break through it or even bore a tunnel, as when a waterpipe, in order to be carried up through the projection of a roof, is led straight up a wall and an opening pierced to take it above the roof. At other times it is easy enough to get on to the lip, because the outside edge of it bends down away from you. But then the difficulty is how to get off the lip on to the chin below. Here again, if you go carelessly forward your weight may break off the edge of the lip. You will fall with it, through the open space underneath, on to the lower level. Or else you may have to jump, or let yourself down by means of a rope if the distance is too great or the landing surface too steep or too slippery or too near an abyss for you to be sure of getting a safe foothold. It is sometimes the wisest course to dig one’s way down, as on other occasions you may have dug your way up. These are the minor incidents that attend every kind of mountaineering. But they are much more frequent, and sometimes a cause of real peril in winter, because overhanging hems of snow may be met with, even in the zone of the grazings, where the snow is usually very deep and much tossed about by the contrary currents of wind resulting from the extremely broken character of the country.

High glacier passes are, on the whole, pretty free from cornices because the wind has free play so near the altitude where all land ceases. Geography is very much simplified from 9,000 feet upwards. You would be easily convinced of it if, on a relief model, you sliced off all the pieces rising above 9,000 feet and separated them from the remainder of the model by slipping in a tray under them at that altitude. That is why the High Alp ski-runner is much less concerned with avalanches than his less ambitious brother who confines himself to lower and more complicated regions. The reader will now understand better why Lunn and myself are so perpetually “lounging, strolling, idling” in this raid.

It was actually only two in the afternoon--let us say it again in the light of these observations--when our party assembled on the lip of the Grünhornlücke. We looked back towards the Loetschenlücke, once more a mere dent against the sky, and contrasted our easy journey with the long, laborious tramp which is there the lot of summer trippers over slushy, soft sticky snow. How often had I worked my way toilsomely, with wet feet and perspiring brow, over these extensive fields when they were mud-coloured and a vast network of puddles! Yet the temperature throughout had been delightfully mild! Our party lay down on the summit of the pass as comfortably as on a hot Sunday afternoon, the members of a boating party on the Upper Thames might choose to land on a dry and elevated part of the bank--but, alas! in our case quite shadeless--to boil the kettle and lay the table for afternoon tea.

At 11,000 feet above sea-level we lay about on the white dry floor and enjoyed a prolonged siesta, and thought how unlikely all this would seem when we should relate it. But when the sun had set behind the Aletschhorn, the change was instantaneous. We had now to go down slopes facing east, whose surface glazed immediately. Our ski seemed alive, and skimmed over the glaze like swallows skimming the surface of a lake. We had plenty of room in which to break our speed by curving in uphill and bending down and round again. I could indulge to my heart’s content in my favourite amusement on such slopes, which, when you present the broadside of your ski somewhat upwards and sideways to the concavity of the surface, let you down at varying rates of speed while you describe a spiral line to the bottom.

In this case the foot of the pass was indeed the bottom, but it was also the top of the Walliser Fiescher Firn. Like arrows from a hidden bow, we shot along the path of the moonbeams and came to a standstill at the foot of a dreadful black rock, on the top of which the rays of the sun, before parting, had lit up as a beacon the windows and chimney-pots of the Finsteraarhorn hut. We left our ski well planted in the snow and scrambled up with our packs. This hut once stood on the Oberaarjoch, till it was removed thence and rebuilt in its present position. The trials of transport may account for its being somewhat loose in the joints. It is not weather-tight, and the snow on the roof--in summer I have known it to be rain--trickles through in large drops, sometimes on the clothes set out to dry on strings all round the stove pipe and sometimes on the noses of the sleepers in their berths. I understand that the trickle of water on one’s cranium is one of the most terrible tortures a man can be subjected to.

Anyhow we had climbed a thousand feet, taken perhaps the wrong way up, the whole in very good time to allow Adolf his usual extra hour for joining us round the flowing bowl of hot soup.

“As we were sitting down to supper,” says Lunn, “a party of some six or seven Swiss came in.” They had just completed the ascent of the Finsteraarhorn, and were not a little pleased to find the stove lit and water on the boil. We had noticed on arrival that the hut had the appearance of being inhabited, and on looking round had soon caught sight of its denizens slipping and stumbling merrily down the shoulder of the Finsteraarhorn. A look at the hut guest-book also told us that it had been lately visited by two Norwegians.

“That night in the hut we were a merry party. The Swiss belonged to the class that in England divide most of their time between watching football matches and playing billiards. They made one realise how much the higher life of a nation was stimulated by a prevailing love of mountains. For mountaineering is essentially the people’s sport. Climbing tends more than any other sport to break down artificial barriers between classes. Snobbery is seen in its true proportion against a background of mountains. The wealth of enthusiasm which mountaineering inspires among the artisan classes of Switzerland is a permanent asset to the nation, lifting all those who come into contact with the hills out of their narrow ambitions. Shelley felt this truth. The great peaks, he writes, have a voice to repeal large codes of fraud and woe. One had only to look at these Swiss to feel how their lives were coloured, their ideals raised, their views broadened, by their love of their native mountains.”

Lunn likes to speak of the Swiss parties he meets as being “guideless.” I do not know to what extent this epithet may convey a clear meaning to others. It hardly does to me. What is a guideless party? Unless it means a party who undertakes, without the assistance of a professional guide, one of the ascents for which such a guide is authorised by a binding tariff to claim payment, the expression is wanting in point. There is nothing particularly noteworthy in this, that the natives of Switzerland should explore and climb the mountains of their country without the assistance of professional fellow-citizens. These form a class which has been instituted to serve two purposes: (1) To provide them with an additional economic asset; (2) to give strangers confidence in exploring the Alps.

Guides seek from their employers certificates of good conduct and utility. Many of the latter have acquired a taste, in those documents, for sitting, as it were, at the feet of their guides as though the positions were reversed. Indeed, it would be more natural that the guides should give certificates of ability, daring, and endurance to the amateur mountaineers whom they have in their charge. Under such altered circumstances a guideless party would be a party in possession of a certificate to the effect that they had gained sufficient proficiency in mountaineering to hold a licence as guideless parties. Till things are so arranged, the epithet is bootless.

Many young Swiss solve the difficulty by going through the official course of training laid down for professional guides, in the persuasion that should they, or the party they are with, meet with an accident, it would not be possible for either the guiding corporation or public opinion to fairly lay any blame at their door. There was assuredly no reason why the young men whom we saw on that day should have been expected to meet with an accident because they had no paid bystander.

“Luxuries had long been devoured, but even soup has a delightful flavour in a club hut. And no one can really understand the charms of tobacco who has never smoked in a club hut at the end of a good day’s work. The mountain pipe has a flavour undreamt of in the plains. Even some horrible hay-like production purchased in Adolf’s inn seemed inspired with ambrosial flavour.”

On this 6th day of January it was to be our turn to ascend the Finsteraarhorn. For the first time in our trip this verb is an apposite term. It meant work, and our Socialist undertook to prove it. He first of all swallowed up on the sly the last contents of our pot of honey. If I wished to be nasty, I should say that he got himself tied at the end of the rope because he had calculated selfishly that he would be dragged up and, being first and lowest on the rope when descending, he would be held up by us.

This little piece of reckoning did not miscarry. Wise Ulysses was too good natured to let it be seen that he “saw through” this little plot; fiery Achilles was of too powerful a build to mind a little extra weight, and the other two Bernese guides were such excellent fellows that they gave no sign of how much they suffered in their pride on account of their colleague.

“For once in a way,” says Lunn, “the guides were punctual. I think Professor Roget was the only one in the party who did justice to the breakfast. A seasoned mountaineer of thirty years’ standing, he can eat stale bread and tinned meat at 6.30 in the morning with the calm persistency of the man who realises that food is a sound insurance against cold and fatigue. But we were all glad to turn out of the hut, which we left at 7.15 a.m. The first signs of dawn appeared before the moon had set, a somewhat unusual phenomenon. Such a sunrise--though one misses the more dramatic change from the darkest night to the day--is accompanied by an almost unique depth of colouring. Two hours above the hut the sun shot out from behind the Oberaarhorn, I should like to add, like a stone flung out of a sling.”

To face p. 163.]

The simultaneous presence, morning and evening, of sun and moon at opposite ends of the sky, was one of the most interesting pictorial features displayed before our eyes. I am not aware that painters are ever likely to succeed in reproducing the cross light effects we witnessed, silvery and cold at one extremity, golden and warm at the opposite extremity, meeting on that endless expanse of neutral white, and shot throughout with the azure of the sky.

The Finsteraarhorn proved itself as accommodating as the Jungfrau was rebellious: for one and the same cause, as already hinted. The rocky _arête_ stood up like a lace ruff above its shoulder, as fine as if it were wrought in muslin, and offering everywhere an easy hold for our hands. It was free from snow and from ice, owing to the constant action of the sun’s rays percolating through the superimposed layers of dry air. Where there was any snow there was so little that we could hardly have expected less in summer. The _arête_ was warm to our touch.

On reaching the breakfast place, we looked anxiously at the sweep of the uppermost span into space. Not a suspicion of any wind blowing up there. The last two hours of the six afforded a delightful scramble along the edge of that very impressive cock’s comb. For an hour and a half more we climbed up alongside steep snow slopes, down which we saw the most alarming ski tracks I have ever beheld.

By one o’clock our ropes were thrown as a noose all about the top of the Finsteraarhorn, the giant of the Oberland. The Socialist hung on to the end of the rope like a scorpion’s sting; Achilles led, presenting his naked torso to the bite of the sun; in the middle bulged the robust frame of venerable Ulysses, with his grey hair blown about by the wind, and, filling the gaps between those three important personages, came Gyger and Schmidt, betraying on their honest, grave countenances their naive satisfaction at seeing themselves on such a lofty platform. We spent a wonderful hour on the summit.

The view was perfect, as only a winter view can be, over all the great ranges mellowed by the winter atmosphere. Beyond them a vast sea of cloud covered the plains of Switzerland and Italy. We lay about hatless, coatless, and gloveless. Not a breath of wind even to make the inviolable quiet audible. Quoth Lunn:--

“‘It seemed as if the hour were one
Sent from beyond the skies,
Which scattered from above the sun
The light of Paradise.’

“Time stood still, or rather the time we passed on that aerial summit, seemed stolen from the rest of eternity. At such moments the mind becomes a passive instrument for recording external impressions. Old memories arose unbidden; old associations lived again. Familiar ridges, the hills of Grindelwald, the little chalet, just visible, where I had spent so many happy summers, all lent an element of personal romance to the view, all helped to awaken memories of ‘far-off things and battles long ago.’

“The view from the Finsteraarhorn is of its kind almost unique. It is the very hub of vast spaces of eternal winter. Below, the ice-bound cliffs of the Oberland, scored with the passage of ages, rise from a waste of glaciers. The Finsteraarhorn is the culminating point of this rugged chain, and looks defiantly over a host of lesser peaks towards its great brethren of the Swiss Alps. From the Dolomites to Dauphiny, from the Vosges to the Apennines, scarcely a peak of any importance was hid. The winter atmosphere toned down the harsh features whilst rendering the whole flawless panorama strangely distinct. The mountains were clad in those wonderful bluish tints peculiar to the winter months, their crudities had been softened, their barren places made smooth. The keynote in the panorama was a dreamy, languorous atmosphere.”

The boundless canopy of clouds dragged itself out lazily, like a huge soft beast, to fill up all the interstices in this rock-bound and rock-studded vista, shot through with waves of light. There was a superb suggestion of indolence on the far horizon, turning pale against a sky of unfathomable blue. Below us the small wooden hut, perched on its rock, added a touch of human interest to the view.

The guides went to sleep in the snow, while the two educated men of the party contemplated and smoked, smoked and contemplated.

“Nine long summers I had spent as a small boy in getting to know the remote bye-ways of the Faulhorn chain. For nine summers we had looked longingly up to the great cliffs of the Oberland, the peaks of storm and of dread, the dark Aar peak, the Maiden, the Monk, and the Giant. Vaguely we wondered if it would ever be ours to penetrate into their recesses. By the peculiar cussedness of things, I had climbed in other ranges, but till then had never returned to my first love.

“The force of associations formed in childhood has been insisted on _ad nauseam_ by Wordsworth and his imitators, but the sentiment is none the less powerful for being somewhat trite. And even now, as this early ambition had at last reached the point of realisation, I could scarce restrain a feeling of regret. Though, in later years, calm reason convinced me that the terrors in which my childish imagination had clad the Oberland peaks were almost non-existent, yet the ease with which we had conquered their monarch had its element of sadness.

“The hour passed like ten minutes. The professor gave the word to return. We roused Adolf and sadly turned down the _arête_. The weaker brother led with great deliberation. On this occasion we lacked not æsthetic compensations for his slowness. It was a unique sensation, sitting astride that vast cliff, watching the afternoon lights spreading tinges of an infinite gradation of tones over the boundless canopy of mist.”

We reached again the fantastic little gap of the Hugi-Sattel, overlooking a sheer cliff that drops down to the Finsteraarhorn glacier. We now rested in the afternoon where we had breakfasted in the forenoon. We looked back up the way we had come down. Owing to the ice, we had been forced off the summer route--which keeps some distance below the ridge--on to the very _arête_. There is nothing on the Matterhorn finer than that sheer cliff that falls away to the glacier 3,000 feet below. Drop a stone, and it falls the entire distance without a bound. The climbing, however, both up and down, had been easy enough. Good sound hand and foot-holds--no shadow of an excuse for a slip, not even for Adolf, who had come up wailing in the forenoon, contributing to the gaiety of the party by his monotonous: “Ich komme schon, aber nur nicht so schnell.” With a shudder he beheld the track of the two Norwegians, who had taken their ski to within a thousand feet of the summit, and, on their return, appeared to have gaily descended a slope of soft snow lying on streaks of ice, at an angle of 45 degrees, bridging several yawning cracks.

Having rested on the Hugi-Sattel--this part of Switzerland recalls everywhere the names of its explorers and scientific investigators--we slowly retraced our steps to the hut, reaching it at 5.45.

The merry Swiss boys had left everything in beautiful order. We had all the room--and all the raindrops--to ourselves. Heated through and through, the roof was letting the water from the melting snow pass through the shingles.

Once more a perfect sunset gave promise of yet another day of cloudless beauty. Our anxieties--we had none others than those which might come from eagerness to succeed--were at an end. We had done what we had set out to do. Had we planned to go to the North Pole--or to discover the Antarctic--and succeeded likewise (as mountaineers would have done long ago if they had troubled to) our feelings could have differed but little from those that now passed in our minds. There is a likeness in all achievements in this. When the past is just putting forward its forefinger in warning of its readiness to withdraw our deed gently from our grasp and from the sight of men, we feel a pang that to have done something means parting with it soon after. Some may have been so ambitious to reach the North Pole that they set about it in a dishonest spirit. Some returning from another voyage of joint and mutual discovery--that generally goes under the name of a wedding tour--carry home with them a melancholy tinge of regret upon their happiness. So did we.

Yet there is in simple achievements a satisfaction which nothing else in the world can give. Most other successes leave something to be desired. The instability of wealth and health is a platitude. But Lunn rightly says that every successful expedition is a permanent asset, bringing in year by year a high rate of interest, an incorruptible treasure in the memories of the past which nothing can destroy.

“Next day we got away by 7, stumbled down the steep rocks below the hut, picked up our ski, our faithful boards, standing all bespattered with snow, and by the light of the moon skied merrily down the Fiesch glacier. As dawn broke we pushed up the long slopes leading to our next pass, the Oberaarjoch. Suddenly an expression of pleasure escaped Professor Roget. Such an unprecedented phenomenon--on the part of the old Cynic--aroused my attention. I turned and saw what, for an æsthetic mind, was probably the most striking view of the whole tour--namely, softened and subdued by the magic of the winter atmosphere, the perfect pyramid of the Weisshorn flanked by the daring spire of the Matterhorn.

“A little later it was my turn to give vent to some satisfaction, and the professor looked up to see Adolf walking well at the head of the party with his pack trim and neat on his shoulders, like those people who, when approaching the end of their trials, stride forth as if they had conquered the world.”

We almost reluctantly took our stand upon this the fifth and last sky-line we were to cut through with the flat of our ski. The last of our five passes disclosed the long arm of the Oberaar glacier, backed by the mountains that overshadow the birthplace of the Rhône. Now the Finsteraarhorn showed us his back view, his shoulder blades, terrace upon terrace of sheer rock.

Indeed, the force that was impelling Adolf back towards civilisation was not of the sort that could make the pace for us. We were going onwards and onwards, but rather drawn by the sun towards his haunt in the east, the common goal of so many pilgrims. But our mood was not devout except that we were nature worshippers who, while marching to Canterbury, were diverting one another with appropriate tales. You might have had pleasure in seeing us advance in very open order up the wrinkled back of the Fiesch glacier. I believe one of us was holding a pipe between his teeth, another strolled with his hands in his pockets, a fourth darted about kodak in hand.

Adolf thought we were slow, and grew impatient at our tarrying on this astonishing veranda. It has, perhaps, no like in the world in this, that it is a suspended ice-garden of an extent and altitude well proportioned to the physical faculties of man, showing as much of natural beauty under one of its most prodigious aspects as does not exceed the understanding of a well-balanced mind.

I shall never forget the ever renewed delight which I found in skirting the southern buttresses of the Finsteraarhorn range. We did not take a step forward without stopping to look backward through the wide gap formed by the valley down which the Fiesch glacier pours its waters in the Rhône. The whole of the Pennine Alps displayed themselves within this gap.

There they loomed as lifted off the earth, a gossamer, a sea of soft light, a row of pearls looking as frail as a dream, and yet a real world, the key to which is love of the beautiful.

Softly--the ski have a way of caressing the snow--slowly, chatting, then wrapped in silence, we went forward, as on wings. Immersed in light, we might have been borne aloft by an expansive force within ourselves, so much did we rise without any effort. It was barely midday when we stood on the Oberaarjoch. Before us bent and curved the sides of the last glacier which we had yet to follow--the Oberaar Gletscher. Our eyes embraced a new horizon which, surging beyond the Galenstock and the Dammastock, extended further than the Toedi in the north and enclosed the Bernina in the east.

We were not alone on this Belvedere. The Oberaarjoch hut, high above us on our left, looked like one of those boxes which in a theatre allow the eyes of the occupants to plunge down upon the stage unseen. The platform in front of the hut was occupied by some fellow-runners, whose voices reached our ears almost as soon as we saw them. They were watching us, and we exchanged with them such greetings as ships may send to one another when crossing on the high seas. To-morrow they would resume their course towards the skies we had left behind us, while we pushed our way towards those they had hitherto travelled under.

It would be idle to attempt to reckon up our widely sweeping curves as we came down the Oberaar glacier. The surface, concave at the top, becomes convex at the bottom, with a regularity which is a good example of an unfailing law in glacier phenomena. I think we turned to the right, and spun round to the left, and then turned to the left and spun round to the right for about twenty minutes on that sheet of snow without a stop. Our men bowled themselves down anyhow. But the spiral line we looked back upon from the foot of the glacier would have won respect from the most exacting teacher in draughtsmanship.

Lunn says that the top slope was unskiable. So we set our lunch upon it. “Thence some straight running took us over an uninterrupted stretch of snow about five miles in length. The surface was hard and wind-swept, but the gradient was so gentle that we could let ourselves go without thought of possible falls. We turned off beyond the snout of the glacier and bore away down a gully to our left. Here the professor supplied an interesting _entre-acte_.

“The guides had, for once in a way, got ahead. Suddenly Professor Roget fell down at the top of a steep and trying slope. He did not rise, so I sent the guides back to help him. Adolf saw his opportunity: a little bit of a tragedy coming in the nick of time when the perils of the route were over. He puffed and panted up the slope, leading the search party with a rush. When at last three hot and perspiring guides reached the piece of wreckage stranded on the chilly shore they were not a little annoyed to see the boat right itself without their help, and, recovering the use of human speech, the Professor remarked that he hoped this lesson would teach them to keep together. It did!”

By four o’clock in the afternoon we had wandered over the long, flat basin at the end of the Unteraar glacier, whence we said goodbye to the Finsteraarhorn. Arnold, in high spirits, was bent on making the most of his last chances. We were on the last spur abutting on to the flat land in the middle of which stands the Grimsel hospice, when I saw him dash to the left over the brow of the last wave of the hill, exclaiming, “I see a cheeky thing to do!” The next moment he was sailing along safely on the flats. We had no thought of entering into the hospice. Why should we? We had not a scratch, we did not feel an ache, our equipment was as complete as when we had started. We therefore took immediately to the road.

“Here we at last discovered genuine winter. Above, on the glaciers, all had been warmth, colour, and light. Here in this grim gorge all was sombre, grey, and chill. The hospice seemed to breathe a feeble defiance to the genius of this abode of frost. Never have I seen anything more desolate than the deserted post-road, gagged with old avalanche tracks and overhung with icicles. Below, the angry gash of the torrent peered out between cakes of ice, whilst above the waning light revealed sombre bosses of grey rock smothered in snow.

“We were anxious to telephone, so I took one of the guides and made all speed down the road. Some one had conveniently made tracks, which had iced during the night and afforded some furious running. At last, at 6 p.m., twelve hours after leaving the hut, we pulled up at Guttannen. Here we telephoned to Beatenberg and Kandersteg and then went in search of night quarters. The hotel was, of course, closed, but we found rooms for the night in an adjoining chalet and were afforded one of those sidelights on real Swiss life which the summer visitor so rarely sees.

“We supped in the one room which was warmed, and here the family were pursuing their various occupations. The patriarch was mumbling in the corner over his pipe, attracting, like the majority of patriarchs, little attention. The father, a guide in summer, chatted on the winter’s work. He appeared to think that cutting the wood and bearing it towards the valley left a man little time to grow fat. At the table a young girl was plying--alas!--not the spinning-wheel of a previous generation, but an unromantic ‘Singer.’ In front of her stood some dressmaker’s model, a hideous, headless monstrosity on a wire cage. On the stove a small youth slept contentedly. To him entered a bustling little damsel with the maternal instinct precociously developed. With unsuspected tenderness she gently lifted him up, still sleeping, bore him out of the room, and attacked ‘with an undaunted tread the long black passage up to bed.’

“Supper over, we lit our pipes with pardonable satisfaction. Our long journey had been carried through without a hitch. Perfect weather, thorough arrangements, every precaution. Seriously, one can scarcely be too careful in winter mountaineering. With every precaution, the entire complexion of things may be altered in one moment. A broken ski, a wrenched ankle, the work of a minute, and the situation becomes charged with painful anxiety. With superb indifference the mountains suffer us for ninety-nine days, and, perhaps on the hundredth--with equal indifference--they strike.

“_Friday, January 8th._--Up once more before the dawn, to discover signs of bad weather, which had thoughtfully postponed its arrival till we had left the upper snows. One day earlier and we should have been cooped up in the Finsteraarhorn hut for four days, living on stale bread and tinned meat. A sleigh was hired to drive us to Meiringen, but I was anxious to finish the journey on ski, so, with unpardonable sophistry, I ‘tailed’ behind the sleigh. This proved far from easy on the icy, winding road.

“At last, six days and six hours after leaving Kandersteg, five happy men stepped on to the Meiringen platform. On lake Brienz the sky was veiled in dark, lowering clouds, and snow fell as we drove up to Beatenberg. On arriving, we were plied with those questions which a certain type of people offer as well-meant flattery: ‘Was it not too cold?’ ‘Wasn’t it too, too awfully dangerous?’ We could have accepted the heroic _rôle_ with greater equanimity, had we failed to realise that any one with decent endurance and a fair knowledge of ski-ing could have accompanied us without risk.”

To give satisfaction to so many kind inquiries, I gave two days later my first lecture before a more than crowded audience, and Arnold Lunn supplemented it. The joint address is the common foundation of anything we have since written on the subject.

Let me now wind up with a few final remarks.

1. Winter mountaineering may be more difficult and more dangerous than summer climbing. One often has to face the most intense cold; but with first-class conditions such as we enjoyed, it is scarcely more arduous, and certainly much more enjoyable, than summer work. Our journey in summer would have involved hours of walking through damp, slushy snow. There would have been wearisome tramps up and down _moraines_, tedious stretches of mule paths, dull grinds over grass slopes, and I shudder to think--consider the mileage!--what the last day would have meant in July. As it was, we at no time suffered from the cold, and, strangely enough, though our days were long and mostly uphill, in point of time at least, we neither of us ever felt tired. This was, to be sure, owing to good ski technique. “The professor would never allow us to raise our ski off the surface of the snow. In that way they were absolutely no weight, and even the raising of the foot and leg was replaced by the glide upwards of the ski blade which provided a resting-point and support, reducing the muscular action to the same amount of forward movement as is necessary on level ground, without any additional force being employed in vertical action.”

Given good weather and normal conditions, a six-day traverse can be accomplished with very little fatigue and still less privation. I have done four such and have never been any the worse. One may weary somewhat of soup, bread and cheese, but barring these and similar drawbacks, there is no reason why any one of moderate physique and fair ski-ing powers should not follow in our steps.

Somehow the memories of those six days have the power to impart something of the magical colourings of a winter sunset to the drab dullness of lowland evenings. On the mountains we all have moments when life assumes unsuspected values, helping us to realise on our return to civilisation, that the things that are seen are temporal, whereas the things which for the time are not seen are for all practical purposes eternal. “The winter Alps are but a vision, a faint memory intruding itself at intervals when the roar of the commonplace is for a moment hushed in silence. If visions were not at times the most solid of realities this world would be intolerable.”

“Just for a moment I have had a fleeting vision,” wrote Lunn, when he had once more settled down to the round of daily life, “of the silent snows of the Aletsch, as you and I saw them that glad evening on the Loetschenlücke, lit in all the splendour of the January moon. It faded all too soon, and the winter Alps again seem very far away.”

2. I append a table of levels, in feet, similar to the table of my vertical displacements, in metres, which the reader has found at the end of the Diablerets to Kandersteg chapter:--

_January 2nd._--Kandersteg to Mutthorn hut: 5,700 feet
(Tschingel pass).

_January 3rd._--Mutthorn hut to Petersgrat (our second pass):
1,000 feet.

_January 4th._--From Kippel to Egon von Steiger hut (Loetschen
pass): 6,000 feet.

_January 5th._--From Concordia Platz to Grünhornlücke (our
fourth pass): 2,000 feet.

_January 6th._--From Fieschfirn to Finsteraarhorn: 5,000 feet.

_January 7th._--From Fieschfirn to Oberaarjoch (fifth pass):
2,000 feet.

Add 2,000 feet for unconsidered trifles. The total vertical
displacement is thus brought out at a little under 24,000 feet.

We paid each of our men a pound a day. Other expenses brought the cost to thirty pounds. It is better to have plenty of men and plenty of food. Plenty of food because one is always liable to be detained some days in the huts by the bad weather--plenty of men, which does not necessarily mean guides, because a party that can be broken up into sections is infinitely safer and handier. A party of six may be expressed by 2 + 2 + 2, or by 3 + 3, or by 4 + 2, dispositions which may fit into almost every emergency.

There is no doubt that sealskins are extremely convenient and a great saving of labour in going uphill, because they annihilate back-slip, the bugbear of beginners and of loaded men. Serious trouble may be caused by wrinkled and puckered-up hard snow, or by those extremely slippery patches, either snow or ice, which now and then upset the balance of the High Alp runner.

The remedy to this I have found in a contrivance against side-slip which figures as a permanent fixture on the powerful pair of military ski which I used on all my big traverses. It consists of two blades of hardish steel, about 5 inches long, sharpened and shaped in the fashion of skates. Linked to each other across the upper surface of my ski, they adhere to the sides by lateral pressure only, which is applied by means of a top screw. The edge of each blade stands out beyond the flat of the ski by the merest fraction of an inch, in front of one, and behind the other, foot. This secures straight running on hard snow and ice by biting into it, preventing side-slip when the broadside of the ski slew’s round to the drop of the slope. The laws of mechanics teach that this contrivance, maintained against the ski by side-pressure only, should get pushed out of place when, the ski being edged, an unduly large portion of the weight of the runner falls to be borne by the ski edge. But, in practice, it is not so, provided you are careful to obtain the maximum of side-pressure that the horizontal binding screw can produce.

To face p. 178.]

Studs on the inside of the blade, making impressions upon the wood of the ski, without injuring it in any way, increase the resistance of this contrivance to the vertical pressure caused by the weight of the runner.

3. Within a few years from the date of writing, this part of the Alps will be girdled by a network of mountain railways. The Grindelwald-Jungfrau railway, already completed to the Jungfraujoch (11,000 feet), will deposit the ski-runner within a stone’s throw of the Concordia Platz. There he will, as the phrase goes, have it all his own way, with the resources of civilisation and a railway station to fall back upon.

The line of the Loetschberg, on the international railway, now being built to join Berne to Brigue, should be open to traffic by the end of 1913. It will then take but a few moments to run there and back, underground, between Kandersteg and Goppenstein in the Loetschenthal, joining together both ends of the ski route Kandersteg--Gastern--Mutthorn--Petersgrat (or Loetschberg)--Kippel--Goppenstein.

To the east, a line now under construction from Brigue, with a tunnel under the Furka pass to Andermatt, will connect the St. Gothard ski-ing grounds with those we have just described.