Chapter V: The Bernese Oberland From End to End (1)

The Oberland circuit--My appointment with Arnold
Lunn--An Anglo-Swiss piece of work--An unbelieving
public--Switzerland and Britain--Geographical--Practical--We
start from Beatenberg--The Jungfrau ice-slabs--New
Year’s Day at Kandersteg--In the Gasterenthal--On the
Tschingelfirn--Foehn-effects on the Petersgrat--The Telli
glacier--The Kippel bottle-race--A church door--Theodore
Kalbermatten--The Loetschen pass--Burnt socks--Roped
ski-ing--The Concordia breakfast-table--Why we did not ascend
the Jungfrau--The Concordia huts--The Grünhornlücke--On snow
“lips” and cornices--An afternoon snooze--The Finsteraarhorn
hut--A guideless party--Ascent of the Finsteraarhorn--Our
next pass--A stranded runner--The Grimsel--Home life at
Guttannen--Our sleigh run to Meiringen--A comparison of winter
and summer work--Memories and visions--Table of levels--How
to form a caravan--The pay of the men--Side-slip and
back-slip--Future railway facilities.

This the Oberland “circuit.” We left Beatenberg on December 31, 1908, passed through Interlaken, went on to Kandersteg, crossed the Petersgrat to the top of the Loetschenthal, traversed the Aletsch glacier between the Jungfrau and the Concordia hut, ascended the Finsteraarhorn, reached the Grimsel hospice, and came back to Interlaken and Beatenberg, where we were again comfortably quartered on the night of January 8, 1909.

This traverse was made into an event and marks a date in the history of Swiss mountaineering. The telegraph and news agencies announced it far and wide. It was the object of press articles and flattering references in most countries in which interest is taken in mountaineering feats. It has been lectured on, and related in periodicals over and over again.

The reception given to a trip of this kind obeys the laws of pictorial perspective. Maybe, however, shorn of the benevolent element so kindly contributed by the public, our expedition is still worth describing in its true relief, in the light of the impressions of the two explorers who carried it out.

This expedition, the first of its length at such altitudes at that time of the year, was an Anglo-Swiss piece of work. It was performed in company with Arnold Lunn.

We met by appointment at Beatenberg, which his father was then opening up for the first time as a winter station. Arnold Lunn is as keen a mountaineer as was ever born under the skies of Britain. His poetic and adventurous mind is endowed with an exceptional facility for imaging forth in words Alpine scenery, and for communicating to others the manly joy which overtakes him in such scenery. He has the soul of a propagandist and missionary. He is a striking example of how, with climbers, performance goes before propaganda, unless one would belong to those who are deservedly marked out as hangers--on to the exploits of others. There are only too many such loitering about the Alps nowadays.

(Reproduction made with authorisation of the Swiss Topographic Service. 26.8.12.)

To face p. 114.]

Can there be a more noble spectacle than the sight of one, who having met young with an extremely serious accident in climbing, which to all appearance, and according to cool reason, should confine him to the part of an armchair propagandist and pen-wielding missionary, yields again to the irresistible call of the Alps, and ascends the Dent Blanche in spite of the lameness consequent upon the accident in North Wales in which his right leg was broken in two places, under such conditions that it has continued ever since to be a source of daily suffering?

Last winter, on the Eiger, battling with a terrifying snow and wind storm, my lame friend was three times thrown out of his steps. He had with him Maurice Crettex, one of the most powerful rock and snow men, I believe, of the present day among Swiss guides. The situation would have been frantically impossible but for him. But what a picture! Two men, side by side, one, all physical strength and professional devotion to duty, the other, all spiritual energy and moral force.

It is particularly gratifying that a Swiss and an Englishman should have been united in showing to ski-runners that the way across the Bernese Oberland was open from end to end and that the most magnificent mountain scenery that ever wasted its sweetness upon the desert air was awaiting them. These were spectacles for which I was quite prepared, having already moved, like many of my country men, amid the glories of High Alp winter scenery, ever since some of the sections of the Swiss Alpine Club (that of Geneva leading the way), had instituted for their members and friends, the expeditions known under the name of _Grandes Courses d’hiver_.

It is, however, one thing that the Swiss should favour such expeditions, and quite another thing that strangers to Switzerland should entertain the idea. I understand that when the first accounts of my winter ascents of the Aiguille du Chardonnet and the Grand Combin were read, in London, in the pages of the Alpine Ski Club Annual, there came upon the lips of many competent readers a smile which partly betokened admiration--which I certainly did not deserve--and, partly, incredulity--which I certainly expected in some measure.

Even in Geneva I had at first some hesitation in making known my Bagnes-Entremonts-Ferret circuit. When I did make up my mind to send an extremely short and compendious notice to the _Journal de Genève_, the editors let my scrap of paper lie six weeks before they printed it. It was unkind of me to laugh in my sleeve while this long pause lasted. I did not fare much better after my ascent of the Dent Blanche. I slipped a word about it into a local but widely read halfpenny paper, to whose information people “in the know” are wont not to attach much importance. In fact, some busybodies had already forestalled my note with a few warning lines to the effect that any attempt to cross in a consecutive trip the Pennine Alps, in January, from Mont Blanc to the Simplon pass, would be too hazardous to prove anything but fatal. And here was a gentleman who not only had got from Bourg St. Pierre to Zermatt, but asseverated he had ascended the Dent Blanche.

Some of my colleagues in the Geneva section, desirous of protecting the good name of their club, and anxious to exonerate one of the older and more respected members from any charge of senile self-complacency, explained gravely that it was a printer’s mistake, and that surely I had written Tête Blanche in my hastily scribbled manuscript note.

The reader must be told at this juncture that the Tête Blanche is an insignificant little bump of snow on the Col d’Hérens, of which those good colleagues of mine, with their knowledge of my climbing powers, could well trust themselves to say that I might have reached its summit, without putting too great a strain on my powers. Even now, another of my young disciples, Marcel Kurz, whose circuits on ski in the Bernina and Mischabel districts may be followed in two of the maps appended to this volume, writes me that he is pleased to hear of its approaching publication, because it may conduce to the enlightenment of disbelievers, across isolated specimens of whom he still occasionally comes.

Arnold Lunn, too, has met with ultra-sceptical folks, and a boastful trait has been read by some into his ardour.

For my part, I am content to look upon our mountaineering fellowship as a pleasant little incident in the history of Anglo-Swiss relations. These I much take to heart. There is every reason in the world wherefore they should be frequent, numerous, and close. Sometimes, in the flush of after-dinner speeches, I have spoken of the Swiss as the navigators of the Alps and of the English as the mountaineers of the sea. There is some similarity in the risks incurred.

It would be a truism--in fact the repetition of a truism--to say how English climbers of the middle of the nineteenth century helped the Swiss in introducing into mountaineering the wholesome element of risk. “On ne fait pas d’omelettes sans casser des œufs.”

It should not be hidden from the present generation of English climbers, however, that the example of their forerunners has perhaps been more thoroughly taken to heart in Switzerland than among themselves. There is hardly a family or friendly circle in Switzerland that does not count one of its members in the ring of those whose life was sacrificed for love of the Alps.

The motives for associating here Swiss and English in my mind are not solely sporting. It has hitherto been little realised how much Swiss neutrality and national integrity are one of the bulwarks of the freedom of Britain’s movements in Europe.

Every effort is being made to join Switzerland more closely to the economic system of central Europe. In a century in which economics are considered to offer a more effective political weapon than the open use of military force, the tightening of the ties of fellowship between two nations, neither of which can possibly aim at political encroachments upon the other, may usefully serve to counteract a less innocent set of tendencies. What with military roads, tunnels, and railways, the Alpine barrier between the Baltic and the Mediterranean is being worn very thin.

It needs, probably, no further insistence to show that sentimental Anglo-Swiss relations may be attended by practical consequences of some immediate utility. In this network of associations an important function devolves upon winter mountaineering. The English have no sporting winter. They have already, in large numbers, adopted the Swiss winter as what they want to supply home deficiencies. May this continue and an ever wider bridge of Swiss and British ski be thrown over the Channel. That this book, among others, might serve this purpose was one of the motives that impelled the writer when he put together, for publication in England, such accounts as that which follows.

At first sight, the title I have given to this chapter may appear exaggerated. But it will not bear out any such unfavourable construction, if the reader will charitably recollect that he has already travelled with me from the western extremity of the Bernese Alps, visiting from end to end the Diablerets, Wildhorn, and Wildstrubel range, as a prelude to this excursion beyond the Gemmi to the east.

Geographically and technically the euphemistic title of this chapter is not without excuse. The Oberland is theoretically taken to include not only a western, but also an eastern wing, on to the Galenstock and Dammastock. Popularly, the name Oberland is understood to apply to the great range which is cut off on the east by the Grimsel and Haslithal, on the west by the Gemmi and Kanderthal. Classical literature agrees with the popular definition, the main point about which is, for ski-runners, that between those two depressions there is no pass that does not lead across glaciers.

The Oberland shows, between its extreme points, two parallel rows of peaks. The northern row overlooks the lakes of Thun and Brienz. The southern row overlooks the valleys of Loetsch and of Goms (in French Conches), leading up to the Furka pass. Of those parallel rows the northernmost, facing somewhat to the west, comprises the Blümlisalp and the Lauterbrunner Breithorn. The southernmost, drawing to the east, culminates in the Bietschhorn and Aletschhorn, and includes the summits which, under the names of Wannehorn, Galmihorn, &c., look down upon the glaciers of Fiesch and Oberaar, while the northern row, curving round the Lauterbrunnen Valley from the Breithorn, is crowned by that magnificent cluster overlooking both Scheideggs: the Jungfrau, Mönch, Eiger, Wetterhorn, &c., with the Schreckhorn and Finsteraarhorn somewhat in the rear.

Between those two rows a high glacial basin takes the form of an elongated trough. From distance to distance this trough shows transversal lips (cross-bars or threshholds, if one so prefers to style them), which are the upper Tschingel glacier with the Mutthorn hut (9,700 feet), the Loetschenlücke, with the Egon von Steiger hut (10,515 feet), the Grünhornlücke, between the Jungfraufirn and the glacier of Fiesch (10,840 feet), and at length the Oberaarjoch (10,800 feet), between the Oberaarhorn to the north and the Oberaar-Rothhorn to the south. One sees from the figures quoted that those glacier passes all reach to an altitude exceeding 9,000 feet. The top of the arc--to speak like Euclid--would pass over the Finsteraarhorn at an altitude of 14,035 feet.

This high level is, in the opinion of Sir Martin Conway, who followed it in his journey through the Alps from end to end, the very finest snow-field in the Alps. It passes at the head of the greatest ice stream, and is sufficiently remote from the Italian border to escape the unfavourable influence which the Rhaetic, Lepontine, and Pennine faces of the Alps have to endure from the hot atmospheric currents and inordinately violent action of the sun.

“Two things were necessary for the success of this trip,” says Arnold Lunn in one of his printed accounts; “good weather and immunity from accidents. We could reduce the chances of accidents to a minimum by a careful scrutiny of our kit, and we could reasonably expect fair play from the weather by judiciously choosing the moment to begin our attack, though, of course, the weather is always the most fickle factor in determining the success of an expedition.

“As regards kit, I carried two pairs of gloves, one made of reindeer skin lined with sealskin, the other a thick pair of woollen gloves, a woollen scarf, a silk scarf, and a woollen helmet. A spare suit of underclothing and two pairs of stockings completed the list of extra clothing. I wore laupar boots and goat’s-hair socks on my feet, with a pair of crampons in my sack for rock and ice-climbing. And here, incidentally, let me remark that the ordinary crampon-nails which are fixed into the sole of the boot soon spoil laupars. The only practical kind are those which are sold in summer to be strapped on under the boots.

“I think I have at last found the ideal ski-binding for mountain work. It is made by a Geneva firm, and was given me by Professor Roget. It never gave any trouble; it was strong and tough. It did not vary in tightness with the temperature, and, most important of all, it could be put on and taken off at a moment’s notice. This is really essential, as one may meet with short stretches on which it pays to ‘take up one’s ski and walk.’

“I tried, for the first time, a pair of sealskins, and found them answer admirably. They reduced the labour of climbing by 20 per cent., weighed hardly anything, and could be taken on and off without any trouble. An extra ski-tip, a pair of Canadian rackets, ‘climber’s guides,’ maps, &c., completed our kit.”

To face p. 123.]

My intention was to use Kandersteg as a starting-point, to land on the high level, at 9,000 feet, by means of the Kander glacier gradient, to go down to Kippel, in the Loetschenthal, by the Petersgrat; to pass through the Loetschenlücke, to drop thence into the basin formed by the Aletsch _névés_ (the Jungfraufirn and Ewig Schneefeld of German maps); to rise again to the Grünhornlücke, to skid down upon the _firn_ of the Fiesch glacier, to overtop this network of ice-mountains by the ascent of the Finsteraarhorn, to go round the Finsteraarhorn group on its south side, to return to the north as far as the Oberaarjoch, to descend the Oberaar glacier to the Grimsel hospice, to follow thence the posting road and to enter Guttannen as knights-errant, mounted and spurred--that is, in our case, on trusty ski and shod with nailed boots, the attire in which we would leave Kandersteg.

Thanks to the absence of any unpleasant incident, thanks also to a most obligingly long spell of unbroken weather, the precautions we had taken enabled me and my companions to carry out this programme without interruption and without inconvenience. The “stripling,” Mr. Arnold Lunn, gave proof of remarkable staying powers. Though our Bernese porters seemed at first to believe that they were being “let in” for harum-scarum adventures, by which they discreetly hoped the party might be brought to a standstill after a few hours’ march, before it could run its head, beyond hope of escape, into the dangers of this raid, they laid no visible claim to being wiser than ourselves. They proved themselves to be good and reliable fellows to the end, and came out of their trials with beaming countenances, grateful for the lessons they had received in High Alp ski-running.

We got into training at Beatenberg, where a snowfall delayed our start for three days, if three days spent on the running slopes above Beatenberg may be looked upon as a delay. Then, one morning, the sun, bursting through the snow clouds, showed us the great peaks of the Oberland looking down on a scene newly painted white. Our hopes rose high, and making our rucksacks proportionately heavy, we skied down to Interlaken, losing a bottle of whisky on the way. Carefully laid on the top of my pack, with its nozzle looking out upon the world, it flew out, on Arnold’s calling a sudden halt, and broke its nose against the wall by the roadside. Thus was our expedition christened straight away, as a launched ship that leaves the stocks.

On reaching Kandersteg, the gossamer banner of ice-dust blowing off the Blümlisalp showed plainly enough that the gale from the north, which had brought the fine weather, was still in full swing. My sympathy went out to any young men who might be then battling up there with the raging wind, for at Christmas and New Year’s tide the Alpine huts are much visited by holiday-makers. Indeed, I saw later from an account published in the Swiss periodical _Ski_, by Mr. Tauern, and by Mr. Schloss in the Alpine Ski Club Annual, that those gentlemen were actually at the time on the Aletschfirn. They had hoped to ascend the Jungfrau. Under the circumstances the prospect lost its charm.

As I write, the Jungfrau has not yet been ascended in winter. The Swiss papers gave out last year that my young friend Fritz Pfeiffer had succeeded in reaching the top. It was a misapprehension. Within two hundred yards of the ice-cap that crowns the Jungfrau, Mr. Pfeiffer, who was accompanying an officer of the St. Gothard troops, was compelled to fall back before the heap of slabs of solid ice, with which the combined action of wind and sun had strewn the way. On these the two distinguished mountaineers were unable to gain footing. The slabs slipped away from under their feet, or bore them down in such a manner that they could not have had better toboggans. Toboggans, however, were not the thing wanted, nor even such trays or pieces of board as children are fond of using, for the sake of amusement, in sliding down grass slopes nearer home.

The formation of these ice-slabs on exposed summits of suitable shape opens up an interesting, and as yet unsolved, question in the history of natural phenomena. What clearly happens is this. Snow, driven by a tearing wind, falls against an ice buttress. Then the sun shines with all its winter power upon the snow that sticks to the rugged ice. Exposed to the action of two physical agents of great force, namely, to the heat produced by the sun and to the impetus of the wind sweeping now with perhaps still greater violence across a clear sky, the amorphous but plastic mass is cut up and divided by a process which may be compared, though the analogy is merely superficial, to what happens to dough in an oven when a hot blast is driven through it. The dried-up dough breaks up into flakes.

When I first came across that winter phenomenon--I have never met with it in summer--I was led to compare those piled-up ice-slabs to the stone slabs of like shape and size which lie on the bare crests of so many mountains. The supposition lies near that these, too, may be due to some combined action of pre-existent heat and supervening wind impetus, in those geological ages when we have a fancy for imagining that the still plastic earth-crust was blown about in huge billows by the liquid and aerial elements.

Be this as it may, I hope I may never be uncharitable enough to desire, for ski-ing parties, an encounter with those ice-slab pyramids.

The caretaker who in winter keeps watch over the Schwarenbach Hotel had just come down to join in the New Year festivities. He announced that there was on the heights a fresh layer of snow 30 inches deep. Stoller, a guide of some reputation, whose advice we applied for, was of opinion that we should put off our departure till the 2nd of January. The advice might be sound, but I did not like it because I knew how badly the men I might be about to engage were likely to spend their time on New Year’s Day. As a matter of fact, when we did enter the Gasternthal, we found nothing like the amount of snow that we were told would impede our way. From Stoller, who had just returned from a week’s engagement to teach the rudiments of ski-ing to a Swiss club, we heard that all guides with first-class certificates were away climbing, and that he, having only just returned, would not be available. We engaged three men, under his advice and under that of Egger, for whom Arnold Lunn had a valuable letter of introduction from his father. One of these men had a guide’s certificate, the other two were porters.

I took three men because I wanted to carry sufficient commissariat for six days, which the raid was supposed to last, with a margin in case of a check being put on our progress by a change in the weather or some accident that could not be foreseen. I hoped to force my way through without touching any inhabited spot before we reached Guttannen. We went down to Kippel, because our progress was so smooth and easy that it would have been a pity to sleep in a chalet at Guggi just for the pleasure of not stopping in a decent hotel.

None of our men had been beyond the Aletsch glacier. This I did not mind, having previously gone over the whole route in summer. Provided those men carried their loads from hut to hut, we should be satisfied.

Arnold Lunn says in the _Isis_ that we arrived in Kandersteg just in time for a fancy dress ball, and aroused considerable curiosity as to what we were supposed to represent. At dinner he sat next to a man who, lost to all sense of local colour, had come dressed as a nigger minstrel. This was on New Year’s Eve.

Next day we pottered round Kandersteg, one of us receiving much useful advice as to how to fix on his ski, from a lady who was under the quite pardonable impression that she was addressing a novice, while the other was considered enough of an expert to instruct another lady who had the good taste not to be so sure of her own knowledge.

We left Kandersteg on the morning of January 2nd. As usual in those early starts, we had plenty of time, the five of us, to try and find out of what stuff each and every member of the party was made. It was my first expedition with Arnold Lunn. I was entitled to think he would take my measure as curiously as I was about to take his. Two of our men turned out to be quite satisfactory, but the third was destined to become the butt of our satire. I am not prepared to say that he had spent New Year’s Day in those excesses which I dreaded, because I have since been told by old Egger that Adolf--as we shall agree to call him--was in bad health when he undertook to serve us. Whatever might be the cause, whether excusable or not, he showed himself throughout in the colours in which he is painted--maybe somewhat to the amusement of our readers--by Arnold Lunn and myself.

Those who mountaineer for sport are very much like schoolboys, or they become schoolboys for the nonce. The printed records of mountaineering are to a great extent records of the kind of humour that overgrown and elderly boys--if I may so describe those of us who have gone through public school-life and wish to preserve some of its characteristics in a sphere where these may be as harmless to others as comforting to themselves--would be expected to cultivate.

For us, in the course of a constant fellowship of seven days, Adolf soon represented quite a definite and rather objectionable specimen of the human kind. We found him lazy, slow, clumsy, ever ready to take undue advantage. Some one, who had evidently made a close study of political types, dubbed him the Socialist, and the title stuck. For my part, anxious to secure for him a place among types ranking in a higher class, I placed him, under the name of Thersites, in a gallery of classical portraits in which I allotted to Arnold the part of fiery Achilles, and to myself that of the worldly-wise and cunningly cautious Ulysses.

Our course lay up the Gasternthal, one of the wildest and most impressive valleys in the Alps, utterly desolate in summer. From its rugged floor rise some of the sternest precipices in Switzerland. On our way we had plenty of time to examine the superstructure of the shafts which were then being driven through the floor of the valley to ascertain the depth of the gravel-bed that formed it. Our readers may remember that, in 1908, the Italian workmen engaged in excavations on the north front of the Loetschberg tunnel were suddenly overwhelmed by an inrush of water, gravel, and mud. The progress of the boring was stopped till it could be known to what extent it would be necessary to divert the tunnel, in order to keep in hard rock.

It is a bit of a reflection upon the forethought of engineers--and geologists--that, before working their way from beneath across Gasternthal, they had not sunk that shaft which was now to supply them with an information that would still be opportune from the engineer’s point of view, but which was belated in regard to safeguarding human life.

Three hours after starting, we reached a rustic _café_, or summer restaurant, which we discovered it was Adolf’s summer occupation to preside over. It was a pretty place with a fenced orchard about it, whose trees now stood out barely from amid the coverlet of snow which contributed to enhance the attractiveness of the spot. But a dreadful doubt crossed our mind. Was Adolf a _bona-fide_ mountaineer or was he a professional tavern keeper?

On reaching the doorstep of his property, he angrily dropped to the ground his burden, produced the key of his cellar, and contrived to give us the impression that he expected us to call a halt of some duration and indulge in the delights of his Capua. We were suddenly confronted with the thought of the temptation put by Circe before wary Ulysses and his simple-hearted companions. Thersites, as a mental picture, was outdone. The vision conjured up before us was that of five days to be spent in plenty in this winter-bound Abbey of Thelema. We would empty the larders. We would clear the bottle shelves. We would rifle the cigar boxes, under the watchful, but encouraging eye of this male Circe, who would fill his pockets with sweet-scented coin, instead of bruising his shoulders any longer with that dreadful pack. We commend the trick to those who may have the face to play it on the public. Nothing is easier. Switzerland is full of those concealed Canaans flowing with milk and honey.

To face p. 130.]

Shortly after leaving Adolf’s pavilion, a bend in the valley disclosed the ice-fall of the Tschingel glacier. The moraine up which we had to pass came into sight. It was three in the afternoon--and we had distributed some of Adolf’s packages amongst the other two guides--before we caught our first glimpse of the sun, which flashed out triumphantly behind the Hockenhorn, only to disappear in a few minutes past the Balmhorn. A steep slope of snow led from the moraine to the glacier.

Out of laziness, we did not fix up our ski with carrying straps. We might have paid dearly for the mistake, as a sharp wind caught us half-way across, and a dropped ski would have taken hours to recover. It is always wise to have at hand in one’s pockets the short straps which serve to tie together the ski at each extremity, and to make use of them whenever one has to carry ski across an unskiable piece of ground. It is also better to be provided with ski-slings wherewith to carry them across both shoulders. The wind is the ski-runner’s treacherous enemy. When you are on your ski it may drive you out of your direction, and when you carry your ski it may try to wrench them from you and blow you off your balance by weighing upon them.

The last three hours of our walk lay along the _névé_ of the Tschingel glacier, a snow valley bounded on the north by the cliffs of the Blümlisalp, on the south by the gently rising Petersgrat.

“The last lingering rays,” writes Arnold Lunn, “faded from the snows, but the sunset was soon followed by the rise of the full moon, a moon undreamt of in our English skies, so bright that I read with ease a page of my note-book. Those who have only seen her ‘hurrying with unhandsome thrift of silver’ over English landscapes have little idea of her real beauty. Before we reached the hut we had been climbing fourteen hours uphill, loaded with heavy sacks. Yet such was the mysterious fascination of the moonlit snows that we made no attempt to hurry. Again and again we stopped, lost in silent wonder.

“Straight ahead, the Jungfrau, backed by the slender cone of the Eiger, rose above a sea of shadows. The moonlight slept on her snowy terraces, steeping in silentness her cliffs and glaciers, and revealed the whole as a living monument of incarnate light. A hut stood in a _cirque_ of snow. Here the wind had played strange havoc, torturing the billows and cornices into fantastic shapes. Anything more weirdly beautiful than the glancing sheen of this hollow I cannot conceive. Its colour could only be compared, if at all, to the fiery blue of Capri’s grotto.”

The writer of the above lines, whom we shall not tire of quoting in this chapter, does not overpaint the picture. What could be more beautiful, more entrancing, than the Tschingel terrace, by moonlight, in the middle of winter? Standing on a balcony little less than 10,000 feet high, we were able to read our maps, after ten o’clock at night, as plainly as at noonday.

To the furrowed and broken ribs of the Blümlisalp clung several small glaciers, suspended in the couloirs like swallows’ nests in the eaves of a ruined castle. The sharp pyramid of the Eiger shone beyond the white cupolas of the airy Jungfrau, as though they had been the distant walls and minarets of an Oriental city. The snows about us were alive with a smooth and soft radiance. The sky was transparent, and as yet hung about with light veils. Silver clouds fluttered about the peaks, and when they floated into the moonlight from behind them, they flashed forth like fishes when the sun plays upon their scales. Layers of purple and crimson haze rested upon one another along the horizon. The play of light and shade upon the black patches and white spots of the visible world showed them, according to whither you looked, wreathed in smiles or puckered up in frowns. Buttresses, cliffs, abysses swam in a bluish mist, in which the twinkling rays of a million stars danced as sparkling dust.

It is a law of this world that what is unbecoming--τα ου δεοντα of Greek comedy--must ever come to underline and show off the most beautiful sights by giving them a contradictory background. For Arnold and myself, the last three hours of that day were spent on one of the most beautiful walks we can remember. But Adolf had been completely knocked up long before. During the self-same last three hours he experienced a great desire for sleep, and the burden of his refrain was not, “How grand! How beautiful!” but “Very, very tired!” Sometimes he dozed; sometimes he half uttered swear-words, which issued from his throat like stones rattling down a mountain gully. I had to send one of the other men to his help. Whether we shouted to him Thersites or Circe, or the Socialist, he cared not. What went to his heart, and as it were broke his wind, was that we had left his tea-house far behind and would not take him back across the beloved threshold. A miserable Alpine hut awaited his tottering footsteps. He staggered through the doorway and collapsed on the mattresses, sleeping at last when to sleep was decent. What was it to him that every curve in the swelling snows, every crag and buttress of the Blümlisalp cliffs was lit up by the mellow rays of the mountain moon?

Of the night spent in the Mutthorn hut nothing need be said, except that it seemed to us a perfect night. At 5.30 the alarum went off, and, if Arnold Lunn’s story be trusted--and it must be, in the absence of any other accountable person, as I was asleep at that moment--the ring of the bell was accompanied by an ill-sounding German epithet. A guide stumbled to the door, threw it open, and muttered in more parliamentary language: “Abscheuliches Wetter.” Arnold says--and I must trust him in this again, for I was still asleep--that a sense of sickening disappointment, such as climbers know so well, fell upon the waking inmates of the hut, a definition which must be taken to exclude Adolf and myself. Arnold stepped outside and discovered heavy grey clouds blowing up from behind the Eiger, sniffed a gust of south-westerly wind, laid his finger on sticky snow, and, in thus feeling the pulse of the weather, became aware of a high temperature.

He says: “We sulkily despatched our breakfast and started up the slope leading towards the Petersgrat. Suddenly Professor Roget caught sight, through a gap beyond the Blümlisalp, of the still lake of fog hanging quite undisturbed over the plain of Switzerland and above lake Thun. I should like to say that he gave a cry of surprise, but, alas! the professor has his emotions under strict control, and was content to rapidly communicate to us his analysis of the apparent bad weather. These unauspicious phenomena were merely local disturbances, which would vanish after dawn. The westerly breeze was only a glacier wind, the grey clouds only the effect of the intense solar heat collected the day before and blending throughout the night with the cold air from the snows. As long as the _Nebelmeer_ remained undisturbed, no bad weather need be feared. Every sign of evil actually vanished an hour after sunrise.”

On the Petersgrat we could fancy ourselves on the top of the globe. We were standing on the highest point of a curved surface, shaped like a balloon, and on all sides it seemed to fall away into immensity. Beyond, rose in gigantic outline the summits of the Alps and, still further, in long sinuous lines curving in and out of sight, the Jura, the Vosges, and all that distant girdle that hangs loosely about the outskirts of Switzerland. The winter fog filled up the intervals. Afar, there was not a breath of wind, not a whirl in the air.

The phenomenon that alarmed my party was that which is well known under the name of _Foehn_, a phenomenon which may assume almost any dimensions, sometimes general enough to embrace the whole of the Alps, and sometimes so closely circumscribed that you might almost compare it to the motion in the air produced by a small top spinning round on the palm of your hand.

The phenomenon is as follows: Masses of air of varying density and temperature are pushed up the Alps and are dropped down, as it were, upon the other side. Or else, as this morning on the Petersgrat, it is a layer of hot dry air formed aloft that forces its way down, in corkscrew fashion, on a given spot, through the nether air.

With us the phenomenon lasted an hour and was as a water spout in the middle of a still ocean. The universal quietude of the elements impressed itself again upon the spot on which we stood, doubting, like Thomas, but ready to believe, if a sign would but be given. By 8.30 the sun gilded gloriously the whole Pennine range, towards which our eyes were eagerly turned.

As we reached the sky-line, that distant host of old friends greeted us beyond the morning shadows, but what held us most was the wonderful pyramid of the Bietschhorn. The sharp-shouldered giant, sprinkled with snow from head to foot, through which showed his jet-black armour, stood forth before us, as within reach of the hand, strangely resembling the view of the Weisshorn from above Randa, but how much grander in his winter cloak with jewel-like crystals!

This second day was to be a day spent in idling down glacier slopes and in lounging above the forest zone of the Loetschenthal. We knew now that we could count on the sun till its proper time for setting in the evening. We knew that on his decline and fall the moon would take his place, as the night policeman succeeds the day policeman upon the common beat. The winter God was full of gentleman-like consideration. The rules of meteorology might have been purely astronomical and mathematical for any chances we might see of their being upset by the weather fiend.

The snow was hard and crusted as we entered upon the southern slopes of the Petersgrat. After forty minutes running, or thereabouts, the guides advised us to take off our ski while we descended the steep bits on the Telli glacier. The fact is that those men were not quite sure of their ground. I asked the party to proceed in close formation and to move with studied care till we should reach the bottom of the Telli glacier, considering that it would be wiser to cope with any difficulties it might put in our way than to ski down the Faffleralp, as to whose condition in winter I had not the faintest indication. The ordinary summer route might prove dangerous from avalanches. On the Telli glacier, the hardness and comparative thinness of the snow layer cemented to the ice, allowed of crevasses and depressions being easily recognised. It would be a piece of summer mountaineering in midwinter, and to this, for safety’s sake, there would be no valid objection.

I kept my people close in, to the eastern edge of the glacier, so as to pass under the buttress on which were supported the masses of snow over which I would not ski. The descent of the deep gully proved the right solution to our difficulty and procured for us for some twenty minutes the distinct pleasure of being thoroughly occupied with a serious job.

A run over some extremely broken ground, then some cuts and capers in a wood led us to a chalet, where we decided to have a feed and a rest.

“This confession,” says Arnold Lunn, “lays us open to the scorn of those who imagine that mountaineering is a kind of game, the object of which is to spend the minimum of time on a peak consistent with reaching its summit. Our party fortunately belonged to the leisurely school that combines a fondness for wise passiveness with a strong dislike to reach one’s destination before sunset.

“Thus understood, mountaineering on ski is the purest of all sports. The competitive and record-breaking elements are entirely eliminated. Those who go up to the hills on ski are then actuated by the most elemental motives, the desire to explore the mountains in the most beautiful of all their aspects, and to enjoy the most inspired motion known to man.

“To me the ideal form of ski-ing is cross-country mountaineering. One thus approaches nearest to the methods of the pioneers to whom mountaineering meant the exploration of great ranges, not the exhausting of all possible climbs from one small centre. Nothing is more delightful than to penetrate into the remote Alpine valleys in the winter months. The parasite population that thrives in summer on the tourist industry has disappeared. One meets the genuine peasant, ‘the rough athletic labourer wrestling with nature for his immediate wants.’

“Those who travel first class and stop in the best hotels do not know the real Switzerland. It is in the third-class carriages and small inns that one sees the most characteristic types. Nothing is more enjoyable than to escape for ten days from conventionality and dress clothes, wandering, kit on one’s back, from club hut to club hut, and descending at rare intervals to remote recesses in winter-bound valleys.”

The conclusion of this is that neither of us could describe in strenuous language the lazy afternoon we spent on the upper fringe of the woods above Blatten and Ried. We had a quiet repast, smoked our pipes, or cigars--and watched the shadows creeping up the Loetschenlücke. Having heaps of time, we sailed down to Kippel, as merry as finches, piping like blackbirds, and as fresh as new-laid eggs. Would we have been in such a happy predicament if we had not been on narrow boards about six and a half feet long and half as many inches broad, of Norwegian origin, which were used primarily as a means of crossing deep snow, and have lately been adopted as an aid to winter mountaineering?

The hotel we landed at was quite an ordinary eating and sleeping house of the ugly type which too often disfigures Swiss villages. How is it that dwellers in the Alps who, when left to themselves, show such good taste in the plainness of their dwellings and in their primitive church architecture, are, when they build for townspeople, such utter strangers to the most spontaneous suggestions of the artistic instinct?

At table we chanced to have as neighbours three members of the Swiss Alpine Club, whose native language was the Germanic. They were on their way from the Grimsel and had just completed that section of our route upon which we were to enter on the morrow. We sat with them after dinner, and here fiery Achilles behaved most wisely. With high hopes he went quietly to bed at a reasonable hour. Then Ulysses, seeing his opportunity, thought he would like to unbend for a while. He sat up with the Swiss party and sacrificed to good fellowship a few hours of rest and the contents of a few fragile flagons.

As midnight came on, the moon suddenly peeped indiscreetly upon the carouse, showing through the casement a seductive vista of most beautifully slanting slopes round the foot of which roared the river Lonza. Cunning Ulysses, beside himself with a naughty idea, sent the empty bottles flying through the window. Immediately the blood of the young Swiss was up. They rose, strapped on their ski in a trice, and down they went along the slope to the bank of the Lonza. The bottles were by then floating on the swirl of the stream. But, in the case of each pursuer, a timely Christiania swing brought him round up the bank again. There was a swish, a spray of snow, and three young men were saved to fight again for their country.

On returning to the hotel, they and I found a jolly old villain in possession of the tap-room. He was in the early stages of inebriation. Seeing from the costumes of the party that he had to do with town-bred mountaineers only, he drew from the depths of his imagination the longest bow that was ever harboured by a genuine mountaineer in his armoury. With him the humour was transparent. But it is not always so, unfortunately. Some of the Swiss peasantry, brought into contact with the foreign _clientèle_, are in the habit of being so pampered by sentimental, gullible people that they quite overstep the bounds of any liberty that may be permissible in resenting such treatment.

On the whole, the winter life led in the high Swiss valleys is not altogether wholesome. When they are visited in summer, the people are seen in the busiest time and appear in the most favourable light. The domestic establishments of the hotels, and the few individuals who benefit from the presence of strangers, such as mule drivers, casual dealers in cut flowers, in carved bears and rock crystals, are merely parasitic and as temporary features in the landscape as those whose passage called them into being.

The evils inherent to winter seclusion are more serious. This old man was an example, for he could be seen there day after day, spending his time in idle talk and throwing into the till his earnings of last season.

But stop: is Ulysses acting up to his reputation for wariness in moralising at the present moment to a weaker brother’s detriment? Has he forgotten that on the next day, Monday, January 4th, the little company turned out into the night at six o’clock without him? Was it a fair excuse, that, on the eve, he had engaged Theodore Kalbermatten to carry his kit for him to the next hut?

Having once more sworn allegiance to his usual beverage, milk, the best friend of the young and the old, he marched out last, but in good order, to join the troop over which he held command. As the dawn broke he found them waiting for him before a church in the Upper Loetschenthal, built six hundred years ago. Arnold had time to examine it. He says:--

“The church door was carved by the hand of some long-forgotten genius, carved with a delicacy of execution surprising in this remote corner of the Alps. We stopped for breakfast in some cheese-making chalets high up in the valley. Here we exchanged some remarks on cows and kindred subjects and gently chaffed the cheese-makers on the proverbially high stature of the men of Ried. But one realised throughout the barrier which one could never pass. We could form little or no conception of the world as seen through their eyes. To them these mountains must seem a waste by-product, an inexplicable freak on the part of the Creator. They regarded us and our ski with that amused tolerance that everyone extends to those idiosyncrasies which are not personally annoying.

“This rugged conservatism is nowhere so accentuated as among those who are shut off by mountain barriers from the ‘sick, hurry, and divided aims’ of modern life. Theirs is the spirit so gently satirised in Utopia. These things they say pleased our forefathers and ancestors: would God we might be as witty and wise!

“For six hundred years their forefathers had worshipped in the little church we had passed, sheltered by the hills from all breath of modern scepticism, apparently undisturbed by the thought that beyond them existed spirits who recklessly doubted the priest’s control over the economy of nature in such modest details as harvest rains. The Loetschenthal still possesses the strange pathetic beauty of those secluded Catholic valleys whose inhabitants seem to live a life as old as the hills themselves, and in which one poor priest and one little church stand forth as the only help, the only symbol of the world outside, and of ages not absolutely prehistoric.”

Arnold Lunn relates that after leaving the chalets he had an amusing talk with Theodore Kalbermatten, whom I had engaged to carry my sack up to the club hut. A fine-looking fellow, he showed a touch of that not ungraceful swagger which one notices in many guides and in which Lunn rightly sees nothing more than the unsophisticated pride that humble and well-meaning men take in the achievement of good work. But business is business. Lunn says very wittily that the conversation concluded with the inevitable production of a card, coupled with the caution that, though there were many Kalbermattens, there was but one Theodore Kalbermatten.

Anyhow, we were soon great friends with Theodore. The day was indeed long enough--like the glacier on which we were wandering--to make and undo friendships several times over. Circumstances lent themselves so well to mere strolling--think what it is to be able to cross the Bernese Oberland without once having one’s foot brought up against a stone--that we pressed our pace no more on this third day than on the preceding. We might have been Egyptian sages walking up and down in conversation outside the porticoes of Thebes with the hundred gates. Had we been told that what we stirred up with our ski were the burning sands of Africa which we mistook for Alpine snow, because our eyes were under the spell of _mirage_, it would have been ungracious on our part to pretend to know better, so much did we long for the coolness of the evening, for sea breezes and the dew at dusk, as Arabs might, returning upon their tired steeds to the secrecy of the oasis, after a raid in the desert.

All said and done, we found that we had spent twelve hours in reaching the summit of the Loetschenlücke pass. Arnold’s poetic gift found at every step fresh sustenance. He had discovered the _beau ideal_ of a pass. “It was,” he says, “the only opening at the head of the valley, visible, with the whole length of the glacier, during the entire day. For twelve hours a little gap backed by blue sky told of a wonderful new world that we should see from the summit. Above us we caught sight of our goal, the Egon von Steiger hut, bearing the name of a Swiss climber who perished on the Doldenhorn, and built in his memory. This is the real ungrudging spirit of mountain lovers, the attitude which Mummery sums up so well. ‘The great mountains,’ he writes, ‘sometimes demand a sacrifice, but the true mountaineer would not forego their worship even though he knew himself to be the destined victim.’

“We had the whole day,” says Lunn, “to reach the hut, and without being lazy, were wise enough not to hurry, and, indeed, there was no temptation to rush on. The time was all too short to take in the wonders of the Anen glacier on our left, the stern beauty of the Sattelhorn cliffs on our right. Slowly the distant ranges climbed higher into the sky. Peacefully the morning merged into the afternoon, and the afternoon into the evening. We paused below the final slope to watch the glow creeping down the snows of Mont Blanc. Even the guides were impressed by the strange stillness, as--

‘Light and sound ebbed from the earth,
Like the tide of the full and weary sea,
To the depths of its own tranquillity.’

“I shall never forget the tantalising suspense of that last slope. For twelve hours a little strip of blue behind the sky-line had been an earnest of the revelation that was awaiting us. For some six hours we had been faced by this same long slope in front and above. Now only a few yards remained. We took them at a rush. At sunset exactly, the sky-line was beneath our feet and in one moment were set forth before us, backed by the Finsteraarhorn, the ‘urns of the silent snow’ from which the greatest of all the Alpine glaciers draws its strength. The rays of the risen moon mingled with the ebbing twilight and lent an atmosphere of mystery to our surroundings. For the moment we were no longer of the earth earthly, for the moment the Loetschenlücke became a magic casement opening into perilous snows ’mid faery lands forlorn.’

“Thus what, seen from a distance, was obtrusively--almost offensively--a pass, wore a peculiar fascination for that very reason. It grew upon the imagination with the magic of those corners one has only turned in one’s dreams.”

Like the historic gap between the Mönch and Jungfrau, it led to the solitudes of the Aletsch, which Lunn had never seen save as a white streak from distant ranges. Like all good mountaineers, who have usefully wasted hours over a map in keen and eager anticipation, he now could dwell with gladness upon the reality of the mental picture elaborated long ago, while contemplating certain white spaces on an old copy of the Siegfried map.

But the inevitable anti-climax that dogs the flight of all poets was awaiting us. “On this occasion it took the form of the club hut stove, and a more effective bathos has never been devised. Amongst the torments of the damned I am sure the smoking stove holds a proud place.” Some of last summer’s moisture had remained in the pipe. Our fire might have been of green wood and wrung from us copious tears.