KANDER GLACIER.To face p. 123.
KANDER GLACIER.
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 Aletschnévés(the Jungfraufirn and Ewig Schneefeld of German maps); to rise again to the Grünhornlücke, to skid down upon thefirnof 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 receivedin 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 periodicalSki, 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 isdriven 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 theIsisthat 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 asharmless 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 rusticcafé, 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 abona-fidemountaineer 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 commendthe 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.
GASTERNTHAL.To face p. 130.
GASTERNTHAL.
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 thenévéof 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 acirqueof 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 abalcony 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 Adolfand 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 theNebelmeerremained 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 ofFoehn, 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 forthbefore 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 theexhausting 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 oftendisfigures 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 fightagain 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 foreignclientèle, 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 momentto 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 dividedaims’ 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 ofmirage, 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 thebeau idealof 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 spiritof 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.’
‘Light and sound ebbed from the earth,Like the tide of the full and weary sea,To the depths of its own tranquillity.’
‘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.
“The guides for the space of some half-hour, wrestled and fought and prayed, Kalbermatten meanwhile keeping up a running conversationwith 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 thatlooked down on Hannibal:—
“‘Die unbegreiflich hohen WerkeSind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.’
“‘Die unbegreiflich hohen WerkeSind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.’
“‘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 partinggenius locihas, 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.
CONCORDIA PLATZ.To face p. 149.
CONCORDIA PLATZ.
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 caughtThe mountain turrets in a noose of light.”
“The hunter of the East had caughtThe mountain turrets in a noose of light.”
“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 icequadriviummarked 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 werelaid 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 extremelyunfavourable 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 Dutchbelle. 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 havepiled 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 ofnévé,” 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 therôleof anold 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 ofreal 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 partylay 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 meantwork, 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.”