T HE new edition of Murray's "Handbook for Switzerland " which
Mr. Stanford has just published is a delight to the reader who finds pleasure in tantalising himself with reminiscences. A mere gazetteer, a list of names, will awaken the fancy : how much more a book with an admirable map of sinister-looking mountains every few pages! Any man who has once seriously fallen in love with a wild sport has laid up for himself an abiding madness. He may think to smother it deep down under layers of respectability and daily duties and worldly ambitions and all the other ballast of life, but it is there, and any moment may see it rekindled. The finding of some lost salmon-flies has blighted more than one pro- mising career, and the casual examination of a forgotten diary has wrecked many a peaceful home. Orion, the hunter's star, is never out of the heavens, and though to-day we are sedentary folk, intent on Fiscal Reform or marriage with a deceased wife's sister, to-morrow may behold us lending willing ears to the call from the wilds, and ready to sell our all to feel the rod in our hands again or get our feet on the sharp saddle of snow. Of all the moods of wild Nature, none call so per- sistently upon their votaries as the great mountains ; and the Alps are of great mountains the most accessible and the most fascinating. What is the secret of their charm? Sir Martin Conway in his admirable book has written a noble apologia of mountaineering, and finds its secret to lie in the height, the great spaces, the solitude, the contrast between fertile valleys and savage uplands, the long-descended human interest of the great peaks, and the eternal desire of human nature to strive with something, and to attain mastery over the perverse forces of Nature. All are good reasons and true ; and yet, if they were all, the climber might be contented with easier and more secluded mountains. The mere lover of hills will find in the
Alps.his inheritance shared with many thousands of clamorous tourists. He will find his love of solitude sorely outraged before he can achieve his ambition. For the truth is that to the true, mountaineer the Alps of to-day are full of grave drawbacks. If he seeks them at the best times, in spring and autumn, he will see indeed the wonderful valleys, and he will not be disturbed by picnics, but the inner courts of the hills will be as inaccessible to him as if he had remained in Surrey. If he tries to achieve the impossible, he will be met by the emphatic refusals of wiser guides. If he seeks them at the right season, be will find every inn overflowing with strangers, even those perched, like the Riffel and the Bel Alp, high up on the hill shoulders. He will find himself among a race who wear dress-clothes of an evening, and saunter up grass- slopes and brag of ascents. What with Strauss-playing bands, and ladies in their best frocks, and strings of tourists steered by indifferent guides across easy glaciers, and the finest climbs so staled by common use as to have lost all the glamour of pioneering, it will be a hardy soul which retains its enthu- siasm. The vulgarity of the summer valleys has done much to cheapen the wintry magnificence of the peaks. But not all : the charm still remains, and remains because the Alps are different from ordinary mountains. If their fascination lay only in their solitude, their beauty, and their historic interest, it would have shrunk with the inroads of second-rate civilisation. But it abides because they retain a core of un- tameable savagely; they are not only mountains, they are mountains of snow and ice.
It was different, indeed, in the great days of the " sixties," when every season saw some virgin peak fall before the hardy pioneers, who penetrated to far valleys and created with toil and peril the craft of mountaineering. In their eyes the Alps may well have had all the charms of other mountains ; their valleys were still lonely and simple, the peasants still unsophisticated, the whole region the preserve of adventurous spirits. But nowadays these things are gone, and we must look for their abiding charm to that which they share with no other European range,—their essential savagery. They are still the home of ice and snow, and still the playground of the elements. Though the Matterhorn cliffs be covered with ropes and stanchions, though rest-houses and cabanes dot the higher slopes of the Oberland, there are still the great snowfields and the endless peaks which are unfashionable because they do not rise from a hotel-strewn valley. Like the veld, the bush, and the high seas, snow mountains are one of the primeval types of the created world. Nature is bared to her foundation,— rock, snow, ice, and tempests. None of the soft accretions with which she has made the lowlands habitable are there. She has no care for man or human life in that wild no-man's- land, where the forces which shaped the globe still work out their stern drama,— " Only the mightier movement sounds and passes, Only winds and rivers, life and death."
It is good for man to go into such places, for his soul is braced by the austerity and the conflict between his poor strength and skill and the relentless natural world. It is good for him to stand now and then " high in the stainless eminence of air," for he will lose the little cares which dog our common life, and gain something of the serenity and strength of the wilds. But only a god or a madman can live long in such communion, and it is in the incidents of travel and the trivial needs of sustenance that that human element is found which provides the corrective. The bivouac on the rock platform, the camp on the high glacier, the care- fully husbanded food and wine, the pipe smoked in the sleeping-bag,—such trivial things provide the foil to the austerity of Nature, the homeliness which gives man domi- nation over the solitudes. When he has taken sleep and refreshment in those dead spaces, and has sustained life in a world which ignores him, he has brought the mountains into the circle of his own being. He is a true mountaineer, for he has striven with the wilds and conquered.
The Alps still give this high pleasure, but it must be sought for. The mastery, not of man, but of man's domesticity, has been pushed further into the solitudes, and the most intimate of mountaineering delights can be found only in deep retreats. Nothing can take away the beauty of the valleys and the lower slopes, the lakes and the passes, but they are tame beauties nowadays, and the true mountain
quality is far from tameness. The hills may have countless other interests and charms, but they must have a core of savagery, a remnant of the old fierce Nature which is so alien to the lives of most of us. It is the quest of this that drives many of the most devoted lovers of the Alps to ranges further afield. It was no mere vulgar wish to add to their list of ascents which took Mr. Donkin to the Caucasus and Mr. Mummery to Hindu Koosh, but the desire to get what the old generation of Alpine climbers got,—an untamed and uncharted snow world, where a man might enjoy the exquisite satisfaction of the pioneer. Every season sees some new expedition to the Himalayas, or the Andes, or the Selkirks, and though all who have once loved the Alps must return to them, the mountaineer, while he possesses youth and health, tends to seek his pleasure in places where there is less to distract, and where he can obtain the freehold of the snows. The Alps will always remain the Holy Land of mountain adventure, and in their tremendous ramifications there is enough still unknown to satisfy the most exacting. But as a range they cannot offer quite the same lordly inducements which they held out to our fathers. The "call of the wild" to the mountaineer comes more from other and remoter peaks, from the giants of the Himalayas and the. Karakoram, from the unexplored Northern wastes of the Rockies, from the long chain of the Andes, and, not least, from the equatorial snows of Ruwenzori. In these he is still a pioneer and an adventurer, a pigmy wrestling with the fierce gods who guard the inner courts of the snows. But he will find that the Alps are still his mountain alphabet, he will think of all mountains in the terms of the Chamonix Aiguilles or the Dent Blanche, and in his own mind will measure all ascents by the peaks which were his first love. For both to the climber and the mere seeker of the picturesque the Alps have become the essential mountain type, and their call is the call of all heights and solitudes.
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