WINTER SPORTS.
THE season for Alpine sports has come, and many a heart is being moved among those to whom the call of the mountains and the snows is potent, nay, imperative. To lie awake in London and think of the bright, clear air of the Swiss highlands on a frosty night under the moon or the stars, or the great fields of snow sparkling in the ardent sunshine of mid-day, makes an appeal which is often almost agonizing in its intensity. It is strange that a country which has no mountains of its own, or, at any rate, very few that have the true touch in them, should be the home of the race which, above all others, feels the fascination of the hills.
Let others praise the distant prospect of Monte Rosa or the Matterhorn, the glorious pageant of the Bcrnesc Oberland or the Valais's depths profound. It wants, I venture to say, a man of the English kin to have his blood stirred by the feel of a glacier underneath his feet, to riot and revel in a snow-slope or a rocky arete. Even the Elizabethan poets, who had very little personal experience of the Alps, somehow seem to have got the true fascination into their veins. For example, Beaumont and Fletcher make the British Warrior Queen, if I remember rightly, speak of " the untrampled deserts where the snows are." Who could better this I All the magic of the snow seems to be frozen in one narrow line. It is that sense of " untramplement " (to use a barbarous phrase), of the mystery, purity, and aloofness of the snow which so greatly stirs the passions of the true mountaineer. Again, Donne, Lk the wonderful travel poem addressed to his wife, catches something of the same emotion. Throwing himself into her place he says that when he is away she will wake from her dream, to call aloud :-- " I saw him go, o'er the white Alps alone."
There are literally thousands of Englishmen and women who seem sluggish and unmoved among the ordinary beauties of Nature and, perhaps, have no knowledge at all of the beauties of literature. Yet the heart you thought so dull and tame will flutter like a captured bird when the fingers of the dawn spread their enchant- ments of rose, azure and jade upon the mountain peaks, or when the gorgeous and jewelled hand of the sunset is colouring some snowy range in saffron and crimson, and when the vault of heaven, against which it is set, has become the colour of a blue moth's wings.
But, hush, I am losing touch with all the dreary and tragic realities of life—the Tariff, the Referendum, the Ruhr and the Rhineland. If I run on in this way I shall either paralyze myself with longings for the snow which cannot be realized, or else play the truant and have to be chased back by my colleagues and my staff through the rocks and forests of the Grisons. The hunt is up. I can see them hot on my track on the Bernina or up the Stelvio. They just miss me in the Pusterthal or by the red rocks which ring in Cortina. I escape by a miracle at Meran. I can even see the sensational bills and head lines concocted by contemporaries jealous of my freedom who have remained in London : " TRUANT EDITOR DRAGGED FROM GLACIER CAVE." " FIGHTS LIKE A BEAR." "DECOYED BY A BOGUS BILL DECLARING LORD ROTHERMERE TO HAVE TURNED TRAPPIST."
Alas ! this winter I can only indulge in dreams of future joys, and find my consolation in the delights of the past—those noble years when we were twenty-two, when the charms of the winter in the Alps had only just been discovered, when the Canadian toboggan had not penetrated to Switzerland, and when the little old- fashioned sledgelet held the field, when skis did not exist in any shape or form, when snowshoes or racquettes were regarded as impossible.
When, in 1883, I went out to spend a winter with my uncle, Mr. John Symonds, the discoverer, for England, at any rate, of winter in the High Alps, I may be said to have stood by the very cradle of Alpine sports. I remember being at a committee held in his library for founding the first International Toboggan Race, and I remember the grave and eager discussions as to what sort of cup he should present. Those were great and simple days, and they had one charm which—alas !—is tending to become wholly obso- lete. In those days there were practically no mountain railways and you had to seek your destination in a sledge, most comfortable, most easy, most romantic of all the forms of transport known to man. In my Swiss expe- riences• of forty years ago and more I think I crossed every high mountain pass kept open in winter, and crossed them, of course, in box-sledges. I cannot re- member how many times I crossed the Julier or made the minor passage from Davos to Chur, and again from Davos direct by the Flfiela or the Albula to St. Moritz. Again, in mid-winter I have crossed the Splugen in a blizzard—one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. From St. Moritz to Chiavenna, the key of the Rhaetian Alps, as the Romans named it, was an easy but very delightful sledge-drive. The Hospice I loved best was that on the Bernina. As the snows deepened, often to twelve feet, you moved up a floor. I shall never forget one especially hard winter seeing there icicles as burly as giants and as tall. Clear but wrinkled they stood up in the moonlight like awful ghosts of the dead Romans who had trod that pass when the Caesars laid their heavy hands on the Julier, the Septimer, and the Bernina. Then the Via Male in winter was full of romance. There I heard, or fancied that I heard; the phantom drum beat of the French soldier who, when Macdonald crossed the Splfigen, was swept away by an avalanche. It dropped him and his platoon on a kind of snow island which formed for a little time in the dreadful gorge. They could no more be helped than the castaway in Cowper's poem. But for all that the drummer beat the advance upon his drum and cheered on the legions of the Republic marching to stand by the armies of the First Consul in Italy.
People do no journeys now by sledge. The railway is quicker, though certainly it is not half so pleasant. To be wrapped in thick furs, to have the sun warming one's cheeks and yet know that you are moving in some forty degrees of frost is a kind of Paradise. A few people go sledge-rides for pleasure, but as a rule now the skating- rink, or the skiing fields, or the dance floor seem to offer superior attractions. But perhaps, after all, the younger generation is right, for, though a good snow track on the post road, a good horse, and a sledge with long runners give the poetry of motion, I admit that the skier can get, not only to the highest heavens in the Alps, but can attain to the most fascinating form of motion next to galloping on the back of a thoroughbred. Indeed, though no skier, I am not sure that the skier cannot justly claim to hold the key of the door which opens to the greatest of all athletic pleasures.
Long may the lure of the Alps hold us and our race I A visit to the Alps still remains the best possible of holidays. No man or woman is really at his or her best till he has got above the 6;000 feet level. That is happi- ness. To add another 4,000 feet is to many of us to attain to a taste of Elysium while still in the body natural.
Ah, happy, happy pair! You are taking the golden road to the snows. The sparkling crystals are your lode- stars. The still, clear air you breathe is your benison and your glory.
J. ST. LOE STRACIIEY.
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