COUNTRY LIFE
I suppose everybody this month has been giving some thought to the personality of mountains. The disasters in the Alps have dwarfed even man's inhumanity to man. The long article in The Times of January 25th was one of the most moving i:ccounts of suffering and heroism that I have met for many years. A few tricks of temperature in those pre- cipitous regions, and the result is chaos and disaster. Coincident with this, in another part of the world, there have been volcanic eruptions causing the deaths of thousands of people. How is it, we must all wonder, that these islands of ours, outriders of the great land-mass of Asia and Europe, should be exempt from these violences of the drama of Mother Earth ? One might well expect that, from our position as a bastion against the fury of air and ocean, we should be subject to the worst excesses of climate and gco-malevolence. But here we are, living in a comparatively serene and gentle paradise, the only blots being those made by our own industrial filth and philistinism ; our slag-heaps, our open-cast mining, our slums and ribbon-development. Apart from those horrors, our natural scene and atmosphere arc a constant which is best symbolised in the lyrics of our poets through the ages, and the spirit of the verse of beloved Edmund Spenser and William Cowper, two men whose genius is an epitome of our climatic conditions and our scenery., A neighbour came in last night, a man who has spent his life out East, and all his leisure time risking life and limb in an ardent courtship of the Himalayas. He brought photographs, which we compared with those in a recent number of the magazine Country and Travel (an admirable journal), illustrating an article on the Scottish Garhwal expedition. I wish I had the experience to do justice to these matters: but it needs a pen like that of the late poet Michael Roberts, also a mountaineer, to pursue this theme. I can only look on from the foothills.
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