Above the Snow Line: Mountaineering Sketches Between 1870 and 1880

I can recall that he accepted a sum of ten francs when we parted in the morning. His eyes glistened with pleasure as he took the coin and straightway made for a ramshackle hovel on the hill-side, where lay an aged person “très-malade.” Possibly after his visit there was left a happy peasant in that tumble-down cabin – an emotional object more often described than witnessed. But all this took place years ago, and as we passed the collection of dilapidated tenements in one of which our old friend once lived, I failed to recognise his former dwelling-place. The timbers grew old and worn, the bands rusty, and one day the wheel which had worked steadily for so long stopped. Yet the stream which had moved it ran on as if nothing had happened. Was it a wasted life? Who can say if there be such a thing?

A few can touch the magic string,And noisy Fame is proud to win them:Alas! for those that never sing,But die with all their music in them.

We passed on: in a few minutes the houses were lost to view and there was left but the reflection of how much more, worthy of study, there was in this old curé’s nature than in the majority of Swiss with whom mountaineering brings us in close contact.

A “pension” in a train

As we descended the Lötschthal to Gampel the air seemed to thicken. The excessive warmth allowed our garments to stretch once again to their wonted girth, and we became less thoughtful. The vignette of the ancient curé dissolved away and was replaced by a view (mental only, unhappily) of our aiguille at Chamouni, black and bare of snow, inviting another attack. Gampel does not tempt the traveller much to seek repose, and we therefore caught the first train that came crawling along the valley and shaped our course for Chamouni in a second-class carriage tenanted by a pension of young ladies out for a holiday apparently, who all chirped and twittered and wrangled for the best places till the going down of the sun, like the Temple sparrows.

CHAPTER V.

AN OLD FRIEND WITH A NEW FACE

Chamouni again – The hotel clientèle– A youthful hero – The inevitable English family – A scientific gentleman – A dream of the future – The hereafter of the Alps and of Alpine literature – A condensed mountain ascent – Wanted, a programme – A double “Brocken” – A hill-side phenomenon and a familiar character – A strong argument – Halting doubts and fears – A digression on mountaineering accidents – “From gay to grave, from lively to severe” – The storm breaks – A battle with the elements – Beating the air – The ridge carried by assault – What next, and next? – A topographical problem and a cool proposal – The descent down the Vallée Blanche – The old Montanvert hotel – The Montanvert path and its frequenters.

It was the summer of 18 – and our old quarters at Couttet’s hotel knew us once more. As we drove into the village of Chamouni we turned our heads carelessly around to note the various new hotels that might have arisen since our last visit. Observing that they were four or five in number, we rightly conjectured that we should find all the hotel keepers complaining bitterly of the hard times and the want of custom. Also we wondered in how many ways it was possible to build a house without any particular system of drainage, a deficiency which was at that time becoming very marked in Chamouni, but has since, I believe, been improved. Yet the place itself had not altered essentially. New buildings of imposing exterior and little else do not materially alter a place that leads a life like that of modern Chamouni. The population, which throughout the summer appears to pass its time in the streets with its hands in its pockets, was still amusing itself in the same way. The tone of the village was just the same as we had always known it, and even M. Couttet himself had not succeeded in imparting any marine flavour by building an odd little lighthouse with an iron flag on the top which the architect had ingeniously represented as streaming permanently in a direction indicating a wind favourable for fine weather. We knew that we should find the same denizens in the hotel; and they were there.

A youthful hero

There was a very young man with a very parti-coloured face from exposure on the glaciers, who had recently completed the thousand-and-first ascent of Mont Blanc and was perpetually posing gracefully against the door-post or in a lattice-work summer-house a few steps from the hotel, gazing towards the mountain and rather eagerly joining in any conversation relating to the perils of the ascent. There were three or four young ladies of various periods of life who gazed at him with admiration and enquired at intervals if he wasn’t very tired; to which the young man replied carelessly that he was not, and inwardly thought that the discomfort of sunburn and the consequent desquamation was on the whole cheaply bought, the while he wished the expedition had not cost so much and that so many others had not thought of making the same ascent. And then there came a lithe, active lady walker who had been up Mont Blanc and a great many other mountains too, and paid no more attention to the guides’ stereotyped compliments than a suspicious dog does to those of a nervous visitor: so the young man’s nose was put out of joint and he would have laughed scornfully at the fickleness of hero worship had not the skin of his face been in danger of cracking, and he wished his shirt collar had not been starched and thumped by the village washerwoman into the form of a circular linen saw.

A scientific gentleman

Then there was an excitable Englishman of impulsive habits, with a large family who were perpetually playing a game of follow-my-leader with their parent, and who were under orders to weigh anchor on the following morning at five o’clock for the Montanvert and the Mauvais Pas. The boys were stoking up for the occasion with raw apples, and the girls were occupied, when not pursuing their restless father, in preparing a puggaree for his hat. There was a gentleman who affected the curious untidiness of raiment not unfrequently noticed among Sunday frequenters of the Thames, and who sought to establish a mountaineering reputation by constantly gazing at the peaks around in a knowing manner and wearing a flannel shirt of an obtrusive pattern destitute of any collar. There were guides about, who were on the point of being paid for their services and who were exceedingly polite and obsequious; others whose “tour” had just passed, were, proportionately, less deferential. There was an elderly lady whose whole soul appeared bent on a little stocking from which she never parted, and who turned the knitting needles to more account for toilet and other small purposes than I could have conceived to be possible. There were two or three mountaineers who appeared anxious only to avoid everyone’s gaze and who might be seen in byways and odd corners talking to bronzed guides who looked like business. Finally, there was a gentleman of statistical and scientific tendencies, much given to making quietly astonishing statements of astronomical facts and gently smiling as he rolled over his tongue and enjoyed the flavour of the vast numbers with which it was his pleasure to deal. He absolutely revelled and wallowed in figures. Buttonholed in a corner and compelled to listen with deferential attention, I secretly writhed as he crushed me slowly with the mere weight of his numerals. He shared with others of his frame of mind the peculiarity of always keeping something in hand and skilfully working up to a climax. Such and such a star was so many millions of miles off. We opened our eyes to the proper degree of width and observed, “Bless me!” or, “You don’t say so?” Instantly he would rejoin, “Ah, but that’s nothing to so and so,” and then favoured us with a still more immeasurable distance. We expressed a slightly greater degree of intelligent amazement. Thereupon he nodded his head, gently inclined it a little to one side, and smiled softly. It gave him such evident pleasure to have a listener that I attended with due reverence to his enthusiastic computations; knowing my man, I felt sure that he was keeping back a real staggerer to finish up with, and was prepared to assume varying degrees of surprise up to the moment when it should come. Unfortunately I misjudged its advent, and feeling that I had somewhat lost in his estimation by evincing undue astonishment at a comparatively small array of figures, I sought to turn the conversation by requesting to know how long he thought it might be before the great rock peaks around us would have crumbled away to their bases. The calculation was too trivial and the number of millions of generations too small to interest him much, but he vouchsafed an approximate estimate.

A dream of the future

I let him babble on and fell a-thinking. The peaks were crumbling away bit by bit no doubt, the glaciers shrinking. At a bound the mind leapt into a future which, after all, might be not so very unlike a past. The Alps things of the past! What, I wondered, when the mountains were all levelled down and smiling valleys occupied the troughs of the glaciers of to-day, would some future commentators make of the literature so industriously piled up by the members and followers of the Alpine Club? Imagination ran riot as in a dream, and I fancied some enthusiast exploring the buried city of the second Babylon and excavating the ruins of the “finest site in Europe.” I pictured to myself the surprise in store for him on digging out the effigies of some of our naval and military heroes, and the mingled feelings with which he would contemplate the unearthed statue of George IV. It seemed possible that in that far-off epoch to which my friend’s calculations had borne me, the Alpine Club itself might have ceased to exist. Pursuing his explorations in an easterly direction, the excavator might perchance have lighted on a strange tunnel, almost Arcadian in its simplicity of design, and marvelled at the curious and cheap idols of wax and wood which the people of that ancient day had evidently worshipped. Turning north again, this Schliemann of the future would pass by the ruins of S. Martin’s Church, eager to light upon the precious archives of the historic Alpine Club itself. How eagerly he would peruse the lore contained in the Club library, anxious to decipher the inscriptions and discover what manner of men they were who lived and climbed when mountains and glaciers were still to be found on this planet. Human nature would probably not have changed much, and the successful explorer might even have been asked to favour a scientific society of the future with the result of his discoveries, to which in all probability he would have acceded, with a degree of reluctance not quite sufficient to deter the secretary of the society from pressing him.

A condensed mountain ascent

An abstract of his description of our sibylline leaves I fancied might run somewhat in this style: – After commenting on the fact that the maps and illustrations did not usually correspond in number with the list set forth in the index of the volumes unearthed, he might proceed thus: – “In pursuit of their great and glorious object these ancient heroes appear to have undergone vast personal discomfort. It is difficult therefore to realise fully why so many engaged in this form of exploration. Instances have been given by other learned antiquarians who have studied the habits of this people, of a similar purposeless disregard of comfort, such as the four-wheeled wooden boxes in which they travelled about, the seats in their churches, &c. The outset of their expedition was almost invariably characterised by a display of bad temper, attributed to early rising. After a varying number of hours of excessive toil the travellers were wont to arrive at some fearsome chasm spoken of as a ‘bergschrund.’ On this, if the subject-matter of their narrative was insufficient in quantity, they were wont to descant and enlarge at length; sometimes, as we judge, in their descriptions they enlarged the bergschrund itself. They then crossed it. Immediately after this incident they were in the habit of eating, and the minute and instructive details commonly given enable us to form a tolerably accurate opinion as to the nature of the diet with which they supported their exhausted frames. Next they traversed strange localities for which there appear to have been no adequately descriptive expressions in their own language. In fact the difficulty of deciphering these records is greatly increased by the fact that the writers were versatile linguists, for they constantly make use of words of a hybrid character. They were evidently practised meteorologists and took much interest in this subject, as may be gathered throughout from their writings. At length they reached summits, of the nature of which we in our time can have but a feeble conception. So great was their relief at the termination of their self-imposed but toilsome task, that they habitually burst forth into language characterised by a wealth of imagery and a fervour of poetic description which unfortunately conveys but little idea to us in our day of what they actually saw. In descending they were all commonly within an ace of meeting with a violent death. The mode in which the danger attacked them varied within certain restricted limits, but it always occurred and the escape was always narrow. The peril over, they remarked that they breathed freely again, and then at once fell to eating. Arrived at a successful termination of their wearisome labour, they advised others to do the same. They dealt out unsparing satire to their companions, unlimited praise to their guides, and unmeasured ridicule to their porter. They commonly expressed throughout their descriptions grave doubts and uncertainty as to the issue of the expedition: a curious and noteworthy fact, for the heading of the accounts always divulged at the outset their ultimate success. The construction, therefore, of their narratives was in accordance with a well-recognised model and appeared capable of little variation. The only other facts that we can glean are that they were prodigious eaters, were much pestered by some extinct species of insects, and that they make frequent allusions to a substance termed tobacco. The constant repetition of these incidents stamps upon their writings the impress of unexaggerated veracity. Still they were not universally held in favour, indeed were regarded with disapprobation by some individuals of their own race. It would seem indeed from internal evidence that, had it not been for frequent and sharp criticism of their proceedings, their pastime might never have inveigled so many persons with its seductive fascination.”

Now at the time at which these prophetic fancies were conjured up we had just completed an expedition which it seemed might be worthy of attention, solely on the ground of its very contradictoriness. For the features of this climb were most opposed to those already mentioned, and in fact mention of it scarcely seemed admissible in an Alpine narrative. We took no porter with us to fill the rôle of first low comedy man. We had very little to eat; our stock of wine ran out through a leaky gourd; our tobacco was wet and there was no bergschrund, and yet all this happened on a mountain close to Chamouni.

Wanted, a programme

“Some vast amount of years ago, ere all my youth had vanished from me,” as the poet says, at a date therefore which for obvious reasons it is inexpedient here to mention, I found myself, as already mentioned, at Chamouni. With me was an old mountain friend and fellow climber, J. Oakley Maund. We were both burning with desire to add to the list of the many successful expeditions we had made together, but, as a matter of fact, were somewhat gravelled for lack of suitable matter. Like a ministry on the eve of a general election or a gentleman without a sixpenny-piece at a theatre, we were sorely in need of a programme. The locality was somewhat unfortunately chosen for those in whom the ancient spirit was not yet quite extinct and who wanted to do something new. Ever since the days when Jacques Balmat, Dr. Paccard, and the great De Saussure had donned strange apparel and shown the way – that is to say, for nearly a hundred years – people had been climbing mountains in the district, and it was not to be wondered at if it were hard to find some expedition which nobody else had thought of, or, worse still, had achieved. We gazed at the map and made thumb marks all over it. In every conceivable direction ran little lines indicative of previous explorations. We studied the carte en relief, but without much hope of getting any information of value from this inaccurate and lumpy absurdity. Mont Blanc, which, according to this work of plastic art, was modelled out as some eight or ten thousand feet higher than any other point of the chain, had had all the snow worn off its summit by much fingering, so that the component pasteboard showed through. Rivers ran uphill in this map, and lakes were inclined at an angle; bits of sticking plaister represented towns and villages, and the whole article was absolutely bristling with little spikes and points like the old panoramas of London or the docks at Liverpool. Still a considerable number of people seemed willing enough to pay fifty centimes for the pleasure of indicating elaborate expeditions on it with their fore-fingers, and appeared to derive pleasure from gazing on a pasteboard misrepresentation when they could by looking out of window see the real thing for nothing. We abandoned the carte en relief and took Jaun and Kaspar Maurer into our confidence. The only suggestions that they could make were the Aiguille des Charmoz and the Dent du Géant. The former of these two peaks we had both tried to ascend in former seasons, without success. Jaun did not think then that it was possible, and without sharing his opinion we gave way to it. With regard to the latter mountain we all thought at the time that an undue amount of what is vaguely termed “artificial aid” would be necessary to ensure success, an opinion confirmed by subsequent events, for when Signor Sella achieved the honour of the first ascent he was only able to accomplish it by somewhat elaborate engineering appliances. Some bold person of an original turn of thought suggested of course a variation of some way up Mont Blanc, but the utter impossibility of discovering the slightest deviation from any previously ascended route and the utter uselessness of trying to find one caused a general shout of derision, and the bold person thereupon withdrew his suggestion and ordered some coffee. Besides, the weather was fine; every day swarms of tourists could be seen, crawling up the sides of the monarch of mountains, in numbers as many as the flies on a sugar loaf in a grocer’s window on a hot day.

One evening we sat in front of Couttet’s hotel staring pensively at the familiar outline of the row of aiguilles, and wishing we had lived in the days of Albert Smith, the best friend Chamouni ever had. At any rate, at that time the natives were unsophisticated and the mountains about were not all done to death. The valley between us and the chain was filled with a light haze, not sufficient to conceal the outline of the mountains but yet enough to blot out their detail and solidity. As the moon rose behind the chain we saw a strange phenomenon. A silhouette was thrown forwards on to the curtain of haze and photographed on it with sharp and clear definition, so that we could recognise, at an immense height, the shadowed peaks looking almost as massive as the actual mountains. Nor was this all; a second curtain of mist seemed to be suspended, in a vertical stratum, in front of the former one, and the shadows were again marked out on this, infinitely more magnified and less distinct, but still perfectly recognisable. As a result we were able to see the semblance of three distinct tiers of mountains one above the other, looking so massive that we could scarcely realise that they were but transparent ghosts of the peaks; and the phenomenon, a double “Brocken,” must have lasted for more than half an hour. However, we desired something more of the nature of the substance than the shadow, and ultimately came to the conclusion that it was absolutely necessary for our peace of mind to accomplish something on the morrow, and as it really mattered but little what that something might be, provided a good climb was afforded, we must yield to circumstances and perforce adopt the latter-day necessity of all mountaineers. If we could not find the right way up some new mountain we could at least take the wrong way up an old one.

The Aiguille du Midi

So the next morning we walked up to the Pierre Pointue as a preliminary step – a good many and rather arduous steps – towards the object in view. The exertion of toiling up the zigzags or the more rarefied atmosphere had a remarkable effect on one of the party, whose face when we reached the chalet was found to be wreathed in smiles and wearing an expression of great intelligence. He had in fact become possessed of an idea. Bubbling over with self-satisfied chuckles, he suggested that we should ascend the Aiguille du Midi by the face directly in front of us and then descend on the other side, thus making a col of the mountain. The idea found favour instantly, and the intelligent person was so much pleased that he ordered a bottle of wine, plastered over with a very costly variety of label, and regretted it. Investigation of the cellar revealed only two casks of wine, but the “carte” comprised a long list of various vintages. Fired with enthusiasm and inflated with limonade gazeuse, we left the chalet and strode vigorously up the hill in order to prospect the route and reconnoitre the rocks. The exertion and the pace soon told upon us, the sooner that it was a hot, enervating day; the kind of day that makes one perforce admire the ingenious benevolence of nature in fashioning out on the grassy slopes rounded inequalities, exactly adapted to those of the human figure in a seated or recumbent position. The heated air rising from the ground gave flickering and distorted views of distant objects, like unto marine phenomena viewed through the cheap panes of a seaside lodging-house window. The grasshoppers were extraordinarily busy; the bees droned through the heavy air; the ants, overcome apparently by the temperature, had given up for the time straining their jaws by their foolish practice of carrying large parcels about without any definite object, and had retired to the shady seclusion of their own heaped-up residences; the turf was most inviting. It now occurred to us that there was no absolute necessity for the whole party to ascend on the present occasion, and that perhaps the guides might go up quicker alone. The details of this suggestion were acceded to on the part of the amateurs of the party with astonishing alacrity and unanimity. We laid the scheme before the guides, and they also thought it a very fine one. Thereupon, with much parade and ceremony, they braced themselves up for great exertion, borrowed the telescope, remarked that they expected to be back some time during the night, and started upwards with somewhat over-acted eagerness. My companion and I disposed ourselves comfortably in the shade, and resumed an argument which had originally commenced some days previously. I waxed eloquent on the subject under discussion and with much success, for such was the force of my logic and the cogency of my reasoning that I bore down on my opponent, and reduced him in a short time to absolute silence, from which he did not awake for nearly two hours.

Ephemeral acquaintances

About this time the guides, who in all probability had also been comfortably asleep within a short distance of us, returned and gave a favourable report concerning the mountain. Elated by this news, we climbed a short distance further up, and met there a large party of ephemeral acquaintances who were taking an afternoon’s pleasure on the hills. After the manner of people when so engaged, they set forth with great energy and climbed up a steep little rock tump a few hundred yards distant. Arrived at the summit, they roared out unintelligible remarks to us, and we did the same to them till we were hoarse; we waved our hands and hats and they flourished their handkerchiefs as if they were our dearest friends on earth, just setting out on an emigrant ship for the Antipodes. The party then descended; the nearer they came the less friendly and demonstrative were we, and by the time we met the warmth of affection recently manifested on both sides had wholly evaporated, and we conversed in ordinary tones on indifferent topics. Then they set out for another little hill, and we were moved, apparently by some uncontrollable impulse, to go through the same idiotic performance. Emotional behaviour of a similar kind is not infrequently observed in the mountains. We journeyed together back to the Pierre Pointue, viewing each other with distrust and suspicion; and when it was found that we had bespoken the beds – if the exaggerated packing-cases lined with straw bags could be considered such – we parted on terms the reverse of friendly. So frail are the links that bind human affections.