Italian Alps

No one, however, interfered with our siesta, or prevented us from leaving early in the afternoon for San Martino. Here, however, we found some officious person had given warning to the douaniers, and had not Tuckett's German been fluent and our passports in order, we should have no doubt had difficulty. As it was, we spent a very pleasant evening with the officials, who were glad enough of a little company, and invited us to join them in the circular chimney-corner which is the best, if not the only, invention which has come out of Tyrol.

The old hospice was as rough quarters as could well be found, and our beds did not interfere with early rising. Our object was to discover a pass leading directly to Gares and so to Cencenighe and Caprile. We had found it impossible to obtain any information overnight, but, as we were starting, a peasant on his way to Val Fassa offered to set us in the right path. We soon found, however, that he was leading us too far north, towards a far-away mule-track on the other side of Paneveggio. Much to our friend's surprise, therefore, we turned our backs on him and our faces towards the great wall of cliffs which rises immediately to the east of San Martino. A long climb through a fir-wood brought us to the bare crags. The only difficulty, if it can be called one, lies in hitting off the easiest point at which to pass a low cliff. Above this the way lies over steep slopes covered with loose rubbish. Three hours after leaving San Martino we stood on the crest close to the base of the Cima della Rosetta. The view to the west was very wide and beautiful. We looked over a foreground composed of mountains pasture-clothed to their summits, beyond which the snows of the Orteler and Œtzthaler groups, the towers of the Brenta, and the sharp peak of the Presanella shone in the distance. We were now on the further edge of the great waste we had wandered over two days previously, and in the centre of the rocky peaks which dominate it. Several of them appeared accessible. One, the Rosetta, is in fact only half-an-hour's easy scramble, and well rewards the trouble of an ascent by a delicious glimpse of the fertile fields of Primiero as well as a more extensive panorama.

At our feet was a deep hollow lying under the back of the Cimon della Pala. We descended into it, and found it the first of a series of basins connected by steep troughs, at this early season snow-filled, but later in the year, when the rocks are bare, steep enough to require some scrambling.

We were threading a defile among the mountain-tops. Sheer walls of cliff impended on one hand; on the other the rocks of the Cima di Vezzana towered aloft in forms of the utmost daring, yet too massive and sublime to suggest the epithet 'grotesque.' Here was rock scenery seen in its purest simplicity, with no variety or relief from its sternness except what it could itself afford in the shapes and colouring of the crags. It was a Val Travernanzes destitute of its only elements of life – verdure and water. In one of the lower troughs a slender stream took the place of snow as a covering for the rock-surfaces, and we were forced to get down as best we could by the side of and sometimes through the cascade. At the end of the last basin the stream entered a narrow gorge. There was still no trace of path, and sometimes only just sufficient footing beside the water. We began to fear lest we might be trapped, when notched logs of wood placed as rough ladders against the rocks showed that some passage existed. Presently the opening of the gorge came in sight, and the opposing rock-walls gave space for an exquisite picture – the green slopes and rugged summit of the Cima di Pape bathed in a flood of sunshine. After plundering a bed of lilies of the valley (a rare flower in the Alps), we came to the brink of the cliff above the Gares valley. A log had been thrown across the water on the very edge of a waterfall. This rustic bridge was not substantial to look at, and too narrow for anything but Blondin or a monkey to walk over. We crossed it singly astride, and found on the other side a path which led us by a wide sweep round the rock-wall. This track recrosses the stream, still a mass of foam, beneath a fall which is perhaps the prettiest in the dolomite country. It then zigzags down rhododendron-covered slopes to the floor of the valley.

The village of Gares is perched on a knoll in the centre of a fertile basin and in full view of the green slopes of the Gesurette. Rugged cliffs form a complete barrier on the west, and the tiny gap from which we had emerged looked now the most unlikely entrance possible to a pass.

A haymaker of whom we enquired for an 'osteria' took possession of us and led the way to his cottage, where, having first hunted out benches and stools from all sorts of corners, he entertained us on milk, cheese, and butter. He knew of the existence of the pass we had crossed, but spoke of it as only used by chamois-hunters, and was unable to give it a name. Our host was most unwilling to receive even a trifle for his hospitality. Beyond Gares the valley is open and less wild and savage than most of the neighbouring glens. It runs at first in a north-easterly direction along the base of the Cima di Pape, until at an hour's distance from Gares the Val di Valles, through which runs the mule-track of the Valles Pass to Paneveggio, opens on the left and the united streams bend due east to join Val d'Agordo. At the corner stands Forno dei Canali, the bakehouse of the valleys, a long straggling village which uses the only path for a drain, and sadly needs sanitary reform. We had to creep under the walls and jump from stone to stone to avoid the sea of filth. Just beyond the last houses Monte Civetta, more tower-like in form than usual, closes the view. A picturesque defile – where the river, which flows beside the road, was almost choked by logs on their voyage from the upper forest to the saw-mills – led down to Cencenighe, a short two hours below the lake of Alleghe and somewhat less from Agordo.

We have now twice crossed the great horseshoe. There remains a third passage, the only one unknown to the people of the country, across the deep narrow gap between the Cimon della Pala and the Cima di Vezzana. This pass – which, in virtue of the privilege of discoverers, I venture to call the Passo di Travignolo – leads from Paneveggio to Gares.

On a clear starlight evening in September 1872 our carriage, hired at an exorbitant rate from the inn-master at Vigo, drew up before the shining windows of the hospice of Paneveggio. My friend and I were unprovided with guides, not purposely or because no peasants fit to undertake such service were to be found in the Venetian Alps, but from a combination of personal accidents. In the Alps only for a fortnight I had not thought it worth while to summon François Devouassoud from his far-off home. My friend, who had counted on the services of Santo Siorpaes of Cortina, had found him already engaged to a lady who had taken the first cragsman in Tyrol to lead her mule.

But the assurances we had received before leaving England that the untrodden crest of the Cima di Vezzana was likely to be attainable without serious difficulty encouraged us to persevere in our intentions against that mountain; and at the first opportunity we applied to the people of the inn to procure for us the best chamois-hunter of the neighbourhood to carry our provisions and to serve as a third on the rope. A peasant of stalwart size and manly bearing was soon produced who, by his professions of readiness to go anywhere, created a favourable first impression, weakened it is true, in my mind, by some slight suspicion that his 'anywhere' might be different to ours, and possibly mean anywhere he had been before. But for this doubt I had no foundation except the stubborn disbelief shown by our proposed companion in Mr. Whitwell's ascent of the Cimon della Pala. In such a discussion it is difficult to know how to act. To tamely leave a fellow-countryman's credit to take care of itself, with the precarious assistance of any stonemen he may have left behind him, is opposed to one's impulse. Yet the statement that an Englishman's word is above question loses its impressiveness when delivered with a consciousness that your assertions are at that very moment accepted as the strongest evidence to the contrary.

Shortly after five A.M. we were on the path which follows the eastern branch of the Travignolo. After some time the hills opened, the stream bent suddenly to the south, and wide grassy spaces extended along its banks. High against the sky the pale heads of the dolomites rose in a bare gigantic row. Above the end of the glen towered the gaunt form of the Cimon della Pala girt about his loins by a glacier, the only ice-stream in this group which makes a determined effort to descend into the valley. A grass-slope and a stone-slope led us to the ice, which rose in a steep and slippery bank. Higher up its more level surface was split by a few incipient crevasses, the largest of a size to engulf the heel of a boot or a torpid butterfly. Unluckily they did not escape the keen eyes of our hunter, and he proceeded to probe one of them with his staff. When he had done so his face assumed an air of singular resolution, and to our utter astonishment he informed us that the ice was hollow and that it would be madness to proceed. We of course pointed to the rope he carried on his shoulders. In vain; our philosopher briefly remarked that 'life was more than gulden,' and prepared to descend.

From our standpoint the whole upper glacier was in sight, a semicircular hollow open to the north-west, hemmed in elsewhere by the cliffs of the Vezzana and the steep broken face of the Pala. Between them lay a natural pass, approached on this side by a long bank of snow, between which and us the crevasses were evidently easy of circumvention. The day was cloudless. The path to a maiden peak was open. Should we follow the craven-hearted hunter? The suggestion, if made, was not for a moment entertained. We roped ourselves together and turned our faces to the mountain.

I feel it well here to guard myself from the risk of being reckoned amongst those who would set up an example of 'mountaineering without guides.' We were in fact neither of us disposed to disregard the verdict of the Alpine Club. That verdict may be thus summarised – 'Do not dispense with a guide except when and where you are capable of taking his place.'

An heretical but excellent climber, driven into revolt, perhaps, by some of the excesses of Grindelwald or Chamonix orthodoxy, once endeavoured to incite Englishmen to begin climbing by themselves. I quite agree with Mr. Girdlestone in disliking the passive position of the man who, having linked himself between two first-rate guides, leans on them entirely for support, moral and physical, under every circumstance.

This situation may be appropriate and even acceptable to the 'homo unius montis' who wishes once for all to do, or rather have done, his Wetterhorn or Mont Blanc. But for my own part I can never feel in it any of the pride of a mountaineer, or resist from comparing myself to the bale of calico which abandons itself to the force of a pulley in order to reach the top storey of the warehouse.

But in order to avoid this position it is surely not necessary, as Mr. Girdlestone would have us, to rush into the opposite extreme and do without guides altogether. Employing guides need not involve self-effacement. A guide may be looked to as a teacher instead of as a mere steam-tug; he may be followed intelligently instead of mechanically.

Although we may feel very far from, and may despair of attaining, the ideal of a mountain athlete embodied in an Almer, there is no reason why we should not endeavour to make some humble approach to it.

Let the traveller accustom himself to choosing his own line of march, practise his skill by steering through an easy bit of an ice-fall, cutting steps down a snow-bank, or taking the lead along a rock-ridge such as that of Monte Rosa. In this way he will, without much additional risk, test and improve his own skill, and may become in time capable of undertaking, without other company than that of similarly qualified friends, any expedition of moderate difficulty. Let it never be forgotten, however, that in sports as well as in trades an apprenticeship must be served. Forgetfulness of this fact has led to the worst of Alpine disasters, and it is by its tendency to ignore it that the doctrine of 'mountaineering without guides' is most dangerous.

In the present case we considered ourselves qualified to undertake the work before us; that is to say, we saw nothing to lead us to suppose that we were about to enter on ground where we could not tread safely, or on which a chance slip, should one occur, would not be remediable by such skill as we might have previously acquired.

The ice-chasms, some of them of formidable breadth, of the upper glacier were easily turned, and in a time which seemed short we came to the last of them, the great moat which ran round the base of the mountain. It was furnished with two bridges, one immediately under the centre of the snow-wall, over which any bodies falling from above would probably pass; the second, over which we crossed, somewhat nearer the Pala. This steep bank, for most snow-walls are little more, may have been at a rough guess 800 feet high.

The snow, though in a very trustworthy condition, was a little too hard for speed, and my friend, who is an excellent step-cutter, found plenty of occupation for his axe. Some hour and a half had slipped by and we were still 150 to 200 feet below the crest, when a low bank of rock, parallel to the slope and lying along the base of the cliffs on our left, offered us an alternative path. We swerved towards them, not however without exchanging a reminder of the need of caution in crossing from snow to rock. An unusually capacious last step had been cut, and my friend had already attached to the crag all his limbs with the exception of one leg, when his whole body suddenly became subject to a struggle between the laws of gravity and the will of the climber. He had grasped a portion of the living rock which came away in his hand, for the first time, as if it had been the least stable of loose boulders. I had hardly time to close my axe in a tighter grip before my companion flew past me at a velocity of I cannot say how many feet to the second.

My foothold was too slight to resist any severe shock; the power of resistance lay in arms and axe. In a moment the rope tightened, rather, however, with a strong increasing pull than with a sharp jerk. I felt myself moving downwards, but in my old position, erect, my face to the slope and my axe-head buried as deeply as ever in the snow, and dragging heavily like an anchor through its hard surface. Two or three seconds more and I felt the impulse less, my power of tension increasing. In another moment I had stopped altogether. My companion's fall, checked at the first by my resistance, and still more afterwards by his own exertions with his axe, of which he had with the impulse of an old climber retained his hold, had come to an end, and the moment the downward strain was taken off I stopped also.

I have no mental sensations to record during the time of the slide. The mind has, or seems to have, at times an extraordinary power while the body is flying down a snow-slope of, as it were, anticipating its separation from its old companion, and standing apart to watch its fate, in what a writer in 'Fraser' has happily called 'colourless expectation.' The phrase may suggest of itself an explanation of this curious indifference. In such situations the brain is called upon to register so many sensations at the same moment that as in a well-spun top the various hues are mingled into one, and the pale complexion of terror has not time to predominate. But in order to experience this frame of mind the slip must be irremediable by any present exertion; our moments of descent had their practical impulses, and these were quite sufficient to occupy them.

We now found ourselves respectively some sixty and twenty-five feet lower than we had been before, and with our positions reversed, but otherwise none the worse for our accident. So at least I thought for the first moment; but a red patch on the snow immediately drew my attention, and I found that my knuckles, skinned by the friction against the frozen surface, were bleeding freely. My friend, who had fallen further, had suffered more, and the backs of his hands were indeed in a pitiable condition.

Such a temporary inconvenience was not likely, however, to render us melancholy. Confident that no worse thing could happen to us, and that despite foul play we had proved our ability to cope with the Cima di Vezzana, we looked for the best means of gaining the crest and a convenient halting-place. An upright corniched wall, representing the thickness of the snow-field lying across the top of the pass, barred the head of the gully. With the rocks on our left we naturally declined to have any further dealings; those on the right did not look much more inviting. But, though loose and very steep, they proved with care to be quite manageable; and ten minutes' careful climbing brought us in safety to a spur of rock some fifty feet above the lowest gap.

The way to our maiden peak was still blind. It presented to us a massive shoulder of crag and snow-beds, masking the real summit which lay somewhere out of sight. We bore well to the right along the Gares side of the mountain, and over the shoulder, until we found a gully which took us back towards the crest. A short scramble placed us on it, and by a few steps more along a shattered ridge the summit was conquered.

Our perch was a narrow one, and when our future champion, the indispensable stoneman, had taken his place between us, there would have been little room for a fourth. Still we soon made ourselves comfortable enough to enjoy to the utmost the glory spread out around us. The Cimon della Pala, a great unstable wedge of a mountain, shot up opposite us, its highest rocks overtopping ours by little more than the height of Mr. Whitwell's cairn. The white houses of Primiero showed over the huge shoulder of the Pala. The lake of Alleghe lay peacefully in its hollow. Beyond it rose the central dolomites, the Pelmo, the Civetta, and the Tofana, looming largely through the glistening air, like Preadamite monsters couched on the green hills and sunning themselves in the noontide blaze. On one side we looked down on the white stony desolation of the great wilderness which fills the hoof of the shoe, on one of the nails of which we stood, on the other on the forest of Paneveggio and a green stretch of lakelet studded pastures. Far away to the west spread the rolling hill-waves of the Trentino, a vast expanse of broken country stretching out towards the Brenta and the Orteler.

In this region the common rule is reversed. While the troughs of the streams are narrow and rugged, the summits are wooded downs covered with villages. Seen from any moderate eminence, such as the Caressa Pass, the hill-tops compose instead of confining the landscape, they spread out their broad backs to the sunshine in place of cutting it off. Instead of striking against one opposite range the eye sweeps across twenty surging ridges, and wanders in and out of a hundred hollows, distinct or veiled, according as the sunlight falls on them, until it meets on the horizon the snows of the distant range extending from the Adamello to the Weisskugel.

So far as I know, no great painter has chosen a subject from the basin of the Adige. Yet here, even more than in Titian's country and the Val di Mel, all the breadth and romance of Italian landscape is united to Alpine grandeur and nobleness of form.

The full blaze of an unclouded heaven was just tempered into the most delicious warmth by a gentle breath of air. We could have lingered for many happy hours, and the moment for parting came but too soon.

The return to the gap was only a matter of minutes. There we left our old tracks, and, turning in the opposite direction, slid quickly down snow-slopes filling a recess between the wildest cliffs. The brow on which we halted to tie up the rope was green with grass and gay with the brightest flowers, a tiny garden in the desert, where the seeds wind-borne from far-off pastures are caught by the earth and nursed into being by the kindly rays of the sun streaming full on the southward-facing slope.

We were now immediately above the ravine descending from the Cornelle Pass. Once in this glen we were on old ground, and might easily have descended to Gares.65 Anxious, however, to regain Paneveggio before dark, we turned our faces to a steep ascent. The way across the level ground on the crest of the ridge had been newly marked out by stonemen. We rested for a few minutes to gaze again over the broad field of the blue and green Trentino, and then plunged beneath the breeze and into an atmosphere of sunbeams. The rays came down on our heads, reflected themselves from the white cliffs, and fastened on us with a steady persecution, from which there was no great rock to flee unto. I need not enter into any details as to our exact route, which was so contrived as to cut into the carriage-road between Paneveggio and San Martino as nearly as possible at its summit-level. If anybody ever chances to aim at the same end he cannot do better than bear to the châlets which he will see below him on the right, and there hire a cow-boy to guide him through the ups and downs of the forests and across the great stony scars which mar the mountain side. Anyhow he must make up his mind to reascend the final zigzags to the Costonzella Pass.

After the pathless thirsty hillside and the burning heat, our walk in the luminous deep-hued evening shadows down a smooth road, varied by a milk-giving châlet or a mossy short cut, was most enjoyable.

As the air grew chill and the golden radiance of the sunbeams died out of it the mountain forms exchanged their flaming splendours for a cool grey-blue tint. In some strange way this bloom in the air seemed to thicken until it became no longer transparent. A thin shadowy film grew into being, and the huge spectral dolomites faded away into it like genii of the 'Arabian Nights.'

Their battle was over; they had done their worst; and the Pala and Vezzana, knowing themselves vanquished, might well be imagined, like respectable Afreets, to have retired into the bottles with which their conquerors had, after the custom of climbers, provided them. But the Alpine Club has no seal of Solomon with which to bind its captives. The Primiero giants have doubtless by this time come forth again, and are ready for fresh encounters with human foes.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE PELMO AND VAL DI ZOLDO

Lacs de moire, coteaux bleus,Ciel où le nuage passe,Large espace,Monts aux rochers anguleux. – Théophile Gautier.THE VENETIAN TYROL – VAL DI ZOLDO – PASSO D'ALLEGHE – SAN NICOLÒ – CAMPO DI RUTORTO – ON THE PELMO – A LADY'S ASCENT – THE PEOPLE OF VAL DI ZOLDO

Even in the Venetian Tyrol the tendency of tourists to choose the colder pine-clad north in place of the more tender and varied grace of the south has become observable. Cortina, Caprile, and the Val Fassa are even now on the, in everything but prices, downward path of corruption. But away to the south and outside the 'regular round' there are still many quiet nooks known as yet only to those who

– Love to enter pleasure by a postern,Not the broad populous gate which gulps the mob.

It is across the Italian frontier, and not amongst the stern peaks and solemn pines of Cortina, or in the savage gorge of Landro, that we find the nature which Titian so often sketched and painted. In the foregrounds of the northern dolomite country there is a commonplace stiffness and want of variety, which even the weird crags of the Drei Zinnen or Coll' Agnello cannot render romantic; it lacks the noble spaciousness, the soft and changeful beauties, of the southern region. Its character is German in the place of Italian, it reminds us rather of Dürer than of Titian. It excites and interests the appetite for the wonderful rather than soothes and satisfies our longing for complete and harmonious beauty.

Landscapes composed of blue surging waves of mountains, broken by sharp fins and tusks of rock, of deep skies peopled with luminous masses of white cloud, are familiar to the eyes of thousands who have never seen Italy nor heard of a dolomite. Side by side with the wide sunny spaces, the soft hills and unclouded heaven of the early schools of Perugia and Tuscany, they remain to us as types of what Italian art found most beautiful and sympathetic in nature. The hill-villages of Val di Zoldo claim our interest as the frequent haunts of Titian. While wandering between them, we are amongst the influences which impressed his boyhood and were afterwards the sources of his inspiration. The Pelmo may on good ground assert itself as Titian's own mountain. Mr. Gilbert, in his 'Cadore,' has shown it to us as it stands over against the painter's native town; and it is impossible to turn over the facsimiles of the master's drawings contained in that charming volume without being persuaded that he drew the mountain from life more than once, and his recollection of it very frequently.