Sir William Martin Conway

IT is to be feared that the reader, whose persistence has availed to carry him thus far through the adventure of this book, may bring an accusation against me, on the ground that each form and type of scenery, as in its turn it has come to be discussed, has been described in language of too superlative praise, as though it and it alone were pre-eminent above all other Alpine forms and types. Let me forthwith confess that the accusation is well founded; for the fact is that, whether the attention be turned upon peaks of rock or domes of snow, upon cliffs or aiguilles, upon snow-fields or ice-falls, upon passes, alps, or valleys, the kind under immediate consideration always seems the finest, the central type and the most beautiful. We quit the valleys for the high snows in search of beauty. From the heights we return to the valleys on the same quest. Everywhere we may find it, and to find it is all we need ask; for it is like pure gold, whereof no fragment is intrinsically more precious than another. Each new-found nugget seems for the moment best of all.

THE CASTLE OF ZÄHRINGEN-KYBURG, THUN

Beauty is not the prerogative of any zone or level of the mountains more than of any other. It is of different kinds in different regions, but not of different degrees. Some kinds may appeal to one man more than other kinds, but these in their turn will be preferred by a man of different disposition, and neither can boast that his taste is superior. Youthful vigour may find the keen consciousness of beauty most readily arising after difficulties have been overcome. Age may feel its sense of beauty deadened by toil. In neither case is the power of appreciation to be regarded as a test of the quality of the beauty perceived; it is merely an indication of the character of the person perceiving it.

The normal Alpine climber is more sensitive to the beauty of the high regions than to the beauty of low levels. Nor is the fact surprising. He values that which he wins by toil, as is the natural habit of man. Yet he will by no means deny that there are beauties of the valleys and the middle regions, though he may freely confess that they appeal to him less powerfully. But even he, lying upon some high pasture or in the borders of a wood on some off-day, when the sun shines brightly and the peaks that he knows and loves look down upon him through a clear atmosphere, will realise consciously enough the fascination of the scene. The beauty of the middle region, however, stands in need of no apology, of no lengthy recommendation, for this is the region which the ordinary traveller most frequents and specially associates with his Alpine ramblings. The valleys are the home of the tripper; the alpine pastures, of the tourist; the snows, of the climber. Each class perhaps looks down upon the one below, but each is well rewarded and may rest content with what it receives.

The grassy region between the belt of forest and the snows is known in Switzerland as the alps or high pastures, and it is from these "alps" that the great mountain range of Central Europe takes its name. An alp is essentially a summer grazing ground. It is the locality of cattle and horses, sheep and goats. A high Alpine village without an alp is an exceptional place. The normal village needs an alp for its equipment as much as it needs fields and woodland. The fact that there is an alp for summer grazing enables the grass lands at lower levels to be used as hay-fields; thus a supply of winter feed for the cattle is procured. Hay is also cut on some of the lower alps, but that is an exceptional use.

The easily accessible alps are grazed by cattle. Highest alps whither cattle cannot go, or where frequent precipices surround the beasts with danger, are reserved for sheep and goats. Goat-alps are sometimes islands in the midst of glaciers, as, for instance, those at the foot of the Breithorn and the Twins along the south side of the main Gorner Glacier. Oftenest the alps grazed by sheep and goats are high up in the immediate vicinity of the snow-line, little patches of grass in a wilderness of rocks, or broken up by precipices. Some great grassy places at the ordinary cattle-alp level are so isolated by rock-walls that cattle cannot be taken to them with safety. Large flocks of sheep will then be found there. Such, for example, is the Muttenalp[3] above Thierfehd in the TÖdi district, which is grazed by some 1500 or 2000 sheep. A single shepherd looks after them, and is almost entirely cut off from the lower world throughout the long summer months. The alp in question lies in a hollow of the hills, with terraced slopes rising like an amphitheatre from a grassy hollow, only accessible from below by a giddy path. There would be grass enough here for many cattle if the path could be cheaply improved.

[3] NOTE TO PAGE 229.—Mr. Coolidge informs me that the Muttenalp belongs, not to the Thierfehd, but to Brigels in the Grisons, and is reached over the Kisten Pass. That is why the path down to the Linththal is so bad.

Nothing in the Alps is more lonely and forlorn in aspect than are these high shepherds' huts. They are always wretchedly built. The lads or men that occupy them are the poorest of their village and the worst clad. In an alp where cheese is made there is plenty of work to fill every hour of the day; but a shepherd who lives aloft and does not have to drive his flock back to the village every day, finds time hanging heavily on his hands, and acquires a forlorn expression that matches his attire, his surroundings, and the miserable weather which so often envelops him. Those of us who climbed among out-of-the-way parts of the Alps in the seventies or earlier often had to take shelter for the night in shepherds' huts, and very uncomfortable they were. But modern climbers hardly know that such refuges exist.

One such hut I well remember at the head of the Ridnaunthal in Tirol. Now there are no less than three luxurious climbers' huts built beside or near the glacier further up. The old shepherd's hut has fallen to decay. Only a fragment of one of its walls was left when I passed the place recently. Modern comforts, however, are not all clear gain. To sleep a night in the old upper Agels alp was not a comfortable experience, but it had its recompenses. The rough stone-built cabin was perfectly in harmony of aspect with its surroundings, as a club-hut is not. Built out of the stones that lay around, its crannies stuffed with moss, its roof formed of slabs and sods, it seemed a part of the mountain landscape, a natural growth rather than an artificial structure. A philosopher, ignorant of the conditions of life there, might have argued that the hut had been invested with an intentional protective coloration and form. The hut was hard to find, hard even to see when you were looking straight that way. It stood in a gorge upon a sloping grassy shelf, clutching a dark rock-cliff, as though it feared to slide down and tumble over into the roaring torrent. There was another dark cliff over against it, and the gorge curved round, so that you could not see far, either up or down. Everywhere the dark rock-cliffs shut it in, and only the minimum of sky was visible overhead, as it were poised on cliffs. There was always a bitter wind blowing when I was there, and always the river roaring, and its spray rising to the door of the hut like a wet cloud.

The entry was by a low and narrow door, and there was a tiny window beside it. A little passage or track led from the door down the room to the fire at the far end, where cheese was made of goat's milk. On one side of the passage was a bed of hay, retained by a board. On the other were some shelves fastened against the wall. The door did not fit, and the walls were full of holes through which the wind whistled. It was indeed a wretched shelter; but we slept well enough within it, rolled up in our wraps. The hospitality of the simple peasant was as hearty, his welcome as warm, as his means were exiguous. No one sleeps in these goat-herd huts any more. Climbers have provided better accommodation for themselves, but in so doing they have lost that intimate touch with the life of the mountain-dwellers which a former generation learned to enjoy.

When now we speak of alps, it is the cattle alps that are generally intended and understood. These cattle alps are of all sizes and descriptions, large and small, relatively high planted or relatively low. Some, like Moser's alp above Randa, belong to an individual and afford grazing only for a few beasts; but most are the property of the commune and are worked co-operatively for the benefit of all the cattle-owners who may wish to send their cows aloft to graze. Most alps are divided into two levels, a lower and a higher. The cattle are driven to the lower alp for the beginning and end of the summer season, to the higher for the middle weeks. Every such alp must be supplied with the necessary buildings for the accommodation of the herdsmen and cheese-makers, and generally for the cattle also, though in some parts of Switzerland the cattle are left out in the open throughout the whole summer season. Pigs are usually kept at a cattle alp to consume the refuse of the whey. An old woman once told me that pigs are "the fourth child of milk," the other three being butter, sÉrac, and cheese. What with the coming and going of the cattle, the pigs, and the herdsmen, the milking at dawn and eve, and the cheese-making that follows, a cattle alp is a very busy place. Some are better equipped than others, but in almost all one finds a shake-down on hay, a fire, and good shelter against all possible inclemencies of the weather. The immediate neighbourhood of the huts is liable to be dirty, especially when there are pigs, and at certain seasons there is a plague of flies in the hot hours of sunshine. But, as a rule, these discomforts infest only a very small area, and it is enough to pass beyond that to escape them.

Now that the throng of climbers is so great near the fashionable centres, cattle alps are unsuited to accommodate them, and club-huts or even hotels have been built for their service. Yet even now a climber who quits the beaten track often has an opportunity of spending a night under the conditions which were universal in the days of the Alpine explorers. To climb the mountains without associating with the folk whose lives are passed upon their lower slopes is to lose half the pleasure of mountaineering, as I shall attempt to prove in the next chapter. Valley-life is not widely different from life in the plains. It is the life on the alps that is characteristic of the mountain-dweller. There the peasant learns sureness of foot. There he grows familiar with the aspect of the high peaks and the glaciers. There, as the years pass by, he becomes differentiated from the man of the plains. No one can really acquire the mountain-spirit who has had no contact with the people of the alps. That spirit does not reside in the club-huts, one of which is already in telephonic communication with a Stock Exchange—a foretaste of what the future will bring to others. The great charm and recreative power of mountain-wandering arose from the fact that the climber cut himself off from the life of the Cities of the Plain and exchanged it for the life of the hillside. He came into communication with another set of men, with other habits, other ideals. Each year that passes in the Alps makes that change less considerable and by so much the less salutary.

The crowd of holiday visitors to Switzerland tends to settle in the high pasture region more than was the habit thirty years ago. Formerly hotels flourished in the valley-bottoms, in villages or close to them. Now they are built with ever-increasing frequency upon the alps. The Riffel and MÜrren led the way. Such hotels now exist by dozens, and more are built every year. Round Zermatt there are smaller or larger inns, about 3000 feet higher than the village, in many directions. But to live in one of these high hotels is yet to live the normal life of hotel-frequenting man. The scenery is changed, but not the human medium. It is the inevitable consequence of Alpine vulgarisation which drives the true lover of nature and of the freedom of simple life further afield.

To know what the high pastures are really like, what kind of a foreground they naturally provide for an outlook on the world of mountains, you must not go to the modern Triftalp inn or the Schwarz See, but rather to such unspoiled places as the alps of Veglia or of By, both glorious expanses of wide pasturage, which no crowd as yet has attempted to invade, or is likely to attempt, thanks to their situations, remote from the great tripping highways. There you may obtain simple accommodation for a few fine days, and wander as you please over the undulating meadows, with no sound to break the stillness save the rustling of the breeze, the laughter of the waters, and the musical clang of cow-bells more or less remote.

It would be easy to divide the alps into many classes and to discourse of their characters from many points of view, but there are two main kinds of high pastures, differentiated from one another by their situations, which will naturally occur to every lover of mountains. One kind covers the floor and lower slopes of some high-planted valley; the other lies on some open shelf or convex curving mountain-knee. The first sort is recondite; the other displays itself to the world and commands extensive views. The impression they produce is very different. One is wild and gloomy; the other gay and brilliant. One has to be sought; the other summons you from afar.

The high grassy valleys are not so common as the knees, nor do I at this moment recall one of them that is likely to be known by the general run of my readers, though there are plenty scattered about in all sorts of corners of the Alpine range. Perhaps the TÄsch alp will do for type, though compared with many it is relatively open and accessible. There are better examples near the Dent du Midi, which may be more widely known than I imagine. The ascent to such an alp may lie straight up the valley, first through the forest, afterwards through glades and grassy openings, often of singular loveliness. At last you come to the stunted and scattered outliers of the forest, pathetic trees all crooked and misformed, bending away from the habitual wind and stretching forth angular arms after it as it hurries by. When these are left behind, the open grass-land spreads before and around you, seamed with radiating paths, that start away as with a most definite intention, but soon divide and subdivide, leading in fact nowhither.

If it is early in the season and you are ahead of the cattle, the grass may be relatively tall and the flowers countless in number and variety. You will wade not ankle-but knee-deep in them, and the air will be filled with delicious perfume. Then indeed it is good to wander at this level. It is essentially the level for wandering. You may go as well in one direction as another. The views are in every direction and from every place. There are no points to ascend, no goals to reach. Now it is a fold of the ground, some little hollow with a pool, that attracts the eye; now it is an outcrop of rock; now some gap ahead filled by a snow-peak; now some downward vista of forest or valley. Anywhere you may find entertainment. Anywhere you may be tempted to sit down and gaze around.

The higher you go the shorter becomes the grass, but it is all the more succulent. As the season advances the flowers fade. But the alp nevertheless retains its charm. The kind of alp now specially under consideration, the hollow sequestered high pasture, is often round some corner, cut off from distant and especially from downward views. Perhaps a portion of a snowy peak can be seen over a shoulder of the surrounding foreground. Oftenest even the snows are shut out, and the vision is limited by enclosing slopes or walls of shattered rock, where snow lies late in chinks and crannies. Such places have a wild and at first sight a forbidding aspect. But we grow to appreciate them and find delight in them as the novelty wears off. They have the dignity, the solemnity of solitude. Such elements of beauty as they possess are simple. They do not overwhelm the imagination by imposing shapes, nor astonish and puzzle it by complexities of colouring. Such places are best seen in dull weather when distant views are not to be had, and the eye has to take its pleasure in gazing upon what is near at hand. Then the brown rocks emerging from the grass and embroidered with lichens have their chance. In some places, where water habitually trickles over them, they are quite black and glossy. After all, there is variety enough of colour to be found about them, if one takes the trouble to look. Moreover, how much entertainment is to be found in the really intricate modelling of the grass-covered surfaces. Far different are they from mere low level fields which long ploughing has invested with a continuous curvature like that of a nÉvÉ basin. The grassy alps possess a complex accidentation of form. They bend and curve with an exhaustless variety. They burst, as it were like a breaking wave, against the rocks that perforate the grass. How many shelves and islands grass covers among the rocks! What picturesque corners it makes! What sheltered nooks! What attractive camping grounds! What charming sites for picnics, aloof from the ways of the crowd! In these remote and solitary places it is charming to while away the hours of an idle day, seeing nothing that has name or fame, following no track, accomplishing no expedition, no walk even that can be identified, yet finding everywhere something to look at, some entertainment for the disencumbered mind.

It is, however, the high and open alps, lying on the slopes or laps of the great hills, that are the favourite places with visitors of all sorts. Here the variety is so great, the opportunities of enjoyment are so many, the possible beauties so multitudinous, that it is almost impossible to indicate them in a brief space. Who that has climbed much, or merely wandered much, through Alpine regions has not an exhaustless store of memories of these open, far-commanding alps? What a variety of reminiscences arise when the thoughts are turned towards this belt of the mountains! It forms a stage in the ascent and again in the descent of every peak and pass; and it is the special arena for the "off-day."

My own keenest enjoyments of the open alps are associated with two examples, not, I fear, very widely known—the Fontanella alp above Valtournanche, and the alp over which one descends from Rutor towards La Thuille. Both may be described as staged or terraced alps. They lie on a series of shelves, separated from one another by walls or steep descents. For aught I know, they may be dull to ascend; but to descend they are of marvellous beauty. This beauty is greatly enhanced by the waters that fall in cascades from step to step, and lie in pools, or race along over the successive flats. The waters and the meadows form foreground to the loveliest distances. There are undulations and slopes of green in front; green slopes to right and left; and then the sight leaps across a blue valley to the opposite woods and upper hillsides crowned with rocky crests, above which other ridges rise and peaks appear, till far away soars some snowy giant into the serene sky. In the descent we must turn this way and that—now facing a waterfall, now going down some recondite gully, now down some outward-looking slope. And always, presently, comes the flat meadow on a lower shelf, and the call to tarry upon it and look back at the waterfall, or sit beside the torrent, or watch the reflections in a quiet pool. There are several examples of these lovely staged alps in Ticino, as you go down from the Basodino towards Bignasco. Wherever you find them they are fascinating. They always seem greener on the flats than any other alp. Their picturesqueness has in it an element of the scenic. The arrangement seems to have been made for effect.

There is another kind of far-commanding open alp, that all mountaineers must often have enjoyed. It is a long, relatively narrow slope or level of high pasture that lies horizontally between two cliffs or rocky belts. Such an alp lies above Zermatt to the south-westward, along the foot of the Unter Gabelhorn, round which it curves, so that as you walk along it your direction gradually changes from about south to west. It begins high up on the flank of the Zermatt valley, and it is carried round into the valley of Z'mutt, always at the same high level. There is no lovelier walk in that fine neighbourhood than this; for the foreground is always a slope dropping away to an invisible cliff at your feet, so that the eye constantly enjoys a delightful visual leap across the neighbouring valley to the great pyramid of the Matterhorn, or the more distant snowy range that ends in Monte Rosa.

The extent and development of the alpine belt vary greatly, not merely in different regions, but in different parts of the same region. On descending some mountains, rocky dÉbris are found to cover a large area of undulating ground, and then the grass slopes plunge steeply to the forest, and are quickly traversed. On others the grass reaches high and undulates slowly down, so that you may be walking over it for hours before you reach the trees. These lazily sloping alps are most charming when rightly used and approached, though to the climber, eager to gain the snowy heights, their extent may seem tedious, especially when they have to be traversed in the dark.

There are some magnificent alps along the north side of the Rhone valley above Sierre. The slopes that support them rise rapidly from the valley with an equal and continuous slant. When those are surmounted there comes a great area of undulating land which begins amongst the trees but soon opens out to the sky and stretches far back towards Wildhorn, Wildstrubel, and the rest. On these great alps there lie many small lakes, and all the alpine region hereabouts is very diversified, and filled with foregrounds of all characters and kinds of picturesqueness—and then what distant views they have to set off, for across the Rhone valley to the southward is all the splendour and extent of the Pennine range, with Mischabel or Weisshorn standing out in front in overpowering magnificence.

Perhaps we shall be held justified in claiming that the views from the region of the high pastures are their chief charm, rather than the nearer views upon them. Certain it is that most of the great peaks are best seen from the alpine level, and that the favourite views of them, the characteristically memorable and popularly best remembered views, are from alps. Such is the view of Mont Blanc from the FlÉgÈre, of the Matterhorn from the Riffel alp, of the Weisshorn from the TÄsch alp, of the MischabelhÖrner from above Saas-FÉe. The spectator stands high enough and not too high; he can be near enough at this level and yet not too near. The mountain still retains its individuality, its existence separate from its neighbours, and yet can be seen as a whole. A little nearer and it begins to disclose the details of its structure, whilst its mass fills a larger area than can be embraced at a glance. A little further away and the mountain is only beheld as one of several, part of a larger mass, a component element of another effect.

From the alpine level you look down as well as up. The depth beneath and the height above may be, or appear to be, approximately equal. Moreover, the distance to which the sight penetrates, the area over which it ranges, bears some moderate proportion to the size of the mountain-masses included in it. In the view from a high peak, visible distances are so great, the area embraced is so vast, the peaks visible appear to be so countless, that each of them may shrink into individual insignificance. It is the multitude of peaks rather than the mass of any, their abundance rather than the form of any, that causes the overwhelming impression upon the spectator. But in views from the alpine level there is a greater simplicity and a no less effective moderation. The mountains in sight are few, and of them one is sure to be most prominently placed, one will be central if not unique; and that mountain, in the typical view from an alp, will be seen from base to summit, not merely its superstructure of rock and snow, but its wide foundation also, reaching down into the depths of the valley and spreading broadly with all needful amplitude.

It is not thus that mountains are beheld from the valleys. As you traverse the whole Vispthal from Visp to Zermatt, you do indeed behold the summits of most of the great flanking peaks from successive points on the valley floor, yet it is only the expert who can recognise them, or tell which white fragment far aloft is the top of a great mountain and which are the mere shoulders of lower buttressing ridges. The knees of the hills hide their breasts and generally also their hoary heads from the view of one who passes along at their feet. If you would behold a great mountain as a whole, it is from the knees or the grassy lap of some other that you must look. Foreshortened foundations are then withdrawn; each component part of the whole vast structure takes its proper place and is seen to fulfil its own function. Buttresses stand forward and widen out below; high valleys can be traced into the heart of the mass; minor peaks are duly subordinated. The mountain, in fact, can be seen as a whole. It is thus you behold the Mischabel from the alp at the base of the Weisshorn or the Fletschhorn; thus the Matterhorn from the Riffelalp; thus the Jungfrau from MÜrren. A true instinct has selected and made such points of view famous.

We have left ourselves little space to discuss the value of the high pastures as an element in the mountain landscape, parts of the scene to be looked at, not positions to gaze from. That their value in this respect also is very great must be obvious enough, for in most mountain views the grassy belt fills the largest part. Of course it is not the most impressive. We look at the mountains, or at some mountain, some glacier, waterfall, or cliff, and make it the centre of our observation. As a rule, however, except when we stand in the midst of the snowy world, the mountain that is centrally gazed at does not occupy so large a part of the field of view as is filled by the grassy expanse at its foot. The grassy alp, in fact, generally bears to a mountain the relation that the background does to a Madonna in a picture. Or we may say that alp and sky are the fabric on which the mountain is embroidered.

In many parts of the world the grassy belt is absent from the ranges, and its loss is greatly felt. Peaks rising out of slopes of dÉbris and sand have a grandeur of their own, but it is not the normal grandeur of the Alps. In some other ranges the tree-level leads at once to rocks and snow. It is the merit of the Alps that a broad belt of delicately modelled grass-land almost invariably intervenes between forest and snow. This grassy belt covers the wide substructure of the peaks. Above it is the realm of frost, of split rock and jagged forms. But as soon as the grass-level is reached suave outlines and rounded surfaces, broadening as they descend, take the place of the accidented forms above. The value of the contrast will be apparent to all. Small and very correct little models of the Matterhorn in bronze are sold for letter-weights, in which the culminating pyramid alone is given, planted on a rectangular stone plinth. They are interesting mementoes. But compare one of them with a view of the mountain as seen from the Riffelalp, rising above the long bulging grass-covered slopes that descend almost to Zermatt, and you will at once realise how important an element in the general impressiveness of the mountain are those lower slopes, and that not merely for their form but for their rich coloration.

The green of the alps is the true key-note of Swiss colour. To it all the rest are subordinate. By contrast with it, rather than with the remote transparence of the air-submerged rocks, the snows manifest their whiteness and the sky its blue. From season to season of the year it changes its tint, between the shrill green of opening spring and the amber of autumn. It changes likewise from hour to hour beneath the varied slanting of the sunshine. How velvet-dark seems the alpine belt at night when the moon is high! Even in the twilight you cannot tell that these slopes are grass-covered, till

"the high lawns appear." At first the sunshine lies upon them in patches, like carpets of gold on a rich green floor. The sunlit area increases as the gold itself changes into green, whilst the dominant note of colour rises in the scale. Long before mid-day the broad belt attains its unity of effect, and divides the dark forests and deep valleys from the radiant heights. Most of us, who delight in mountain scenery, praise this peak or that, this broken glacier, wide-spreading snow-field, or intricacy of splintered ridges, forgetting that it is often the unobtrusive, tenderly modelled alps below, that endow these high eminences with half their charm. The beauty of a scene depends upon the harmony of all its parts. It is well sometimes to fix attention on those that seldom insist upon it for themselves.