IT has often occurred to me, when travelling over glaciers and among mountains, seldom or never before visited by men, how much the impression they produce upon a first spectator loses by lacking the human interest. Of course some stray huntsman or dumb and forgotten native may have been there before, but if the fact is unknown to us, it is as though he had not existed.

When climbing Illimani, the great Bolivian mountain, the human interest accompanied us up the lower slopes. Here were old fields, old irrigation channels, even ancient ruined huts. Higher up we still had the memory of former adventurers to keep our hearts warm; but when we had forced the great rock-cliff that guards the peak, and were upon the upper snow-field, we were, so far as we knew, in an unvisited world. There did indeed exist an ancient tradition that once, long long ago, an Aymara Indian had gone aloft, seeking the abode of the gods, and that having found it, he was taken by the gods to themselves and never returned to his people; but the tale was too slender a thread to form a sensible connection between us and the world of bygone humanity. The climb took us over one high peak, then across a great snow-field and up the highest peak. We revisited and rested on the lower peak in the descent. While there resting, I dropped my hand on the rock beside me, and snatched it away, feeling something soft and clammy, a kind of texture instinctively perceived to be strange at such a place.

Looking to see what the substance was, I found it to be a fragment of goat-hair rope, such as the Indians of the Bolivian plateau have used from time immemorial. Instantly the old legend was recalled to my remembrance. It was true! The Indian had actually been here where I was sitting. Here he rested. Hence he looked abroad over the country of his birth—probably his last long look on any view in this world; for he never returned, and must presently have lost his life in some hidden crevasse. The thought of that nameless one animated the scene, and enriched the emotions we experienced with a new interest. I thought now of how he had felt with this great prospect spread abroad before him. I wondered whether his gods had appeared to him, whether he had beheld visions and dreamed dreams, and what those visions were like. There beneath him he had perhaps gazed for the last time on his birthplace, and identified the little hut that was his home. Did he know that he would never return? Did he think about his friends so far below and wonder whether they were looking up towards him? Did he promise himself great future fame in his tribe? Did he dream that they would identify him with the very gods? For the remainder of our resting-time the whole view was animated by thoughts of this man. It is the best instance I can cite of the value of a human interest in giving sentiment to a mountain scene.

The same lesson was taught me by the Spitsbergen mountains, amongst which I spent two long summer seasons. The coast of Spitsbergen is rich with the tales and traditions of human achievement and suffering. Few places have been the scene of tragedies so numerous and so long drawn out. In few have more dramatic adventures occurred and more varied enterprises been undertaken. But the interior of Spitsbergen, and especially its mountain ranges, had scarcely been penetrated before. The mountains beyond reach of the shore were unclimbed, with one exception. The landscapes were unknown to man. It was necessary to spend some time in these solitary places to realise how much they lost by this aloofness. No peak possessed name or history. None had ever been the centre of any one's landscape. None had measured mid-day for any toiler, or served as reckoning point for the close of his labour. No villagers had ever imagined those Arctic glaciers as the home of any gods or the paradise of any heroes. They had never found their way into ancient tale or legend. They had never been worshipped or sung by man, historic or pre-historic. They were just elemental lumps of the earth, with no more human sentiment attached to them than to any dozen stones you may gather off a heap and make mountains of in your imagination.

Pick up any fragment of rock you please and place it upon your table. Look closely at it and persuade yourself that it is not six inches but 20,000 feet high. On that assumption search for routes up it. Examine its faces and its ridges, its cracks and its gullies. You will be able to climb about it in a day-dream, to have accidents upon it, to succeed or to fail in various ascents. But who will care to "hear tell" of your proceedings? And yet, apart from geographical and geological considerations, which are in fact historical, any casual mountain is no more interesting in its essence than your stone. There are hundreds of thousands of mountains in the world. What intrinsic interest has one of them more than another, from a climber's point of view, except in two respects, the difficulty of the climb and the human interest? But the difficulty is of no account, for if that is what you want you can find it on Scafell, and need not wander to seek it.

No! it is above all the human interest that ennobles a peak and makes the ascent of it desirable. It is to climb an elevation that men have seen; to climb a peak that has been named, that has been looked at for centuries by the inhabitants at its base, that travellers have passed by and observed, that has a place in the knowledge and memory of men. If there were a great mountain in full view of London or Rome, how much more interesting it would be to climb than some nameless lump in Central Asia, like K2, that was never within view of any abode of men.

This was one of the main attractions of the unclimbed Alps to early explorers of the high levels. Mont Blanc was known of old. How many generations of men had looked from Thun at the Oberland giants and told stories about them. How much the famed devils and dragons added to the fascination of the Matterhorn. The Alps had looked down upon the march of armies and the flux of peoples for uncounted thousands of years. Their solitudes were peopled by the dreams of all the generations that had passed by them or dwelt amongst them. The subliminal consciousness that this was so, counted for much in the strong attraction that drew the pioneers aloft.

The pioneers in their turn have richly endowed the Alps with a further human interest. Why do so many people want to climb the Matterhorn? It is not a better climb than the Dent Blanche. The reason is because of the stronger human interest that the Matterhorn evokes. All who have any knowledge of Alpine history have read the story of the long siege, the triumphant conquest, and the dramatic tragedies of which the Matterhorn has been the scene. It is the fascination of those memories that draws men to the peak, and makes the climbing of it seem so desirable an adventure to so many people.

Thus also is it, more or less, all over the Alps. Each peak now has its story. Each ascent has been made before and described. Wherever we go now we find and recognise the traces of our predecessors. Here is an old tent-platform; we know who built it and when. This is the site of such an accident; that crag turned back such a party on such an occasion. The memory of bygone climbers is everywhere. It peoples the solitudes and humanises the waste places. These memories will grow mellower as they deepen into the past. The best stories will become classical, and the scenes of them will be endowed with a prestige far beyond any that now attaches to them.

A very dull person looks interesting when beheld down a vista of several centuries. The memory of the first climbers of the great Alpine peaks will remain among the mountains to a far-distant future. I daresay my Illimani Indian was a crack-brained semi-civilised person, but I would sooner see him than a living Cabinet Minister. I can never think about his peak without recalling him. So is it with the bays of Spitsbergen. The whale-fishers were no doubt a coarse lot of quarrelsome seamen, who stank of blubber most disgustingly; and yet if I could call Mr. William Heley from his grave, and hear how he emptied out the Dutchmen on one occasion and they emptied him out on another; if I could get him to show me his huts where they stood, and could hear him yarn about the fishery, how entertaining that would be, and how gladly would I exchange the morning newspaper for such talk. We cannot in fact recall these men, but in fancy we can and do. It is because we possess and exercise this power of fancy that the mountains, which have been in past times the scene of human activity and life, are so much more interesting to wander amongst, except from a purely scientific and adventurous point of view, than those which have not.

What is true of bygone individuals is no less true of bygone peoples. Valleys that have been long inhabited and the high pastures that have been frequented of old are far more pleasant to visit than valleys that have scarcely beheld the face of man. We were made conscious of this difference in the Mustagh mountains of high Kashmir. There the secluded fastness of Hunza-Nagar is the home of an ancient civilisation. The gently sloping floor of the valley is divided into terraced fields, supported by cyclopean walls that might be as old as MycenÆ itself. The villages are built upon their own ruins, who can say to how great a foundation depth? The paths are worn deeply into the ground. The Raja's castle, dominating his little capital, has a venerable aspect, and if not actually old, incorporates an ancient type. There are little ruins by the roadside and carvings upon the rocks. Where-ever you look, the marks of long frequentation are to be traced. Moreover, the people themselves bear the imprint of surrounding nature upon them. Their action in movement, their way of life, their adaptation to their environment—all imply old habit and deep-rooted tradition. The valley in which they are enclosed is the world to them. Its every feature has entered into their habits of thought. The surrounding mountains are a part of their existence, and borrow from man in turn a reflected glow of traditional interest.

From this man-impregnated valley we presently passed over the mountains to the valley of Braldu, descending upon the highest village. Above that poverty-stricken place the traces of man were few. There were faintly marked tracks; there were even a few small ruined huts; but all that these indicated was the occasional passage of hunters or the brief visits of shepherds or gold-washers. Once the glacier was reached, the last of these traces was left behind. It was impossible not to feel the contrast between this region and peopled Hunza. The scenery was not less, was even more stupendous, but the human interest was lacking. There were few named spots, and hardly a remembered tradition. The scenery to the natives with us was not the home of their fathers, but the elemental earth. It might have been fetched from the other side of the moon, for all they had to tell about it. Two recorded parties had preceded us for a certain distance up this valley, and their ghosts alone peopled the solitude, but not a trace had they left upon the surface of the ground discoverable by us. If we had found even the remnants of one of their encampments, it would have animated the surroundings with the memory of man; but we saw none. The lack was a vacuum, an intellectual hunger, continuously felt.

Few mountain regions in the world, outside of the Arctic and Antarctic solitudes, are thus denuded of human interest. The mountains of the Old World and the New have been inhabited over a large part of their valley-area; but often the inhabitants have been people about whom little is known. It is one of the great charms of the Alps that they have long been the home of a fine group of peoples. "Your country," I once remarked to a citizen of a South American Republic, "ought to be the Switzerland of South America." "I will make it so," he replied, "if you will fill it for me with the Swiss."

Throughout the large Alpine area various races have dwelt and dwell at the present time. The character of the population changes from valley to valley, and there is no small variety, not merely in dialects, but even in languages. There is a similar variety in habits, in domestic architecture, in costume, and in bearing. Much of these differences in the character of the inhabitants we are wont to impute in our thoughts to the mountain districts themselves. When we talk of the charms of the Italian Alps, are we not thinking of the attractiveness of the people, and the picturesqueness of their abodes and places of worship, as much as of the luxuriance of the valleys, the sparkling of the waters, and the mere beauty of the hills? The spirit of the people seems to infuse itself into our memory of the mountains about them, as much as the character of the mountains has affected the nature and disposition of the people. Which, I wonder, borrows most from the other—the Lake of Lucerne from the old Tell legend, or the legends from the landscape of the lake?

An essential part of the human interest in the Alps grows out of the length of time through which history has concerned herself with them. The history of the Alpine valleys has only been written, or begun to be written, in recent years. Early visitors to Zermatt no doubt were conscious of the deep impress made by man upon the valley landscape, but they could not interpret, as we now can, the meaning of much that they saw. But when the local archives were searched and the traditions written down, when it was realised that the life now being lived by the peasantry was in all essentials the same life that had been lived by their ancestors for hundreds of years, ancestors bearing the same names and owning the same properties that are still borne and owned by their living descendants, what an increase of interest that gave to a place.

The old tales about the village deep in Tiefenmatten, about the pilgrimage that used to cross the Col d'HÉrens, about the frequented routes over Theodul and Weissthor—does it not add a new charm to the places themselves to hear them told? Who is not interested to remember, when standing on the Theodul pass, that Roman coins have been found there? Climbers have taken fully as much interest in the question of where the Old Weissthor route lay as in actually climbing the passes. I well remember the keen delight that came to me when I discovered that a pass I had crossed, as I supposed for the first time, between the Fillarkuppe and the JÄgerhorn, was in fact the real Old Weissthor itself, a well-known mountain-route centuries ago. To rediscover an old track like that is far more delightful than to invent and carry through some entirely new expedition.

Correspondingly with the future as with the past—to make an expedition for the first time that others will often repeat is a lasting source of pleasure; but to make one that no sane person ever repeats or is likely to repeat is poor fun. I have had many opportunities of making new expeditions in the Alps and elsewhere, and have availed myself of a few; but none ever gave me the continuing satisfaction that I derive from the Wellenkuppe near Zermatt, a mountain that I invented, climbed, and baptized, and that immediately became and has since remained a most popular scramble.[4]

[4] Its summit had previously been touched by some unrecorded route by Lord Francis Douglas, in an attempt to climb the Gabelhorn; but for twenty years no one had thought of the peak, which had no name.

Some part of the popularity of the ascent of Mont Blanc from Chamonix is due to the fact that the mountain is the highest in the Alps; part is due to the fascinating beauty of the ice and snow scenery passed through; but far the greatest attraction is the long and interesting history of the climb. No one, I suppose, ascends Mont Blanc without a thought of Balmat and De Saussure, and at least some dim consciousness of the number of early climbers who mounted by the way he takes, and felt all the strange emotions and high excitements they so naively recorded. What would the TÖdi be if robbed of the memory of Placidus À Spescha? Even a Mont Ventoux can attain dignity and importance by association with so great a man as Petrarch.

It is, however, to the passes rather than to the peaks of the Alps that history clings. Allusion has been made to the Weissthor and the Theodul, and many other minor passes similarly recorded might be mentioned; but it is the great passes, the deep depressions in the main range, that are chiefly memorable from the historical standpoint. Modern climbers unwisely neglect these great routes, or confine themselves to such as are tunnelled. John Ball and his contemporaries made a point of knowing as many main passes as they could. It was their pride to be able to say, not that they had climbed so many peaks, but that they had traversed the Alpine chain by so many great passes. Old literature is therefore fuller of accounts of the historic passes than are most present-day volumes, which regard them as a subject outworn.

To mention the historic passes is to call up the name of Hannibal. Here is no place to revive that old discussion as to the situation of Hannibal's pass. Historians have not yet entirely convinced one another on the matter. But if a general certainty had been arrived at, if we could feel perfectly sure that Hannibal and his host had actually trod a particular route, it cannot be denied that that route would be well worth following, book in hand, for its historic interest alone.

Some, perhaps many, of my readers will have traversed the Great St. Bernard, the Summus Penninus of antiquity. Few who have done so will have been oblivious, as they went, of the many great men in whose steps they were treading. Celts, Romans, Saracens, mediÆval warriors, statesmen, saints, bishops, and monks streamed in their day across this col. Here passed Charles the Great and other Holy Roman Emperors, Lanfranc too, and the saintly Anselm in all the fervour of his young enthusiasm. The reader will forgive me for quoting once again Bishop Stubbs' translation of the letter of a Canterbury monk describing his passage of the pass in February 1188:—

"Pardon me for not writing. I have been on the Mount of Jove; on the one hand looking up to the heavens of the mountains, on the other shuddering at the hell of the valleys, feeling myself so much nearer heaven that I was more sure that my prayer would be heard. 'Lord,' I said, 'restore me to my brethren, that I may tell them, that they come not into this place of torment.' Place of torment indeed, where the marble pavement of the stony ground is ice alone, and you cannot set your foot safely; where, strange to say, although it is so slippery that you cannot stand, the death (into which there is every facility for a fall) is certain death. I put my hand in my scrip, that I might scratch out a syllable or two to your sincerity—lo, I found my ink-bottle filled with a dry mass of ice; my fingers too refused to write; my beard was stiff with frost, and my breath congealed into a long icicle. I could not write the news I wished."

PONTE BROLLA

Over the Maggia, near its junction with the Melezza, looking up the Val Centavalli.