There are few people who are not at heart geographers; the passion may be repressed or forgotten, but it is probably ready to reappear, and elderly persons often surprise themselves no less than their youthful companions by the zeal with which they attempt to mould the face of the earth by amateur engineering: it is in early years, however, that the passion inevitably shows itself.

It was the chief delight of a community of cousins, brought together each summer at the sea-side, to spend as much of the day as the day left possible in altering in every conceivable manner, by dams, diversions, or channels, the geography of a wet strip of sand, which the tide in its next advance would restore to its old conformation. Sometimes operations, more ambitious in the durability of their materials, were begun in a stream inland; pools were made, and the stream diverted into a new, or perhaps a long disused, channel. Sometimes, too, a party of us would explore along a stream to its source, which we rarely reached, since even small streams are apt to extend farther than childish zeal will endure, though fired by the ambition of finding a real spring, entrancing to the dwellers among sluggish south-country rivers.

But it was with our first visit to the Alps that the revelation came. Here were streams without number, small enough to follow, during the course of a long picnicking day, up to real authentic springs, which bubbled clear and cold from the ground at our feet. Geography could be made and altered; our dams made pools where none were before, or caused the paths and water-courses of the neighbourhood to exchange their functions, so that the inhabitants of lonely chalets found their water supply miraculously curtailed, and visited the culprits up above with guttural wrath. Watersheds, things hard for the low-lander to comprehend—mere imaginary lines drawn across gently swelling sand-ridges or downs—gained new life when seen as the jagged ridge of the EngelhÖrner, or the great line of green hills north from the Schwartzhorn to the bastion of Tschingli over Haslithal.

With the magic of water was joined the mystery of the other side. If we followed any of the streams up and up, to the EngelhÖrner or the SchÖniwanghÖrner, whither should we see the torrents going, when the rain that fell on the mountains streamed down the far side? The quest of the geographer was made concrete; and as water has been the chief power in the making of geography, so it is first to start the quest in a child’s imagination, and the best guide in the knight-errantry of childhood. But the streams that fell from the precipices of the EngelhÖrner and Wellhorn pointed out a course beyond our ambitions; not yet could we aspire to be climbers, and they still guard their secret, though ready to yield it, now the time has come, to an ambition strengthened with strengthened limbs. Even the grass slopes of the SchÖniwanghÖrner were too high to cross; but the great day came when we started at six, with two mules, to cross the Great Scheidegg, so long a barrier at the head of the valley slung between Wetterhorn and Schwartzhorn, with Grindelwald as our object.

It was a water-following on a great scale; we started with the sound of the Reichenbach falls in our ears, and followed along the line of least resistance, made by the stream. Still before breakfast we passed the Schwartzwald, where the stream was already shorn of so much of its strength that it could be harnessed and made to pass through hollowed half tree-trunks to do the work of a saw-mill. Higher up was the region of bogs and grass slopes, each few hundred yards sending its half-buried tinkling trickle to join the head waters of the river itself. And then, without warning, the path took a final zig, and brought us to the top; and for the first time we saw part of the land of the other waters, with the other glaciers and snow-fields, grass peaks and stony ones, which gave them birth. We saw how the valleys bent round to Thun and Brienz, how the valley of Lauterbrunnen and the peak of the Jungfrau fitted on to a world whose horizon had been suddenly enlarged; looking for those places above all which had gained special interest and familiarity from the pictured slips in our chocolate packets.

That evening, after a hot trudge up from Grindelwald, and a cool descent along the home stream that somehow rested our tired limbs, we returned to Rosenlaui with a new sense of expansion and a vague feeling of the coherence of things, for the dead lines of the map had become actual and living before our eyes. Yet this feeling soon gave place to the disappointing yet somehow thrilling thought, that by enlarging our horizon we had only left ourselves ringed about by a wider circle of other sides, making it still less likely than before that we should ever solve the abiding questions of our childhood.

For four years the Alps remained a memory and a hope, till in 1907 the long horrors of the Certificate Examination were followed by the thrill of the night journey, enjoyed to the full owing to a constitutional inability to sleep, and a drive from Martigny to the upper part of the Val de Bagnes, a shut-in and self-centred valley presided over by the Combin. It was here that Italy became identified with the other side. Here I was first initiated as a climber, and taken up the Ruinette; and for two lazy hours on the top I watched the Italian mountains raise themselves up from the ever-thickening screen of mist with which the Lombard plains seemed to be hiding their secret. A few weeks later came twenty minutes’ actual walking on Italian soil, between the Great St. Bernard and the Col de FenÊtre. Italy lay at our feet, brought near to us by the road winding down visibly to Aosta, and by the first Italian notices of ‘Caccia Riservata,’ as well as by the southward-flowing water.

That day saw, too, the registering of a vow, fulfilled in the next year, to visit the country of the Gran Paradiso and the Grivola. Peaks there and around Mont Blanc fell before our onslaught, and we grew to be hardened climbers; while passes became mere incidents in the journey between one peak and another. But Geography was roused from her hiding-place by a walking tour two years later—part of the regular ‘Tour of Mont Blanc’ from Chamonix to Champex with variations. The Col du Bonhomme was unsatisfactory because, after much display, it failed to turn a watershed at the first attempt, and, after including the Col des Fours, left us still in the Rhone basin, with the Col de la Seigne between us and Italy. Geography was displeased, but her craving after completeness was satisfied by the long drive from Aosta up the Italian side of the Great St. Bernard. Two known regions were linked up, and of the remembered dips and corners of the road seen from the top, each had had its answer. Also I had a sense of triumph in having cheated the powers of the universe by taking several ounces of water in my soaked clothes across the watershed to the Swiss side of the Col de FenÊtre.

The passion still retained its childish power, but in a wider sense. By being children we had been nearly in the position of the first primitive inhabitants of such a country of mountain and valley: to them peaks are haunts of terror and danger, the parents of all the powers of destruction—winds, avalanches, and lightnings—which descend upon them; their situation makes them geographers by profession: at first their eyes are turned down stream, and communication only extends over the main valley and its tributaries, till a more venturesome spirit arises and uses the water as his guide, but now, ascending it, takes the line of least resistance over the passes to the peoples of the neighbouring river-basins; and ancient legends of hill tribes give a prominent place to watersheds, and great heroes are often made to conquer a monster which has been terrorising the valley, and fling him into some great lake at the head of the waters of the next basin. Did he not embody the terror of those frowning walls, and was not his conquest a victory indeed?

Thus the passes gained in importance, while the peaks were afar off and terrible: they were already in use when there filtered through to Herodotus across section after section of trade route the tradition, confused in its long journey, of a town of Pyrene and a river Alpis; when a new wave of inhabitants, scarcely pushing communication between valley and valley themselves, used their mountain hardiness to extract toll from the Roman merchants whose enterprise brought them across the St. Bernard and the Mont Cenis to Vienna and Lugdunum; and each traveller added to their importance and fame, while the local paths were linked up into great highways, joining country to country, and shrine to shrine, making a way for invasions, for pilgrims, or for traders. The pass where Xenophon’s men cried ???assa! ???assa! possesses a reality and interest of its own, not shared by the almost laughable description of the mythical peaks of Krophi and Mophi in Herodotus. But for us, even as children, there was a difference: the prowess and achievements of our elders made impossible the fear which our ancestors felt even for ‘Helm Crag, Helvellyn, and Butterlip Howe’—the last-named a small wooded eminence about two hundred feet high—yet we lacked the spiritual and bodily pride which the attainer of summits must possess. What climber has not known the moment when this has failed him suddenly, and he has realised the impudence of his presence among the mountain sanctuaries and of his trial of strength face to face with the mountain’s bulk; when he either expiates the crime of his intrusion by a great and tranquillising humility, or struggles, only to find all he sees assume a mask of grinning hatefulness? The attainer of summits follows a way which, even if definite, is none the less new and none the less formidable to each successive user: we children, like them, were pass-goers, enterers of a sanctuary of a different kind, one hallowed by the slow toil of generations, where the mountains could not resent intrusion, since it was the mark of their community of life with the humble folk whom they supported.

Even then we were no longer geographers by profession, still less now, when the Alps are to us no longer a barrier to be forced, but the playground of Europe, whither we in our sophisticated age make trains convey us; and it seems as if the amateur geography of our childhood were a mere survival, to be put away together with other childish things when we grow up to be ‘modern men,’ with the climber’s devotion to peaks, and the true modern appreciation of mountains. Shall we not come to treat passes as highest minima instead of lowest maxima, and so despise them; and will not our new mystical attitude make the partial survival in us of primitive man a bar to the growth of a right spirit?

For your true mountain lover professes himself a mystic: he is one of those that ‘live by places,’ and he waits upon the fruition of those moments in which his senses give him a sudden feeling of fellowship with his surroundings, when

These moments, he will tell you, are an end in themselves, and not pursued for any moral strengthening of our social fibre for fighting the battles of life. Only in isolation from his fellows, from science, and from the interference of intelligence, when he adopts a ‘wise passivity’ of mere sensation, is this sense of fellowship granted him; and among the peaks, under the spell of his rhythmical bodily movements, he and the silent mountains stand face to face, as pure living sensation and lifeless matter, and each finds in the other a mysterious completion.

This is the creed he professes; but how rarely comes one who can practise it or achieve its enjoyment. Nearly all indeed share in some degree this passion for fellowship; nearly all live their lives as much by places as by people. The contrast is put by Wordsworth in one of the poems on the Naming of Places, that called ‘Joanna’s rock’:—

They are the extremes: Joanna cannot understand the frame of mind at all; Wordsworth is, in this mood, the perfect example of the life lived in the fellowship of inanimate things.

But to few is the fellowship thus whole-heartedly given. For this it is necessary to be a true Æsthete (using the word in an unprejudiced sense), so that in the one indivisible act of seeing, the one great moment, a whole message is revealed. But life refuses to divide itself into such moments; we cannot isolate ourselves either from the continuity of the past or the community of the present. Most men move on a plain of less concentration and greater self-consciousness, where the act of seeing inevitably includes and leads up to reflection and analysis. We still have the animal and the primitive man within us, linking us to the past and the flow of time; and reason, the common gift of all men, keeps always lurking in the background. Yet we still strive after this immediacy of fellowship, but there come times when the snow-peaks and the rocks have fed our appreciation on too strong a draught, when our senses, relying on themselves alone, are over-sated, and there seems a film before our eyes, so that we are no longer ‘alive and drinking up our wonder,’ but the draught stagnates without us and turns to bitterness.

Then we must be humble, and resign our pretensions to an ‘Æsthetic geography’ for one on a lower scale; we shall return to the passes, which will remain to us the emblem of a new ‘geography of the spirit’ which, instead of trying to gain all in one tremendous moment, will be content to browse upon the myriad things which intelligence sees displayed. Even as a picture, an arrangement of lines and colours, the pass has much that the higher peaks cannot give us: the deep curve of the summit, slung between its supporting peaks, appeals to us by its grace and weakness; there is a discontinuity of colour and clearness as each bastion of the valley comes out from the curve its forerunner had hidden. But these effects are heightened and brought together by our geography; we imagine the glaciers that separated those bastions from one another; that cup at the end is perhaps the work of some other mighty glacier of the far side, piled up so high that it fell across the watershed and cut its way down; maybe there is a giant moraine, bigger than most of our English mountains, still to bear witness of it.

But it is the stream and the road which hold our imagination; the water tells us of all the powers which we know to be at work, but which our senses are too slow to perceive. Each stream is itself part of the great cycle of water, each is an agent in the mountain cycle, perpetually hurrying the actual fabric of the mountains down to the sea; their voice is never silent even on the summits; they are the lords of the peaks, moulding them slowly to new shapes, and their murmur seems to call the clouds, ‘chased by the hounding winds from distant seas,’ to come and renew their springs for a new course of the never-ending circle.

But the road takes our geography farther afield and peoples our imaginings. We have softened the immediacy of our ‘Æsthetic geography’ by the aid of intelligence; the road softens it by bringing in humankind to stand with us facing the gulf between the living and the inanimate. As the water alters our view of the mountains by bringing to light the importance of time, so does the road alter our view of ourselves. As we look up a pass from below, the view of the road appearing and vanishing round the folds of the valley brings to us two pictures of men. Winding away from us up to the skyline goes the pilgrim’s progress, the slow toiling advance upwards to gain the view of things not seen. Many there are, but few together; some on side-tracks; some on the old steep road with its rough stones now overgrown, more on the new smooth driving road which turns about so that they can take their eyes from the goal; some even making a path for themselves, either above on the hillside, steering for some nearer gap on the skyline, which does not cross the main watershed; others below the road, toiling painfully along the stream-bed. And each in turn we see reach the summit and disappear; we cannot see what they see, nor even the expression of their faces as they confront the other side.

But the same valley can be the setting for another picture: down from the top there seem to come great processions, gay like Benozzo Gozzoli’s ‘Procession of the Magi,’ many leagues long and all ordered and together, though part is hidden in the green woods, part in the valley’s folds. We seem to take our place in the upward journey, and soon it will be our turn to wonder what new thing we shall see beyond the barrier. Perhaps encompassing mists will give place suddenly at the summit to a sunny prospect of some great cathedral range, to take our place in one of those processions and descend to the richness of an Italian land. Or, if it is on the far side that the mists have gathered, and the gateway of the pass is barred by a deep grey veil of nothingness, at least the mists will lift high enough to show the two gentle arms of our mother earth descending to where we are, strong and lit by a strange internal light, ready to hold us up as we take the last step into the grey, where we shall see no more.