The conquest of Mont Blanc was the most important mountaineering achievement of the period; but good work was also being done in other parts of the Alps. Monte Rosa, as we soon shall see, had already attracted the adventurous, and the BÜndner Oberland gave one great name to the story of Alpine adventure. We have already noted the important part played by priests in the conquest of the Alps; and Catholic mountaineers may well honour the memory of Placidus À Spescha as one of the greatest of the climbing priesthood.

Father Placidus was born in 1782 at Truns. As a boy he joined the Friars of Disentis, and after completing his education at Einsiedeln, where he made good use of an excellent library, returned again to Disentis. As a small boy, he had tended his father’s flocks and acquired a passionate love for the mountains of his native valley. As a monk, he resumed the hill wanderings, which he continued almost to the close of a long life.

He was an unfortunate man. The French Revolution made itself felt in GraubÜnden; and with the destruction of the monastery all his notes and manuscripts were burned. When the Austrians ousted the French, he was even more luckless; as a result of a sermon on the text “Put not your trust in princes” he was imprisoned in Innsbruck for eighteen months. He came back only to be persecuted afresh. Throughout his life, his wide learning and tolerant outlook invited the suspicion of the envious and narrow-minded; and on his return to GraubÜnden he was accused of heresy. His books and his manuscripts were confiscated, and he was forbidden to climb. After a succession of troubled years, he returned to Truns; and though he had passed his seventieth year he still continued to climb. As late as 1824, he made two attempts on the TÖdi. On his last attempt, he reached a gap, now known as the Porta da Spescha, less than a thousand feet below the summit; and from this point he watched, with mixed feelings, the two chamois hunters he had sent forward reach the summit. He died at the age of eighty-two. One wishes that he had attained in person his great ambition, the conquest of the TÖdi; but, even though he failed on this outstanding peak, he had several good performances to his credit, amongst others the first ascent of the Stockgron (11,411 feet) in 1788, the Rheinwaldhorn (11,148 feet) in 1789, the Piz Urlaun (11,063 feet) in 1793, and numerous other important climbs.

His list of ascents is long, and proves a constant devotion to the hills amongst which he passed the happiest hours of an unhappy life. “Placidus À Spescha”—there was little placid in his life save the cheerful resignation with which he faced the buffetings of fortune. He was a learned and broad-minded man; and the mountains, with their quiet sanity, seem to have helped him to bear constant vexation caused by small-minded persons. These suspicions of heresy must have proved very wearisome to “the mountaineer who missed his way and strayed into the Priesthood.” He must have felt that his opponents were, perhaps, justified, that the mountains had given him an interpretation of his beliefs that was, perhaps, wider than the creed of Rome, and that he himself had found a saner outlook in those temples of a larger faith to which he lifted up his eyes for help. As a relief from a hostile and unsympathetic atmosphere, let us hope that he discovered some restful anodyne among the tranquil broadness of the upper snows. The fatigue and difficulties of long mountain tramps exhaust the mind, to the exclusion of those little cares which seem so great in the artificial life of the valley. Certainly, the serene indifference of the hills found a response in the quiet philosophy of his life. Very little remains of all that he must have written, very little—only a few words, in which he summed up the convictions which life had given him. “When I carefully consider the fortune and ill-fortune that have befallen me, I have difficulty in determining which of the two has been the more profitable since a man without trials is a man without experience, and such a one is without insight—vexatio dat intellectum.” A brave confession of a good faith, and in his case no vain utterance, but the sincere summary of a philosophy which coloured his whole outlook on life.

The early history of Monte Rosa has an appeal even stronger than the story of Mont Blanc. It begins with the Renaissance. From the hills around Milan, Leonardo da Vinci had seen the faint flush of dawn on Monte Rosa beyond—

The elusive vision had provoked his restless, untiring spirit to search out the secrets of Monte Rosa. The results of that expedition have already been noticed.

After Da Vinci there is a long gap. Scheuchzer had heard of Monte Rosa, but contents himself with the illuminating remark that “a stiff accumulation of perpetual ice is attached to it.” De Saussure visited Macunagna in 1789, but disliked the inhabitants and complained of their inhospitality. He passed on, after climbing an unimportant snow peak, the Pizzo Bianco (10,552 feet). His story is chiefly interesting for an allusion to one of the finest of the early Alpine expeditions. In recent years, a manuscript containing a detailed account of this climb has come to light, and supplements the vague story which De Saussure had heard.

Long ago, in the Italian valleys of Monte Rosa, there was a legend of a happy valley, hidden away between the glaciers of the great chain. In this secret and magic vale, the flowers bloomed even in winter, and the chamois found grazing when less happy pastures were buried by the snow. So ran the tale, which the mothers of Alagna and Gressoney told to their children. The discovery of the happy valley was due to Jean Joseph Beck. Beck was a domestic servant with the soul of a pioneer, and the organising talent that makes for success. He had heard a rumour that a few men from Alagna had determined to find the valley. Beck was a Gressoney man; and he determined that Gressoney should have the honour of the discovery. Again and again, in Alpine history, we find this rivalry between adjoining valleys acting as an incentive of great ascents. Beck collected a large party, including “a man of learning,” by name Finzens (Vincent). With due secrecy, they set out on a Sunday of August 1788.

They started from their sleeping places at midnight, and roped carefully. They had furnished themselves with climbing irons and alpenstocks. They suffered from mountain sickness and loss of appetite, but pluckily determined to proceed. At the head of the glacier, they “encountered a slope of rock devoid of snow,” which they climbed. “It was twelve o’clock. Hardly had we got to the summit of the rock than we saw a grand—an amazing—spectacle. We sat down to contemplate at our leisure the lost valley, which seemed to us to be entirely covered with glaciers. We examined it carefully, but could not satisfy ourselves that it was the unknown valley, seeing that none of us had ever been in the Vallais.” The valley, in fact, was none other than the valley of Zermatt, and the pass, which these early explorers had reached, was the Lysjoch, where, to this day, the rock on which they rested bears the appropriate name that they gave it, “The Rock of Discovery.” Beck’s party thus reached a height of 14,000 feet, a record till Balmat beat them on Mont Blanc.

The whole story is alive with the undying romance that still haunts the skyline whose secrets we know too well. The Siegfried map has driven the happy valley further afield. In other ranges, still uncharted, we must search for the reward of those that cross the great divides between the known and the unknown, and gaze down from the portals of a virgin pass on to glaciers no man has trodden, and valleys that no stranger has seen. And yet, for the true mountaineer every pass is a discovery, and the happy valley beyond the hills still lives as the embodiment of the child’s dream. All exploration, it is said, is due to the two primitive instincts of childhood, the desire to look over the edge, and the desire to look round the corner. And so we can share the thrill that drove that little band up to the Rock of Discovery. We know that, through the long upward toiling, their eyes must ever have been fixed on the curve of the pass, slung between the guarding hills, the skyline which held the great secret they hoped to solve. We can realise the last moments of breathless suspense as their shoulders were thrust above the dividing wall, and the ground fell away from their feet to the valley of desire. In a sense, we all have known moments such as this; we have felt the “intense desire to see if the Happy Valley may not lie just round the corner.”

Twenty-three years after this memorable expedition, Monte Rosa was the scene of one of the most daring first ascents in Alpine history. Dr. Pietro Giordani of Alagna made a solitary ascent of the virgin summit which still bears his name. The Punta Giordani is one of the minor summits of the Monte Rosa chain, and rises to the respectable height of 13,304 feet. Giordani’s ascent is another proof, if proof were needed, that the early climbers were, in many ways, as adventurous as the modern mountaineer. We find Balmat making a series of solitary attempts on Mont Blanc, and cheerfully sleeping out, alone, on the higher snowfields. Giordani climbs, without companions, a virgin peak; and another early hero of Monte Rosa, of whom we shall speak in due course, spent a night in a cleft of ice, at a height of 14,000 feet. Giordani, by the way, indited a letter to a friend from the summit of his peak. He begins by remarking that a sloping piece of granite serves him for a table, a block of blue ice for a seat. After an eloquent description of the view, he expresses his annoyance at the lack of scientific instruments, and the lateness of the hour which alone prevented him—as he believed—from ascending Monte Rosa itself.

Giordani’s ascent closes the early history of Monte Rosa; but we cannot leave Monte Rosa without mention of some of the men who played an important part in its conquest. Monte Rosa, it should be explained, is not a single peak, but a cluster of ten summits of which the Dufour Spitze is the highest point (15,217 feet). Of these, the Punta Giordani was the first, and the Dufour Spitze the last, to be climbed. In 1817, Dr. Parrott made the first ascent of the Parrott Spitze (12,643 feet); and two years later the Vincent Pyramid (13,829) was climbed by a son of that Vincent who had been taken on Beck’s expedition because he was “a man of learning.” Dr. Parrott, it might be remarked in passing, was the first man to reach the summit of Ararat, as Noah cannot be credited with having reached a higher point than the gap between the greater and the lesser Ararat.

But of all the names associated with pioneer work on Monte Rosa that of Zumstein is the greatest. He made five attempts to reach the highest point of the group, and succeeded in climbing the Zumstein Spitze (15,004 feet) which still bears his name. He had numerous adventures on Monte Rosa, and as we have already seen, spent one night in a crevasse, at a height of 14,000 feet. He became quite a local celebrity, and is mentioned as such by Prof. Forbes and Mr. King in their respective books. His great ascent of the Zumstein Spitze was made in 1820, thirty-five years before the conquest of the highest point of Monte Rosa.