Part 9 (1/2)
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 cla.s.sical, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 Mycenae 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 62. CHaTILLON, VAL D'AOSTA.]
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 wors.h.i.+p, 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 63. A CORNER OF THE TOWN OF ALTDORF. The traditional scene of William Tell's exploits. Here Gessler ruled and the shooting of the apple took place. A place of patriotic pilgrimage of the youthful Swiss.]
The old tales about the village deep in Tiefenmatten, about the pilgrimage that used to cross the Col d'Herens, 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 pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.ses. I well remember the keen delight that came to me when I discovered that a pa.s.s I had crossed, as I supposed for the first time, between the Fillarkuppe and the Jagerhorn, 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.[2]
[Footnote 2: 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 pa.s.sed 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 Todi be if robbed of the memory of Placidus a Spescha? Even a Mont Ventoux can attain dignity and importance by a.s.sociation with so great a man as Petrarch.
It is, however, to the pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.ses similarly recorded might be mentioned; but it is the great pa.s.ses, 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 pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.ses. Old literature is therefore fuller of accounts of the historic pa.s.ses than are most present-day volumes, which regard them as a subject outworn.
To mention the historic pa.s.ses is to call up the name of Hannibal. Here is no place to revive that old discussion as to the situation of Hannibal's pa.s.s. 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, mediaeval warriors, statesmen, saints, bishops, and monks streamed in their day across this col. Here pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage of the pa.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 ma.s.s 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.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: 64. PONTE BROLLA. Over the Maggia, near its junction with the Melezza, looking up the Val Centavalli.]
Mr. Coolidge, in that store of Alpine learning, his book ent.i.tled _Swiss Travel and Swiss Guide-Books_, reminds us that the first known guide-book was written for the crowd of pilgrims crossing this same pa.s.s, by no less unlikely a person than the Abbot of Thingor in Iceland, about 1154. There was a building on the pa.s.s before the year 812. A century later the Little St. Bernard was similarly provided. The Simplon was thus equipped before 1235, the St. Gotthard before 1331, and the Grimsel before 1479. Modern Swiss travellers may not be aware of these facts in detail, but it is impossible for any intelligent man to frequent the Alps and not become conscious of the antiquity of the relation between man and the mountains.
Sometimes traces of visibly ancient ways are encountered, as on the Albrun pa.s.s, for instance, or the Monte Moro. The sight of such a fragment of old paved way instantly carries the mind back into the past, and animates the route as with a ghostly procession. Thus, too, I found it in Bolivia and Chile, where remnants of the old paved Inca road, that traversed a large part of the continent from north to south, are often to be met with. The sentimental value of such relics is incalculable.
They, as it were, hypnotise the mind and induce a mood in which we see the nature that surrounds us in a new way. They remove from the traveller the sense of isolation, and form a link between him and the countless generations that have gone before. He shares with them the toil of the way, and looks abroad on the scenes that they beheld.