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Page 17
The study of these powers is one of the fascinations of our time. Let
me ask you to enjoy with me several of the greatest manifestations of
force on this world of ours.
THE MONTE ROSA
Many of us in America know little of one of the great subjects of
thought and endeavor in Europe. We are occasionally surprised by
hearing that such a man fell into a crevasse, or that four men were
killed on the Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and others elsewhere,
and we wonder why they went there. The Alps are a great object of
interest to all Europe. I have now before me a catalogue of 1,478
works on the Alps for sale by one bookseller. It seems incredible. In
this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a
single mountain, and that not the most difficult. There are
publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology,
botany, and one volume of _Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont
Blanc_. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The
summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but
two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends
folded over.
It is the habit, of the Germans especially, to send students into the
Alps with a case for flowers, a net for butterflies, and a box for
bugs. Every rod is a schoolhouse. They speak of the "snow mountains"
with ardent affection. Every Englishman, having no mountains at home,
speaks and feels as if he owned the Alps. He, however, cares less for
their flowers, bugs, and butterflies than for their qualities as a
gymnasium and a measure of his physical ability. The name of every
mountain or pass he has climbed is duly burnt into his Alpenstock, and
the said stock, well burnt over, is his pride in travel and a grand
testimonial of his ability at home.
There are numerous Alpine clubs in England, France, and Italy. In the
grand exhibition of the nation at Milan the Alpine clubs have one of
the most interesting exhibits. This general interest in the Alps is a
testimony to man's admiration of the grandest work of God within reach,
and to his continued devotion to physical hardihood in the midst of the
enervating influences of civilization. There is one place in the world
devoted by divine decree to pure air. You are obliged to use it.
Toiling up these steeps the breathing quickens fourfold, till every
particle of the blood has been bathed again and again in the perfect
air. Tyndall records that he once staggered out of the murks and
disease of London, fearing that his lifework was done. He crawled out
of the hotel on the Bell Alp and, feeling new life, breasted the
mountain, hour after hour, till every acrid humor had oozed away, and
every part of his body had become so renewed that he was well from that
time. In such a sanitarium, school of every department of knowledge,
training-place for hardihood, and monument of Nature's grandest work,
man does well to be interested.
You want to ascend these mountains? Come to Zermatt. With a wand ten
miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks. Europe has but one higher.
Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents
into the little green valley. Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more
difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more
difficult than either or both. A plumbline dropped from the summit of
Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt. You
first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred
double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles. In the
afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the
Riffelhouse. It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs
of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your
house--only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the
house. This takes three hours--an hour to each hundred stories; after
the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have
reached the first floor. The next day you go up and down the G�rner
Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a
view unequaled in Europe. Ordering the guide to be ready and the
porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the
glorious revelations of the morrow.
The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the
question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad." There is
plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live
thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly
near. We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent. The
lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and
the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct. Was the
storm over? The guides would give no opinion. It was their interest
to go, it was ours to go only in good weather. By three o'clock I
noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that
has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an
inch upward. I gave the order to start. The other parties said, "Good
for your pluck! _Bon voyage, gute reise_," and went to bed. In an
hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier.
The sky was brilliant. Hopes were high. The glacier with its vast
medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long,
was crossed in the dawn. The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks
with glory, and we shouted victory. But in a moment the sun was
clouded, and so were we. Soon it came out again, and continued clear.
But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear
weather." Men get pious amid perils. I thought of the aneroid, and
felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his
servants.
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