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to begin their awful, hopping, bounding, whirring flight to the valley. Anyone who has loafed away an afternoon in the high Alps will have heard that faint growling, sometimes rising to a roar and rarely quiet for more than a few moments, which means that the miscellaneous débris of the mountains is slipping from them. A stone fall on a great slope is a horrible spectacle whether seen from above or from below, but especially when seen from below. Some mountain sides are death traps for this reason in the afternoon.

A prudent climber will rarely get too close to falling stones, but through bad luck or misinformation he may see more than he cares of them. He will be working down a ridge which stands up. in low relief upon the great tilting side great tilting side of the mountain. To right and left a wide, shallow, dusty gully, floored with worn slabs of rock and broken with zigzagging scree-littered shelves, may offer easier progress. A little rivulet of gleaming water staining the recesses of the rocks and sending a faint tinkle up to his thirsty soul may add to the temptation. He continues down the ridge. Suddenly from far above, where the upper cliffs lean forward and dominate the lower glacis, a single sharp report will sound. He looks up, every fibre tense and quivering. For a moment nothing will be visible; then, exactly like a bursting shrapnel, a tiny cloud will flash out which looks like smoke but actually is dust. The falling missile has struck some scree-covered ledge. Usually the climber will see little more; he will have his head, and as much more of himself as he can, well and safely tucked away in the shelter of some overhanging boulder or cranny. But he will hear the whole slope, as it seems, leap to life, for the falling stone sets a myriad others in motion. Down they come, whirring and humming, taking enormous bounds and ricochetting

across the whole width of the gully. By the time they pass him they will often be flying too fast to be visible. Only the scream of the air or, if a large boulder is fairly launched, a rumble not unlike that of an express train will tell him that they are past, and he can look down to see them splash into the snows below or leap into the open mouth of the crevasse which is nearly always there to catch them.

The prudent climber, I repeat, keeps well away from falling stones. Occasionally, however, circumstances may force him to run the risk of crossing such dangerous ground. He may be late in leaving the summit; hard pressed for time to work out the intricacies of the glacier before night falls, he may have no other way of avoiding a night spent à la belle étoile, an experience which is nearly always miserable and sometimes dangerous in itself. For a tired man may not be in a state to resist the great cold of the night high up without shelter, and the weather may be changing or the wind rising.

When for any such reason dangerous ground has to be crossed, the climber may hurry, but hurrying is otherwise something which he sedulously avoids. From one point of view he is the most leisurely of sportsmen; he takes a great deal of exercise, but he takes it as gently as he can. He cannot afford to hurry in an expedition which will probably take fifteen hours to complete and may take twenty. On the other hand, he cannot afford to waste any odd minutes. All successful parties develop an elaborate technique for saving seconds - at first a conscious effort, later on an unconscious habit. The beginner gives himself away by the time he squanders. He wants to stop to fix his puttee, or to put cream on his face, or to get out his gloves, or to put them away. A dozen little jobs arise and half a dozen little calamities befall him which the more

experienced man has foreseen the last time the whole party stopped to feed or to put on the rope.

But there is more in time-saving than this, difficult though this trick of not stopping seems to be to acquire. Consider the management of the rope alone. We are tied on, if there are three of us, one at each end and the third in the middle. There will be thirty or forty feet of loose rope between us. Most of the time we shall be all moving together. The rope must be kept moderately taut whenever there is any possibility of a mishap to any of the party. This is not so difficult when we are walking in the leader's footprints across a snow field. But suppose we are working up a fairly steep face of rock. Fairly steep means an angle of about fifty degrees. This looks like sixty-five degrees until one measures it, and is usually talked of as eighty degrees. This face will not be smooth few faces are. If it were, we should be moving one at a time, gathering the rope in and letting it out as required. More probably, like most big precipices that get climbed, it will be built up of a chaos of jammed blocks of all sizes at all angles, held in place by the weight of the blocks above. Over such ground experienced climbers can pass with great safety and speed, but the loose rope must be kept from catching among the innumerable spikes which jut out everywhere. To keep it free while himself moving with special care to avoid dislodging any of the rubbish with which all such faces are strewn, the climber must give a continual series of nicely adjusted flicks. In time this becomes automatic. Usually he will carry a few coils of the rope enough to control it in one hand, the same hand also holding his ice axe; he climbs with the other hand and with his feet and with a knee now and then.

This sounds like one of the dreariest

and least inviting of imaginable exercises, and so it is until the knack has become second nature. But when everything is going as it should the very fact that all this tiresome detail is being dealt with without effort, by the mere sweet-running mechanisms of the nervous system, yields a peculiar exhilaration. I should ascribe a great deal of the fascination of mountaineering to this sense of successful technique. The good effect of doing anything that one can do well radiates throughout the whole personality. One's other faculties benefit, one is at peace with one's self, and the illusion of a complete mastery of existence grows strong. Add to this the slight tension which the situation, the drop below, and the constant need for care impose, and it is not hard to see how this routine part of climbing can acquire a charm.

More difficult rocks have another fascination. The technique of overcoming them without delay and without undue fatigue has much in common with the technique of the arts. Mediocre performers, for example, resemble one another in their procedure, but the masters of the craft develop individual styles. The difference between a breathless muscular struggle and an easy, balanced movement is often too subtle to be analyzed, but every golfer will understand how powerful the appeal of success here may become. And because the movements called for in rock-climbing are perhaps more varied and their nicety not less than those of any other sport, the spell cast is the stronger. To go lightly up a rock wall when the only hold is the friction of the forearm pressing against the sides of a vertical crack while the feet push gently yet firmly upon roughnesses not much bigger than a thumb nail is an achievement which allows a good deal of innocent self-flattery to develop. And if meanwhile the glance which is seeking

for suitable roughnesses can travel past the poised foot and see nothing beneath but the glacier some hundreds of feet below, there is nothing in this to impair the pleasure, provided that equanimity is maintained. Calm control and alert, deliberate choice of pose are the essence of good rock-climbing; the exhilaration which accompanies it is as much made up of a sense that one's judgment is trustworthy and one's intelligence clear and unflurried as it is of any physical delights. And the final movement of such a passage, when the climber reaches handholds like the rungs of a ladder (no higher praise is possible), a roomy ledge to stand upon, and a spike of rock round which he can 'belay' the rope, and so guarantee both his own safety and that of his companions who will now follow him, brings a quiet glow of triumph which is much more than a mere relief of tension or a sense of escape. A good cragsman, it may be remarked, can almost always retrace his steps and return to his companions if the passage should prove more difficult than he anticipated. It is, in fact, only on this condition that he is justified in assuming the responsibility of leading his party. There are plenty of borderline cases, of course, in which a climber may not be perfectly certain whether he should proceed or return, and it is just here that his judgment is tested.

Intelligence, not of a low order, is exercised at many points in any interesting ascent. The choice of route constantly demands it. A fine mountain is a succession of problems to be solved on the spot. Few who have not climbed can realize how very intricate a mountain face may be. Rocks by themselves can require varied enough evolutions, for most cliffs are more like highly tilted labyrinths, when you come close to them, than the solid walls which from a distance they appear to be. And often the choice of one fissure rather

than another, of one shelf or shoulder or buttress rather than its neighbor, will make a difference in time to be counted in hours and spell success or failure for the whole expedition.

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But the complexities of rock-climbing are matched by those of ice and snow. A broken-up glacier can present a maze which only a mixture of good luck and happy opportunism will unravel. It is a strange experience to come down in the late afternoon, one's heels sinking deep into a vast bulge of snow, like a swelling sail, but more dazzlingly white, to survey, as the slope curves over and what is below is revealed, the wild, contorted chaos of waves and chasms into which the glacier ice is riven as it descends. Through this chaos, often by a series of carefully planned leaps interspersed with thoughtful performances upon bridges of snow, an all-fours position which distributes one's weight over the fragile structure is not unusual, — and as a rule by much chopping of steps along the slopes of the ice waves, an intricate way is forced. It is astonishing how often the way followed will seem the only one that is possible, and how rare it is for no way to be found.

III

I have lingered somewhat over the technical attractions of mountaineering because this side of the sport is the one least easy for the layman to imagine, though some knowledge of it is necessary if the climber's passion is to be understood. If I have said enough to show that a great climb is not a rash adventure but a campaign in which prudent strategy and skillful tactics have both been required, I shall have gained my purpose. I have said nothing about the view from the summit the excuse which the nonclimber usually provides for the climber, who is often

lazy enough to accept it. The view from the summit is as a rule no more interesting than the other views. And I have said nothing as yet about the beauty of the high peaks. Before attempting to say what little can be said about this there is another fact, less often mentioned, which must be indicated.

Few climbers are for long exempt from a certain modicum of anxietya watchful apprehension which rarely rises to the point of distress, but remains as a background of consciousness giving a special dramatic quality to each incident. It is tempting to speculate further upon this feeling, for it may have an intimate connection with the beauty which the climber sometimes sees. With fatigue or indisposition this sombre tinge easily develops into a clouding dread, more or less well controlled. When this happens the whole expedition changes from a joy to a nightmare. For some climbers this is not an infrequent occurrence, though it may be but for a moment. With the unloosing of anxiety the whole character of the landscape is transformed. "The eye altering alters all.' There are always plenty of sights in the high mountains which are capable of taking on a hideous aspect. Gaunt, disintegrating black cliffs that can be contemplated without horror only by a mind which is perfectly in possession of itself; obscene convolutions of grimy glacier which stir nothing but nausea unless one is able to hold one's self in check; sinister gray curtains of ice, furrowed by stone falls, that hold no hope for any living thing for thousands of feet; monstrous gaping jaws of crevasses fanged above with sharp blue icicles and lipped with treacherous bulges of soft snow. Even the transcendental sparkle of the snow on the upper ridges turns easily to a mere grim glitter. The instant this anxiety

slips loose, beauty vanishes. Naturally it does, for this holding down of tremors, this serenity amid stress, was its very source and being. Perhaps even the man who deeply feels the beauty of a great mountain from the valley is doing something similar. He is holding in control a set of feelings which if they broke loose would distress him. Let his equanimity be sufficiently destroyed, let some grief or harshness throw him off his balance, and he will not find peace among the hills, he will not see beauty in them, but only a hateful, discomforting presentation of that side of the universe which is least the concern of man.

The climber is not less susceptible to the ordinary beauty of the mountains, if I may call it such this power they have to stir such subtly mingled feelings when they are seen from below; and his privileged enjoyment of their extraordinary beauty, the still more mingled thrill which they awaken in him when he is actually upon their ridges, does not, in spite of all that Ruskin had to say, betoken a lack of sensibility. In the best instances the closer, the more intimate, experience is an amplification of the other. It is possible, of course, to climb for a whole day, or for a week, or a lifetime, with scarcely a moment of the genuine awareness; just as it is possible to perambulate miles of galleries or listen to the best orchestras in the world without any result which is worth mentioning. But it is the claim of the mountaineer that the very conditions of his sport do tend to make a more fully awakened response likely. The passion, like others, can go astray, and bogus forms are not uncommon. There are collectors of peaks, for example, who know as little of the genuine worship as mere collectors of pictures. Fortunately, perhaps, they rarely know what they are missing.

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