Kitabı oku: «Italian Alps», sayfa 19
This portion of the ascent of the Pelmo is, in my limited experience, one of the most impressive, and at the same time enjoyable, positions in which a climber can find himself. Even a sluggish imagination has here enough to stimulate it. The mysterious pathway, unseen from a short distance, seems to open for the mountaineer's passage, and to close up again behind him as he advances. The stones he dislodges, after two or three long bounds, disappear with a whirr into a sheer depth of seething mist, of which the final far-off crash reveals the immensity. The overhanging rocks above, the absence of any resting-place even for the eye below, do not allow him for a moment to forget that the crags to which he clings form part of one of the wildest precipices in Europe.
To walk for a mile or so along a ledge no broader than the sill which runs underneath the top story windows of a London square, with, for twice the height of St. Paul's cross above the pavement, no shelf below wide enough to arrest your fall, must sound an alarming feat to anyone, except perhaps a professional burglar. And yet to a head naturally free from giddiness, and to nerves moderately hardened by mountain experiences, the full sense of the majesty of the situation need not be disturbed by physical fear. The animal 'homo scandens' is not in the slightest danger. His pedestal may be scanty, but it is sufficient. He can follow his chamois-hunter amongst the abysses with as much confidence as Dante followed the elder poet amidst the boiling gulfs of Tartarus.
As we went on, the height of the groove, and consequently the head-room, became, for a time, inadequate to our requirements – a fact which a moment's inattention seldom failed to impress forcibly on the brain. Let the reader picture himself walking along the mantelpiece and the cornice coming down on him so as to force him to stoop or lie flat. 'Va bene!' cheerily remarked the Brusadaz hunter, in reply to some grumbles on this score, 'it is all as easy as this, except one place, and that is of no consequence.' This place, the 'eccentric obstacle' of the guidebook, arrived in due course, a projecting corner where the ledge was not broken away but partially closed in by a roof of rock. There was just room enough to allow a thin person to lie down and worm himself round with due care and deliberation; a brilliant climber could find some support for portions of his body on slight knobs below; those who were neither thin nor brilliant had to trust to the rope and their companions. For us, who followed an adroit and confident leader, there was little difficulty in the feat; but the happy boldness of our predecessor, who, when his companion's courage failed him, himself led the way, did not the less impress us. Mr. Ball, we agreed, had here proved himself in the body as well as in the spirit the true 'Alpine Guide.'
Having all wound or scrambled past the corner as instinct led us, we followed round yet another bay the faithful ledge. At last the precipice above us broke back, and our guide announced that all difficulty was at an end. And so it proved, at least as far as nerves and gymnastics were concerned. But to keep up the pace he now set us was no slight task. We raced upwards through the mists at true chamois-hunter speed, over steep slopes, now of large broken crags, now of smaller and less cohesive fragments, up low cliffs, then over more slopes, until we began to think the mountain interminable. At last, where a stream, the hidden roar of which was often heard, flashed for a moment into light, I was glad to call a halt. Two buttresses of rock, the ends of the topmost ridge of the Pelmo, loomed largely, and, despite our exertions, still loftily overhead; a glimmer of ice shone between them.
We soon came to the glacier, a sheet of uncrevassed ice, sloping slightly from south to north, and filling the large but from below unseen and unsuspected hollow which lies between the horseshoe-shaped battlements of the mountain. 'If the water of the ocean,' writes Professor Huxley, 'could be suddenly drained away we should see the atolls rising from the sea-bed like vast truncated cones, and resembling so many volcanic craters, except that their sides would be steeper than those of an ordinary volcano.' The description exactly fits our peak; and if, reversing the picture, we imagine the level of the Adriatic raised a trifle of 10,000 feet, the glacier would yield its place to a lagoon, and these ridges would exactly represent an atoll of the southern ocean. Our leader at first swerved to the left towards the lower crags which immediately overlooked his native village; turned by our remonstrances, he led us to the highest rocks, a broken crest perfectly easy of access.67 The verge of the huge outer cliffs, in some places level up to the extreme edge, and unencumbered with loose stones so as to allow of the closest approach, was gained within a few yards of the cairn which marks the summit.
Through a framework of mists we could see down from time to time into Val Fiorentina and along the gorge of Sottoguda, but the upper mass of the Marmolata and all the neighbouring peaks were wrapped in dense folds of leaden-coloured cloud. Feeling that a distant view was hopeless, we hastened to retrace our steps before any wandering storm should burst on the mountain. During the descent the fog became at times thick enough to suggest unpleasant fears of missing the direction. No such calamity, however, occurred; and, gaining a slide on every slope composed of fragments minute enough to allow it, we found ourselves far sooner than we had expected on the brink of the lower precipice. The spot was marked by a patch of dwarf Edelweiss, which, in company with other bright but tiny flowering plants, grew here and there upon the mountain. We made our way rapidly back along the ledge; the confidence of experience more than compensating for the inconvenience of the cliff, to which we had often to hold, being now on the left instead of the right hand. Where the direct descent on to the green buttress had to be made we, by keeping a few yards too much to the left, nearly got into a scrape, which was only avoided by a timely acknowledgment of the error. Strait and narrow as is the right path on the Pelmo, all other ways lead to destruction far too palpably not to induce one immediately to return to it.
On the top of the buttress we rejoined our provision-sack, and enjoyed a long halt in full view of the Antelao, now towering above the clouds, a gigantic vapour-wreathed pyramid. From this point it is, as we found the next day, but a two hours' walk or ride amongst bilberry-bushes and forests to San Vito on the Ampezzo road. To return to San Nicolò was, however, our present object, and our hunter promised a new and easy path. We rushed rapidly down a very steep funnel to the great patch of avalanche-snow which lies against the base of the cliffs in the centre of the Campo di Rutorto. In the sort of cave left between the crag and snow a jet of water, spouting like a fountain of Moses from the arid rocks, served to fill our cups. A little footpath mounts gently the rhododendron-covered slope beyond, and winds as near as it can creep to the huge mountain. The cliffs above are broken, and in this part there was formerly a possibility of scrambling through them. Our guide declared that owing to a fall of rock the passage had now become extremely difficult; and his statement gains some confirmation from the fact that two of my friends who attempted (with a San Vito man) an escalade from this direction, were forced to retreat, one of them with a broken head. While climbing in advance he dislodged with one hand a boulder from a shelf above him, which made its first bound on his skull, fortunately without loosening the firm grasp of his other arm or inflicting any permanent injury. Unstable boulders are the great source of danger in this part of the Alps, and even old climbers require to be constantly reminded that on dolomite rocks they must test before they trust every handhold.
At the south-eastern angle of the Pelmo the cliff rises sheer for some distance and then a wedge of stone suddenly juts out, overhanging its base to an extent which I fear to estimate in figures, and can only describe as incredible. The under part has fallen and lies on the path, but a huge block still hangs threateningly overhead, an appropriate gargoyle for so Titanic an edifice.
The brow beneath it commanded a wide and splendid prospect. To the north rose the red crags of the Sorapis and the more symmetrical outlines of the Antelao. Turning eastwards, green pasturages and gable-formed ridges filled the foreground. The blunt-headed crags of the Sasso di Bosco Nero occupied the middle distance. Beyond the gorge of the Piave we looked across to the least-known portion of the dolomites, the blue mountains, crested with dark teeth and horns, which encompass remote Cimolais.
A sturdy little goatherd, the first human being we had seen since leaving Brusadaz, here came up to greet us. The boy did not depend on his voice alone to summon his flock. Round his shoulders was slung a trumpet, one blast from which sent flying a peal of wild echoes not to be disregarded even by the deafest and most obstinate of goats.
The terrace path continued to skirt the base of the Pelmo, until it reached a platform of pasturage, the Campo sô Pelmo, lying due south of the mountain. From this pasturage a second way may be found to the upper slopes of the Pelmo. It is curious that this line of attack should have been adopted by the Cortina guides in preference to that by the angle of the mountain facing San Vito, so far the nearest and most natural route from Val d'Ampezzo.
The difference in difficulty is probably in favour of the southern ascent, but it can scarcely be sufficient to account for good rock-climbers making a circuit of several miles. Yet Santo Siorpaes in 1872 led Mr. Tuckett round the mountain.
The only English ascent by the southern route was made by Mr. and Mrs. Packe in 1870. They camped out for the night at the southern foot of the mountain. I am glad to be able to quote Mr. Packe's description of the climb, both because his impressions confirm my own, and for the sake of any ladies who may be thereby encouraged to venture on the Pelmo.
'From our camp a gentle ascent of twenty minutes over undulating ground brought us to a grassy mamélon, forming an outlying buttress of the mountain. Here we left the heavier portion of our provisions, and at once commenced to climb north-east up a very steep rocky gully which separates the detached shoulder described by Mr. Freshfield as "the antediluvian cub crouching beside its parent." In this part of the ascent, partly over snow, partly over rocks, though the rope was sometimes brought into use, there was nothing very formidable. When at the foot of the ridge which unites the cub to its parent, we turned to the right, traversing transversely a steep talus of schist, with a precipice below, but at some mètres' distance. After passing this we reached a corner, where the rock came down vertically from above, falling in the same way below; and here the difficulty commenced. For about an hour we were passing along a ledge, which wound round the recesses of the mountain, in one place entirely riven away by a rent in the face of the rock, across which we had to step, while the stones we dislodged fell with a sheer descent to a depth which the eye dared not fathom, but which might have been some six hundred mètres beneath our feet.
'It is this system of ledges on the face of a perpendicular cliff, which, moreover, is crumbling in its nature, that forms the difficulty of the Pelmo; and these cannot be escaped, though they may be varied, approach it from whatever side you will; but, that ours was not the same ledge as that by which Mr. Freshfield mounted is, I think, at once evident from the reasons I have alleged, that our left hand was always to the mountain in ascending, and that there was no place where we were compelled to crawl.
'On emerging from this ledge the precipice on our left hand broke back, and I take it here we had reached the same spot as that attained by Mr. Freshfield from the opposite side. At any rate, from this spot, his description would exactly apply to our route till we reached the summit, which was still about a thousand mètres above us. All serious difficulty was at an end. Our course lay over steep rocks, laced with streams descending from the glacier,68 and the only vegetation which attracted my notice was here and there the bright yellow flowers of the Alpine poppy. Above these rocks comes the glacier basin, which we crossed, like Mr. Freshfield avoiding the lower ridges on the left, and keeping to the right close to the highest crags of the Pelmo, which we at last reached after a rough and laborious escalade.
'We remained on the summit from 11.30 to 1 P.M., and then returned by exactly the same route, traversing the same ledge, but this time, of course, with our right shoulders to the rock. After a halt at our camp of the preceding night, we made the best of our way down to San Vito, which we reached at 7, and drove thence in our carriage to Cortina the same evening. The mountain of course may be done quicker, but I give the times, if any other lady should like to try the ascent.'
After crossing a gentle elevation, we found ourselves on the verge of the hollow of Brusadaz, and turned along a sledge-track leading down the crest between it and the western branch of Val di Zoldo, beyond which the crest of the Civetta stood forth high above the belts of vapour. The hamlet of Coi, seated as it were astride the narrow ridge, looks down at once on Brusadaz and San Nicolò; a steep corkscrew path led us in twenty minutes to the latter village, where we found our return not even begun to be expected.69
The Pelmo and Civetta naturally engross the attention of the traveller on his first visit to Val di Zoldo; but the splendid walls of dolomite which fence in the valley on the south-east and south-west invite a second visit and further exploration. Passes may be found through the western range to Agordo; through the eastern, presided over by the strange block of the Sasso di Bosco Nero, the 'unknown mountains' of Miss Edwards, to the valley of the Piave. They have been already traversed by Mr. M. Holzmann, one of the most indefatigable explorers of this region.70
I cannot bring myself to conclude this imperfect notice without paying a tribute to the Italians of the southern dolomites, rendered, as it seems to me, the more due and necessary by the frequent praise which the Bœotian simplicity of their German-speaking neighbours has received from English writers. A mountaineer may well have a good word for the population of Val di Zoldo. Where else in the Alps will he find a valley the natives of which, alone and unincited by foreign gold, have found their way to the tops of the highest peaks? And let it not be thought that this success was an easy one. The Civetta, from whatever side it is seen, is of formidable steepness, and, as I have said before, the Pelmo is to the eye of a mountaineer one of the most perplexing peaks in the Alps. Yet the men of Val di Zoldo, by following their game day after day, and learning that the ledge which offered the chamois a means of escape was also for the hunter a means of pursuit, found out at last the secret of the circuitous access to the upper rocks, which had been for centuries a true 'Gemsen-Freiheit.'
I do not doubt that Mr. Ball was the first man to stand on the highest crest of the Pelmo. Its attainment was probably not an object of sufficient value to the hunters to induce them to cross the upper glacier and brave the peril of being swallowed up alive by some hidden chasm, a risk which weighs heavily on the mind of the peasant who has yet to learn the saving grace of a rope. But the real difficulty lies below, and amateur climbers with foreign guides might have sought long and vainly for the passage which the spirit of the neighbouring villagers had found ready for them.
But it is not alone on the narrow ground of venturesomeness that the people of Val di Zoldo recommend themselves to an English traveller. They possess in a high degree the intelligence and quick courtesy we are accustomed to meet with in Northern Italy. No peasant will pass the stranger as he sits to rest or sketch beside the path without a few bright words of greeting and enquiry, showing often a feeling for natural beauty and a quickness of apprehension rare amongst a secluded population. The slowness alike of mind and of action, the refusal to grasp anything outside their own daily experiences, so common among the peasantry of the Pusterthal, is here unknown. To quote a shrewd observer, 'the men are such gentlemen and the women such ladies, that every chance meeting becomes an interchange of courtesies;' and the traveller, turning northwards, will often have occasion to join in Dickens's regret for what he has left behind, 'the beautiful Italian manners, the sweet language, the quick recognition of a pleasant look or cheerful word, the captivating expression of a desire to oblige in everything.'
CHAPTER XIV.
MEN AND MOUNTAINS
What, I pray you, is more pleasant, more delectable and more acceptable unto a man than to behold the height of hills as if they were the very Atlantes themselves of heaven?
Art thou in nature, and yet hast not known nature?
Hermann Kirchner, circa A.D. 1600.
MEN AND MOUNTAINS – MOUNTAIN-HATERS – A LITERARY EXAMPLE – POETS AND PAINTERS – THE PLACE OF ART – ALPINE SCENERY AND ART – THE VARIETY OF THE ALPS – THE SNOW WORLD – MONS. LOPPÉ'S PICTURES – CONCLUSION
Switzerland, from a distance practically beyond that of the Caucasus at the present day, has in the last thirty years been brought within a few hours of our homes. Increased facilities of travel and of residence in Alpine regions, acting in unison with many less obvious but equally real influences, have extended human sympathy to Nature in her wildest forms and created a new sentiment, the Love of the Alps.
The indifference of men to mountains in past ages has perhaps been exaggerated. The prevalence throughout the world of mountain-worship in different forms seems to show that the great peaks and the eternal snows have before now had power to stir men's minds and to mix with their lives. But the image which has been adored as a god is for a time cast aside, and it is only to distant generations that it becomes valuable for its intrinsic beauty of design and workmanship. In the case of the great ranges the period of neglect had been a long one. In the Europe of the Middle Ages all hilly regions became surrounded by associations of fear and danger. The plan of the universe was indeed held to have been originally divine; but the devil had somehow become clerk of the works, and managed to put in a good deal not in the original specification. Earthquakes, tempests, venomous reptiles and mountains were all accepted as productions of the evil principle.
From this disfavour the mountains have been during the last century slowly emerging. Better acquaintance has led to the discovery of all the beauties and benefits the Alps offer to those who seek them in a proper mood. We have learnt thoroughly to appreciate the variety imparted to all nature by the accidents of hill scenery, to know and love the thousand forms of peaks, the changing charm of lakes and forests, the rush of the grey Swiss torrent under the upright pines, and the blue repose of the Italian stream under the beech shadows. Moreover, Alpine climbing has revealed the wonders of the kingdom of frost and snow. The imprisoned colours of glacier ice, the ruin of its fantastic towers and tottering minarets, the splendour of its fretted and icicle-hung caves are no longer familiar only to Arctic travellers. The overpowering height of some peak soaring majestically heavenwards can never have been felt as it is by those who understand through experience the dimensions and meaning of each rock and patch of snow on its ridges.
The flow of human sympathy towards the mountains has, however, been too recent not to have left many traces of the deep ebb of antipathy which had preceded it. 'Survivals' of the old and narrower tone of thought of a hundred years ago are constantly to be met with in English society. They even penetrate occasionally to the tables-d'hôte of Swiss inns, where they may be recognised by the air of calm superiority generally assumed by the unappreciative, whether in the presence of music, a picture, or a peak.
These representatives of mediæval sentiment are often mediævalists also in their practice. Where their opinions are based on anything besides hereditary prejudice it is very often found if you examine them tenderly that their experience has been coloured, or more correctly speaking obscured, by bodily torture. They have climbed with unboiled peas in their shoes, and without the excuse of their forefathers. For they have deadened their natural senses by bodily discomfort without any hope of prospective gain for their souls. They have literally repeated the old penance by setting out to walk with new boots and cotton socks and a ponderous knapsack. They have rushed over passes and up peaks in bad weather; or overtaxed their powers in a first tour: or they have perhaps never persevered long enough to be able to tread with ease a mountain-path, where the novice dares not lift his eyes from the ground, while his companion, some days or weeks more experienced, can enjoy at once the scenery and motion. No wonder that what is a delight to the wise is to them foolishness, and that they speedily renounce the mountains.
Such mountain-haters still find champions both in English and foreign modern literature. I shall not be tempted to take the late Canon Kingsley as an example, for his amusing attack on mountains71 is in truth only a plea for flats, and in that light I heartily sympathise with it. Moreover Mr. Kingsley loved all nature so well that his cursing is of the most superficial and Balaamitic character, and the argument he puts in the mouth of his 'peevish friend' would invite mercy by its very feebleness.
A distinguished French critic will furnish us with a far more genuine example of the old school. M. Taine, travelling in the Pyrenees to write a book, experiences a difficulty the reverse of Mr. Kingsley's. Feeling that he ought, as a man of his time, to bless, he yet cannot refrain from cursing altogether. The antique modes of expression flow naturally from his pen; he is constantly reminding us of the once favourite theological view that the mountains are a disease of nature. His language at times resembles that of a medical student fresh from the hospitals and the dissecting-room. He sums up his impressions of the Pyrenees in the reflection that they are 'monstrous protuberances.' Here is a picture from Luchon! 'The slopes hang one over the other notched, dislocated, bleeding; the sharp ridges and fractures are yellow with miserable mosses, vegetable ulcers which defile the nakedness of the rocks with their leprous spots.'72 This loathsome simile for mountain mosses pleases M. Taine so much that he never mentions them without repeating it. Take now a more general sketch.
'How grotesque are these jagged heads, these bodies bruised and heaped together, these distorted shoulders! What unknown monsters, what a deformed and gloomy race, outside humanity! Par quel horrible accouchement la terre les a-t-elle soulevés hors de ses entrailles?' It would be easy to fill a page or two with such 'elegant extracts.'
Mountaineers may sometimes feel disposed to resent such unworthy treatment of mountain beauty. But the true lover of the Alps is not necessarily disposed to be arrogant in his faith or to wish all the world of the same mind. While he knows that to him the mountains are sympathetic, he admits that they have also an unsympathetic side which is the first to present itself to many. He recognises in the hill country a type of nature, free, vigorous and healthy, and is glad that others should share the enjoyment of it. But as the affection of a sailor for the sea does not blunt him to the pleasures of dry land, so his feeling for the Alps does not make him less susceptible to milder scenes. He does not assert that mountains are the most beautiful objects in creation, but only that they are beautiful. He does not claim for them undivided worship, but a share of admiration.
Little disposed however as we may generally be to proselytise, we must feel that there is one class of our fellow-countrymen amongst whom we like to make converts. We too often find blind to mountain beauty those who, as we think, ought to be its priests and interpreters. For the painter, like the poet, can feel 'harmonies of the mountains and the skies' invisible to the general eye; it is his gift by a higher or more developed sense to recognise and reveal to others the beauties of the visible world. By his happy power of fixing on canvas the vision of a moment, he extends the appreciation of nature of all who intelligently look at his work. Paul Potter and Hobbema have taught us the charm which lurks in the flat and at first sight monotonous landscapes of Holland. Looking through their eyes we see the beauty of the moist sun-suffused atmosphere, of the sudden alternations of shadow and gleam which chequer and gild the abundant verdure and peaceful homesteads. Corot and Daubigny lead us better to appreciate the unfamiliar spirit of French river-sides in the dewy morning hours or the red gloaming, a beauty indistinct in form yet vivid in impression as that of a dream. When we exclaim as we rush past in the steamer or the express, 'What a Cuyp!' or 'How like Corot!' we pay a just tribute to the artist through whose works the essential features of the scene before us have been made so readily recognisable.
In the same way those who have already studied the beautiful Titian (No. 635) in our National Gallery, or the landscape lately exhibited at Burlington House, will find a deeper and subtler pleasure in their first view of the great Belluno valley. But this unfortunately is a rare example. As a rule the Alpine traveller must depend entirely on his own powers of observation and selection, or must sharpen his appreciative faculty by the aid of poets.
For at least the word-painters of our generation have not been false to their mission of expressing and carrying on the best feelings of their age. The works of our living poets abound with sketches of mountain scenery the precision of which may satisfy even a literal-minded enthusiast. In the exquisite Alpine idyll in the 'Princess' we have brought before us one after another the scenes of the Bernese Oberland; Grindelwald with its firths of ice, Lauterbrunnen with its monstrous ledges and 'thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,' or the gentler beauties of the vale of Frutigen and the Lake of Brienz. Beside this finished picture might be placed a gallery of sketches familiar to every reader of contemporary poetry. Mr. Browning draws with sharp, firm strokes the paths over the foothills of Lombardy, where the high arched bridge leaps the blue brook, and at each sudden turn the faded frescoes of a chapel gleam from between the chestnut-trees over whose tops 'the silver spearheads charge.' Mr. Matthew Arnold prefers the more solemn mood of the inner Alps, where above the hillside, 'thin sprinkled with snow,' 'the pines slope, the cloudstrips hung soft in their heads.'
Across the Atlantic, among the other great English-speaking people, the poets have not any more than our own treated mountains as 'outside humanity.' Emerson has dwelt more fully than any of his forerunners on the appeal they make to our intellectual faculty; Joaquin Miller reflects the fascination exerted over the senses by the great Californian ranges.
Art, like poetry, ought surely to be the expression of the strongest and clearest feelings of its day, and thus the interpreter and instructor of weaker or more confused minds. The types of beauty are eternal, but painters are human beings, and a man can successfully paint or describe only what he has seen and felt for himself. The most vivid impressions of each age and individual are necessarily derived from the forms of life around them, and these are therefore the best suited to inspire their art-faculty. The sculptors of the Parthenon did not carve Egyptian dances but Attic festivals; the great Italian masters painted, whether as Virgin, God, or Saint, their own countrymen or women in the scenery of their own homes. In the dulness of our outer lives, the deadness of our souls to natural enjoyments, lies assuredly one of the chief causes of the artistic barrenness of our century. Can we then afford to throw away lightly, as material for art, any form of nature which seems really capable of stirring our minds into some sort of enthusiasm?
Neglect of to us familiar scenes and contemporary subjects is, however, often excused on the ground that these things were unknown to the painters of the Renaissance. In point of fact this amounts to a protestation of our incapacity or unwillingness to discover beauty where it has not been already pointed out, to a confession that amongst us art is dead. For to be able to choose out, harmonise, and idealise the elements of beauty in the world as it goes on around us is the essential quality of living art. It is one, it is true, which is too often missed on the walls of Burlington House.
Many of the most cultivated living artists show their veneration for the old masters by endeavouring to reproduce the results they arrived at, rather than by studying nature at first-hand and in their spirit. Consequently in one half of modern painting we see, in the place of free and spontaneous accomplishment, an abundance of tentative and over-conscious reproduction. And unfortunately this half finds its best justification in the character of the other. To put it simply, our school may – of course with some illustrious exceptions – be divided into those who think too much and feel too little, and those who neither think nor feel at all.
