The Story of Alpine Climbing

INDEX

THE STORY OF ALPINE CLIMBING.

CHAPTER I.

ALPINE climbing is distinctly a modern enterprise. As a sport it is usually dated from the ascent of the Wetterhorn by Mr Justice Wills, then Mr Alfred Wills of the junior bar, in 1854; and the English Alpine Club—which was the first of all the Alpine Clubs—was not formed until three years later. Explorers and men of science, however, had had adventures on the mountains before the sportsmen repaired to them for athletic exercise, so that the threads of the story of the pastime have to be picked up from somewhat further back.

First let us note that the attitude of our forefathers towards the mountains was very different from ours. The Hebrews, indeed, had a regard for them, speaking with reverence of high places, and relating that the Table of the Law was delivered to Moses upon one mountain, and that the prophets of Baal were put to confusion by Elijah upon another. Sinai and Carmel, however, are quite minor eminences; and the Hebrew view was, in any case, exceptional. By ordinary men of other races mountains were looked upon, at least until the end of the eighteenth century, as obnoxious excrescences and inconvenient barriers to commercial intercourse, equally devoid of interest and of beauty. Dr Johnson, when he returned from the Highlands of Scotland, reported that this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller. John Evelyn, the diarist, who crossed the Simplon in 1646, perceived only horrid and fearfull craggs and tracts. Bishop Berkeley, on the Mont Cenis Pass, was put out of humour by the most horrible precipices. Every object that here presents itself is excessively miserable, is Richardson’s typical comment on Lans-le-bourg. Goldsmith complains of hills that they interrupt every prospect; while Bishop Burnet was quite sure that mountains have neither form nor beauty, but are the vast ruins of the first world which the Deluge broke into so many inequalities.

These petulant protests, however, are far surpassed by the violent outburst of Master John de Bremble, a monk of Canterbury, who crossed the Great Saint Bernard in 1188, and gave an account of his experiences in a letter to his sub-prior, quoted in Stubbs’ Lectures on Modern and Mediaeval History. I have been, he writes, on the mount of Jove; on the one hand looking up to the heavens of the mountains, on the other shuddering at the hell of the valleys, feeling myself so much nearer heaven that I was sure that my prayer would be heard. ‘Lord,’ I said, ‘restore me to my brethren, that I may tell them that they come not to this place of torment.’ Place of torment, indeed, where the marble pavement of the 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.

So long as such opinions of mountains were prevalent, ascents were naturally few. No man, in those days, went out of his way to look for mountains in order that he might climb them; and only an exceptional man here and there, happening to find himself at the foot of a mountain, was impelled by bravado or curiosity to try to find a way to the top of it. The recorded achievements of the kind are few enough to be counted on the fingers.

1. Livy relates that Philip of Macedon made an ascent of Hæmus, in the Balkans. He took four days to climb it, and expected to obtain a simultaneous view of the Ægean and Adriatic seas from the summit, but did not succeed in doing so.

2. Spartianus, the chronicler, records that the Roman Emperor Hadrian ascended Etna to see the sunrise from the summit, but he gives no details of the ascent, which may be presumed to have been uneventful.

3. At some uncertain date in the Dark Ages there was an ascent of Roche Melon, then known as Mons Romuleus, inaccurately believed to be the highest mountain in Savoy. There was a legend that a certain monstrous and avaricious King Romulus had secreted treasure on the mountain, and the climbers, as may be read in The Chronicle of Novalesa, set out to look for it. A fog descended upon them, however, and they, caught in the darkness of the mist, and fumbling about them with their hands, with difficulty made their escape through the gloom; while it seemed, they said, that stones were being showered upon them from above. A second attempt was made by ecclesiastics, commissioned by a very avaricious nobleman, but with no better success: "They started carrying a cross and holy water, and singing litanies and Vexilla Regis, but before they got to the top they were turned back ignominiously, just like their predecessors."

3. The Chronicle of Fra Salimbene of Parma speaks of an ascent of Pic Canigou in the Pyrenees, by Peter III. of Arragon, who lived from 1236 to 1285. The height of that mountain is only 9135 feet, though it was then believed to be the loftiest Pyrenean peak; but the climber had remarkable adventures. There was a thunderstorm, and the king’s companions were alarmed: They threw themselves upon the ground and lay there, as it were lifeless, in their fear and apprehension of the calamities that had overtaken them. King Peter, therefore, went on alone: And when he was on the top of the mountain he found a lake there; and when he threw a stone into the lake, a horrible dragon of enormous size came out of it, and began to fly about in the air, and to darken the air with its breath. So Peter returned and told the story to his companions. It appears to me, says Fra Salimbene, that this achievement of Peter of Arragon may be compared with the achievements of Alexander.

5. Petrarch, when living in retirement at Vaucluse, in 1335, made an ascent of Mont Ventoux in Provence, 6430 feet high, the greatest mountain in the neighbourhood. He described the expedition in a letter to his confessor, Father Denis di Borgo San Sepucro. A peasant, he says, tried to dissuade him from his endeavour, telling us that some fifty years before, he had been invited to go to the summit by the ardour of youth, that he had got nothing by it but discouragement and fatigue, and that his body as well as his cloak were torn by the rocks and brambles. The poet, however, persevered, and reached his goal. He admired the view, and found the ascent an allegory of human life. I only wish, he wrote, that I may accomplish that journey of the soul, for which I daily and nightly sigh, as well as I have done this day’s journey of the feet, after having overcome so many difficulties. And I do not know whether that pilgrimage, which is performed by an active and immortal soul in the twinkling of an eye, without any local motion, be not easier than that which is carried on in a body worn out by the attacks of death and of decay, and laden with the weight of heavy members. And of his return, accomplished in silence, he wrote: At every step I thought, if it cost so much sweat and toil to bring the body a little nearer to heaven, great indeed must be the cross, the dungeon, and the sting which should terrify the soul as it draws nigh unto God, and crush the turgid height of insolence and the fate of man.

6. Leonardo da Vinci climbed, or to be accurate, made a partial ascent of, a mountain which he calls Monboso, and which can be almost certainly identified with Monte Rosa. The passage in his literary works, translated by Mrs R. C. Bell, which bears upon the subject, runs as follows:—

No mountain has its base at so great a height as this, which lifts itself above almost all the clouds; and snow seldom falls there, but only hail in the summer when the clouds are highest. And this hail lies (unmelted) there, so that if it were not for the absorption of the rising and falling clouds, which does not happen more than twice in an age, an enormous mass of ice would be piled up there by the layers of hail; and in the middle of July I found it very considerable, and I saw the sky above me quite dark, and the sun as it fell on the mountain was far brighter than here in the plains below, because a smaller extent of atmosphere lay between the summit of the mountain and the sun.

7. Charles VII. of France, passing through Dauphiné, was struck by the appearance of Mont Aiguille, then called Mont Inaccessible. It is a rock mountain of no great height, but very difficult, draped nowadays with ropes, like the Matterhorn. The king ordered his chamberlain, the Lord of Dompjulian and Beaupré, to go and climb it. The ascent was successfully accomplished, and an account of it is preserved in manuscript in the Grenoble Archives, and has been printed in the Annuaire de la Société des Touristes du Dauphiné. Subtle means and engines were employed, and Dompjulian had the mountain named in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and had mass said upon it, and caused three crosses to be set up. You have, he says, to ascend half a league by ladder, and a league by other ways, and it is the most horrible and frightful passage that I or any of my company have ever seen. He remained two days upon the summit, and built a hut there. The Usher of the Grenoble Parliament, sent to see how he was getting on, came back reporting that he was unwilling to expose himself by reason of the danger that there was of perishing there, and by reason of the impossibility of getting there, for fear lest he should seem to tempt the Lord, since at the mere sight of this mountain everyone was terrified. The mountain was not climbed a second time until a peasant got to the top in 1834.

8. An attempt to ascend the Pic du Midi in the Pyrenees in 1588 is also interesting. The hero of the adventure was François de Foix, Comte de Candale, and Bishop of Aire in Gascony, the translator of the works of Euclid into French. He made his excursion after taking the waters at Eaux Bonnes, and the story is to be found in the Chronicles of De Thou. The narrative is in the shape of a report of M. de Candale’s table talk.

M. de Candale told them, we read, that he resolved to climb to the top of the highest mountain . . . that while he was making ready everything that he judged necessary for the accomplishment of his design, several gentlemen and other young persons, wearing nothing over their vests so as to be less encumbered, offered to accompany him; that he warned them that the higher they got the colder they would feel—a statement which only roused their mirth; that for his own part he had his fur coat carried by peasants who knew the neighbourhood; that towards the middle of the month of May, at about four o’clock in the morning, they got high enough to see clouds under their feet; that the cold then gripped the young people who were in so great a hurry, so that they could go no further; that as for himself he put on his coat, and walked with precaution, accompanied by those who had the courage to follow him; that he ascended as far as a place where he found the lairs of wild goats . . . that up to that point they had found marks blazed on the rocks by people who had been up there before; but that then they saw no further path, and that, to reach the summit, they still had to go a distance equal to that which they had already covered; that the cold and rarefied air which surrounded them caused them sensations of giddiness which made them fall down in their weakness, so that they had to rest and take some food; that after having wrapped up his head he made his way by a fresh route . . .; that when the rocks resisted their endeavours, they made use of ladders, grapnels, and climbing irons; that, by this means, he got as far as a place where they no longer saw any trace of wild beast or bird, though they saw birds flying about lower down; that, nevertheless, they were not yet at the top of the mountain; that in the end he got to it, or within a very little distance of it, with the aid of certain hooked sticks, which he had had made after an extraordinary pattern.

It may be added that M. de Candale proceeded to measure the mountain, and that, though his methods are incomprehensible, his results are not far removed from accuracy.

9. Finally, we may cross the Atlantic, and note an early ascent in Mexico. By far the most remarkable ascent of the period now under review was that of the volcano Pupocatapetl (17,852 feet) by certain of the soldiers of Cortez. Cortez himself is our authority, and an extract from his despatches may appropriately be given.

In my former relation, he writes to the King of Spain, "I informed