LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 1904 HAYMAKERS IN THE VAL MAGGIA The loads carried by the women are enormous in size, what they are in weight I don't know; but many of them are larger than those shown in the picture. One load I measured was twice the height of the woman. CHAPTER I T HE T REASURES OF THE S NOW 1 CHAPTER II H OW TO SEE M OUNTAINS 22 CHAPTER III H OW M OUNTAINS ARE MADE 46 CHAPTER IV A LL S ORTS AND C ONDITIONS OF A LPS 72 CHAPTER V T HE M OODS OF THE M OUNTAINS 101 CHAPTER VI M OUNT

J OHN R USKIN , in a fine and famous passage, describes the effect of a first view of the Alps upon a young and sensitive mind. He was at Schaffhausen with his parents. "We must have spent some time in town-seeing," he writes, "for it was drawing towards sunset when we got up to some sort of garden promenade—west of the town, I believe; and high above the Rhine, so as to command the open country across it to the south and west. At which open country of low undulation, far into blue—gazing as at

I H AVE borrowed the title of this chapter from that of an excellent book, recently published, called How to Look at Pictures . The natural man might suppose that such were questions on which there is nothing to say. The picture is before you, and all you have to do is to open your eyes and let the image of it fall on your retina. What can be more simple? Yet that is not all, because the eye only sees that which it brings with it the power of seeing. How much more one sees in the face of a frien

"O LD as the hills" is not a comparison that would be considered apt if invented to-day, for we now know that, geologically speaking, the greatest mountain ranges are of recent elevation, and that even low hills are seldom of great antiquity. It was not till men became climbers, and so grew to have an intimate acquaintance with mountains in detail, that a recognition of the rapid degradation which all mountains are suffering was clearly obtained. To look at the Matterhorn from below is to behold

R ELATIVELY few Alpine climbers of the present generation know the Alps. They know a district or two, perhaps, though even that amount of knowledge is not so common as might be expected. It were truer to say that the normal present-day climber knows a special kind of climbing and only cares to go where that is to be found. The popular kind of climbing to-day is rock-climbing. The new mountaineer is a specialist rock-climber. Having once fallen in love with rock-climbing, he devotes himself to it

M OUNTAINS do not merely vary from district to district, but from time to time. Were it not so, how soon should we tire of any single outlook or the neighbourhood of any one centre! They change from hour to hour with the incidence of sunlight, and from day to day with the passing season of the year. They change also, often from moment to moment, with the inconstancy of the weather. In fact they are never twice absolutely the same. In the heyday of our scrambling enthusiasm, we perhaps regarded t

I N the chequer-boards of most men's lives, the squares they can allot to the joys of mountain travel are coincident with summer seasons. Thus most of us cannot know the snow mountains all the year round, but only in their warm-weather garb. It may be claimed that then they are at their best, but such claims, in the case of Nature, are untenable. Nature is never or always at her best. One star may differ from another star in glory, but not in beauty; for beauty is in the eye that beholds, rather

I N a previous chapter reference has been made to the varied types of scenery which belong to different divisions of the Alpine chain, and the briefest kind of characterisation of those varieties was attempted. But the Alps, and indeed almost all the great snow ranges of the world, possess side by side within a single neighbourhood varieties of peaks sufficiently divergent to be capable of grouping and classification. For example, in the Mont Blanc group, there are domes of snow, needle-points o

A P EAK is primarily a thing to be looked at. It was only after the aspect of peaks had smitten the imagination of men that the desire to climb them arose. The climbing impulse is subordinate to the eye's delight. A pass, on the other hand, is a thing to be climbed and looked from, but only in a minor degree to be looked at. It is an experience rather than a sight. Few passes indeed are striking objects in a view. The Col Dolent, the Güssfeldtsattel, the Col du Lion, and a few more are imposing

I NCIDENTALLY , in the course of the preceding chapters, glaciers have been frequently referred to, but they form so prominent a feature in Alpine scenery as to demand a chapter alone. For, in fact, it is the glaciers that most of us think about when we turn our minds to the Alps. Minor ranges have walls of rock as precipitous and grand, gullies as difficult to climb, valleys as beautiful and even as profound as the Alps. Other European ranges are for a longer or shorter part of the year snow-co

I T is to be feared that the reader, whose persistence has availed to carry him thus far through the adventure of this book, may bring an accusation against me, on the ground that each form and type of scenery, as in its turn it has come to be discussed, has been described in language of too superlative praise, as though it and it alone were pre-eminent above all other Alpine forms and types. Let me forthwith confess that the accusation is well founded; for the fact is that, whether the attentio

I T has often occurred to me, when travelling over glaciers and among mountains, seldom or never before visited by men, how much the impression they produce upon a first spectator loses by lacking the human interest. Of course some stray huntsman or dumb and forgotten native may have been there before, but if the fact is unknown to us, it is as though he had not existed. When climbing Illimani, the great Bolivian mountain, the human interest accompanied us up the lower slopes. Here were old fiel

T O the purely Alpine traveller, Volcanoes are not a matter of interest, because there does not exist a single volcano in the Alps, nor, so far as I am aware, even the ruins of one. Volcanic rocks there may be, but we are not concerned with rocks except in so far as mountains are built out of them. To the mountain-lover, however, in the broad sense—and it is for such I am writing—volcanoes are as interesting as any other definite type of peak, and I therefore propose to devote this chapter to a