4.15.2017 THE BERNESE OBERLAND (1956) by Arnold Lunn

Chapter 1 - Background

14  ...I made my first clumsy efforts on ski, as far back as 1898. I still ski, but such friendly comments as  my ski-ing still provokes remind me of Samuel Johnsonm's vferdict on women preachers, 'sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs. it is not well done, but you are surprised to find it is done at all'.

16  in 1191 ..the Duke Berchthold of Zahringen after he had crushed the Oberland nobles in a battle fought near the gorge of the Lower Grindelwald Glacier.  here again the significant fact transforms the scene, and recreates the romance which antedated by centuries the romance of mountaineering and ski-ing. you can still trace the remains of the old moat, and though of the castle itself not one stone remains, that forlorn mutilated hill is still haunted by 'the sound of swords unseen And the cry is of kings departed and of battles that have been.

it is indeed this patina of ancient memories which explains the unique appeal of the mountains which watched with serene detachment the coming of the Celt and the Roman and the expulsion of the Saracen....
19  ...no nation has contributed more to the development of ski-ing than the British and no region is more closely associated with these modern developments than the Bernese Oberland.

25  Life in the mountains was a dreary business during the long winter months before the invasions of winter sportsmen began, for the local pub and the Swiss card game 'jass' provided almost the only amusements when snow lay heavy on the ground.

Chapter 2 - The Gateway

28  in this enchanted region there is every combination of peak and glacier, lake and lakelet that the most exacting lover of natural scenery could demand. I admit that my appreciation of the Oberland peaks is coloured by personal associations, but I could appeal to the impersonal science of geology in support of my conviction that the north Wall of the Oberland is unrivaled for splendour of invention and variety of creative design. the primeval rocks of the Earth, which are igneous, are normally overlaid by thousands of feet of sedimentary rock, but in this region an immense fault in the course of millions of years thrust a vast layer of igneous rocks over the sedimentary rocks, with the result that the older igneous rocks, such as granite, overlay the younger sedimentary rocks, such as granite, overlay the younger sedimentary rocks, such as limestone. sedimentary rocks produce vertical steps and Dolomite towers; igneous rocks, spires and pyramids. there is a suggestion of mass production in the repetitive forms which are inevitable in ranges composed exclusively

29  either of igneous or of sedimentary rocks and it is the intricate interplay of igneous and sedimentary rock which is responsible for the individual character of the great Oberland peaks. there is therefore a sober basis of scientific fact for a remark which I made some years ago about the Oberland mountains, which had an infuriating effect on a devoted worshipper of other Alpine peaks: 'these mountains are unique. God made them and broke the mould'.

mountaineering in the Oberland is as varied as the mountain formations. there is no more exacting test of ice-craft than the north walls of the Lauterbrunnen Breithorn and Gosshorn, and few more impressive granite climbs than the North Wall of the Finsteraarhorn, one of the few climbs accomplished at the beginning of the century which still retains its old prestige. for 50 years the limestone needles of the Engelhorner above Rosenlaui have continued to delight rock-climbers, and the conquest of the North wall of the Eiger, the highest limestone peak in the alps, still remains the ultimate Alpine ambition of the mountaineering elite.

Chapter 3 - Berne

37  the Switzerland which Napoleon invaded was a loose federation of virtually sovereign Cantons, many of which had their
38  own coinage. in 1847 civil war broke out between the Protestant and the Catholic Cantons which ended in a victory for the Protestants, a victory of which modern SW is the result. the constitution is in all essentials the same as the constitution accepted in 1848, the year in which Berne became the Federal Capital and the seat of the Federal parliament. the Parliament consists of two chambers:  the national Council ..which emanates from the Cantons. when these two  chambers meet in joint session they form the Federal Assembly.
the Federal Assembly, being therefore composed of representatives of the people and of representatives of the Cantons, symbolises the double sovereignty which exists in SW.

all Federal laws, after being passed by both chambers, must be submitted to a referendum of the people, if 30,000 vote-possessing citizens, or 8 Cantons, demand this referendum. the people also possess the right to initiate legislation involving changes in the Federal Constitution.

Modern Berne

39  it is a chastening reflection for those who believer in the inevitability of progress that there are very few towns which are more beautiful today than they were at the beginning of the 19th century and far too many in which the legacy of loveliness inherited from the past has been squandered...

40  the charm of Berne is, however, due less to individual buildings such as the Cathedral than to the fusion of cultural influences in the old city. Berne was Burgundian long before it became Swiss and the cultural  influence of France was, if anything, stronger than that of the Germanies between Marginano and the Napoleonic era....

it is misleading to describe the Swiss in foreign service as mercenaries. the Cantonal regiments who served in France did so by virtue of a treaty which bound the King of France to come to the rescue of the Swiss if they were attacked by any foreign power, and it is therefore arguable that the survival of SW as an independent country owes a great deal to the Swiss in foreign service.

there  was no Germanic town whose culture was more influenced by France than Berne. to this day the descendants of some of these patrician families of Berne speak French among themselves. as the distinguished Swiss historian Dr Gonzague  de Reynold remarks, though the religion, the language and the institutions of Berne were not those of France, nowhere beyond the frontiers of France has the French influence been less deformed or better assimilated. clear evidence of this genius for assimilation can be traced in the architecture of old Berne....

41  the fusion of cultures, Germanic and latin, finds expression  not only in the building of old Berne, but also in its famous fountains, some of which are in the style of the early German Renaissance still haunted by the ghosts of the dying Gothic and others in the classic style of the French Renaissance. until 1869 every drop of water for drinking and for washing had to be every drop of water for drinking and for washing had to be laboriously carried from the fountains into the houses of the Bernese. it was literally from the fountain-head that the Bernese so often heard the first news from the outside world, for the couriers usually halted at the first fountain to refresh man and beast...

42  the Seiler fountain allegedly commemorates Anna Seiler, founder of Berne's first hospital. after passing the schutzen-brunnen, 1545, with the erect statue of a knight in armour, a kneeling bear between his legs, we reach what was once the West gate of the old town, the Clock Tower (zeitglockenturm),  rebuilt in the 15th century. try to time your walk  so as to arrive at the Clock tower when the hour is striking , particularly if there are any children in your party, for I can still recall the fascination with which as a small boy I watched the procession of bears, cocks, and other puppets which issued from the interior of the clock and circulated round the figure of Father Time...

'persons of all ages...and of all ranks, from the counsellor, or M.P., to the beggar, are never weary of gazing at the animals and hang over the wall in fond delight:  the opulent sometimes spend a halfpenny in pears of ginger bread to throw to the bears.  they watch them eating; and if the bears catch a piece of gingerbread in their paws, the happiness of the spectators

43 is complete. this is the only notion a Bernois can form of pleasure; when he reads that we soon become tired of pleasure, he understands  of feeding bears;  a man of pleasure, or a woman of pleasure, is a person who is occupied all day long in throwing gingerbread to bears..."

44  the Art Museum contains fine examples of the work of leading Swiss painters. Albert Anker is a competent painter of typical Swiss scenes, such as wrestling matches on the grazing alps, but he is a trifle too sentimental and romantic for modern tastes. no such criticism could be leveled against Max Buri's realistic  and striking studies of Swiss peasants. nor is there anything old-fashioned about Hodler, some of whose finest and most characteristic works are on exhibition at Berne.

Ferdinand Hodler was born at Berne in 1853, in humble circumstances. at the age of 18 he went to Geneva to pursue his studies...
Hodler excelled in mural paintings and in cartoons. his Retreat from Marignano at Zurich is a masterpiece of vitality and vigour. Hodler's contempt for facile beauty is so marked that the critics have occasionally accused him of the deliberate cult of ugliness.

in his Alpine landscapes he concentrates all his powers to produce a dazzling effect of light and colour...

Chapter 4 - The Town and Lake of Thun

Thun is 17.5miles by road from Berne and 13.5 miles from Interlaken.

Early History

Thun (1,840 ft) is on the site of an ancient Celtic settlement, perhaps called Dunon, and the worked 'Thun' itself is perhaps derived form the Celtic word dun of the same family as the English word 'downs'. (def - 'open, rolling, grass covered country) after the conversion of the region to christianity, the little church of Scherzligen, 1.5 miles south of the railway station, became a pilgrimage centre. ti is first mentioned in AD 761. after the Reformation the pilgrimage church was deserted, but in 925 it was restored, revealing some fascinating frescoes which had been painted over a period of 200 years. ..in recent times this little church has been reopened  for worship...

47  towards the end of the 18th century it became fashionable to visit SW.  in 1779 Goethe slept in Thun..
48  ''the towers of church and castle again came into view among the trees:  the diligence drove through the gates of the little walled town, through the Rathausplatz with its deep-shadowed arcades, up the narrow Hauptgasse, and across the bridge to the Freienhof. he was conscious of deep pleasure and excitement as he saw again the tall houses with their overhanging roofs that nearly met over the narrow street and heard the rattle of the wheels on the cobbles. even apart from Marguerite, Thun was an enchanting town. the river still flowed swiftly under its wide bridge towards the weir; the streets rose steeply towards the church on the hill. there was a market going on near the Freienhof, the stalls were piled high with apples, pears, and bloomy grapes, with cheeses and embroidered peasant wastecoats and bright striped aprons'.

Chapter 5 - From Gstaad to Spiez

in the Alps man has been co-operating for thousands of years with other geological agents in changing the face of Nature. he has carved from the primeval forests a Lebensraum for the caw, and incidentally provide not only pasture for the cow but also open slopes for the skier. I never fully realised all that the Alps in general, and the gentle rounded contour of the Gstaad mountains in particular, owe to man until I visited the Chilean lakeland, where man has only won his first skirmishes with nature, and where the mountain slopes mirrored in the Lago Todos los Santos are choked and strangled by forests. only a few scant plots have been liberated from the dictatorship of the tree. how I missed the signature of man in those primitive forests! how I longed for little villages nestling near the lake -shore, for Gothic spires or Romanesque campanili, for friendly little paths climbing past weather-beaten chalets to green grazing alps, dotted with slow-moving cattle.

Chapter 6 - Adelboden

Adelboden  (4,450 ft) is 10 miles from Frutigen, a station between Spiez and Kandersteg and is reached from Frutigen by motor bus.
A..is a good centre for matriculating as a mountaineer. the climbs, though short, are interesting.  the Tschingellochtighorn (8,990 ft) is a moderately difficult rock climb and there is some first-class rock-climbing on the Lohner. the Widstrubel (10,667 ft) is easier.

Chapter 7 - from Kandersteg to Spiez
Chapter 8 - Interlaken
Chapter 9 - The Mountain Way of Life

..(I) devote (this) chapter to the way of life  of the Berglers.  (foot - the word Bergler is derived from the word Berg, a mountain , and means mountain men or hill men.
in brief, I know the Berglers of the Jungfrau region well enough to realise how little I know them, for it is all but impossible for the plainsman to achieve genuine intimacy with the Berglers. friendship, certainly. I have every reason to know that Ruskin was realistic rather than rhetorical when he wrote of the Swiss, 'they use no phrases of friendship but they do not fail you at your need', and among the enduring friendships of my life are those with men who are either Berglers themselves of who come of bergler stock. again, I doubt if there be any sport in which the relations between amateurs and professionals are as close and as valued as the relations between an amateur and an outstanding guide, but perhaps one has to be a mountaineer to appreciate 'the feeling of more than ordinary friendship which
85  binds one to a man whom one has learned to know and to judge in that school of stern though voluntary discipline and not infrequent danger which is the very essence of serious mountineering'.
(foot - tribute by Captain J. P. Farrar to Daniel Maquignaz,  The Alpine Journal, vol. xxv.)

but friendship, however genuine, does not imply intimacy.  however cordial may be the relationship between the 'Herr' and his guide, those relations seldom lead to an intimate exchange of views. you have, as I know, to live among Berglers for 20 years before they begin to confide in you, and even then the barrier between the hillmen and the plainsmen is only partially lifted. Berglers are very secretive and though they may quarrel violently among themselves, they seldom discuss these differences with foreigners and are even curiously reluctant to comment on anything with the foreigners may have written about the Berglers.
..Belloc..write..'In such towns three quite different kinds of men meet. first there are the old plain-men, who despise the highlanders and think themselves much grander and more civilised; these are the burgesses. then there are the peasants and wood-cutters,

86  who come in from the hill-country to market and who are suspicious of the plain-men and yet proud to depend upon a real town with a bishop and paved streets. lastly, there are the travellers who come there to enjoy the mountains and to make the city a base for their excursions, and these love the hillmen and think they understand them and they despise the plain-men for being so middle class as to lord it over the hill- men: but in truth this third class being outsiders, are equally hated and despised by both the others, and there is a combination against them and they are exploited'.

every Swiss citizen is subject to the government first of his Gemeinde, and secondly of his Canton and thirdly of the Federal Government. he has the right to vote for and offer himself for election to the Gemeinderat of the Gemeinde in which he is domiciled, and it is to the Gemeinde that he pays his taxes. it is the Gemeinde which is responsible for the schools, the upkeep of the roads, etc, in some Gemeinde there is no distinction between the einwohner - that is, the Swiss citizens who are domiciled in the Gemeinde, including recent arrivals - and the Burgers who are in general the descendants of earlier settlers. in many a Gemeinde the Kuhrechte (that is, the right to graze so many cows on the communal alps) is rigidly restricted to the oligarchy of Burgers. in other Gemeinde these rights are attached to a particular property and change hands when the property is sold.
the Senns, as the communal herdsmen are called who look after the cows and transform their milk into cheese, are employed by the Gemeinde, and it is  the Gemeinde which owns the various 'alps', a term which is used not only of the mountain range knows as 'The Alps', but also of the grazing 'alps'.

on two or three Sundays in the course of the summer the owners of the cows visit the alps for a formal test of their cows' milk-producing capacity. on these particular sundays the amount of milk which each cow produce, under the anxious observation of her owner, is officially  recorded and the owner's
87  share of the communal cheese distributed at the end of the summer depends on the amount of milk which the cow produced on the above-mentioned critical Sundays. so if your cow is not feeling quite herself on these important occasions, well, it's just too bad.

in some Cantons, such as the Canton of Valais, the Cantonal Government has the right to demand that a Swiss who has been domiciled in the Gemeinde for a certain length of time must be admitted to the Burgerschaft on the payment of such money as the Cantonal Government may decide...

...the Swiss are proud of their democracy, but they are too realistic to indulge in the egalitarian cant which is becoming fashionable in our own country. I use the word 'cant' advisedly, for nobody has ever heard an egalitarian Cabinet Minister urging that the salaries of MPs and the salaries of Cabinet Ministers should be equalised. there is no pretense in these village communities that the latest immigrant from other Gemeinde is the equal of the descendants of early settlers who immigrated from the
88  Lotschen-Tal in the 13th century feel themselves the superior of those who immigrated from round the shores of Lake Brienz in the 18th century and both agree that their status is far superior to that of families who have settled in Grindelwald in this century, who are referred to by the older inhabitants as 'hereingeschlingeter', a dialect of which the literal translation would be 'those who have slunk in'.
again there is a division between the landed and the landless. a friend of mine at Murrin who had fallen out with one of the local hoteliers interjected from time to time in the story of his grievances the remark, 'he has no land. his hotel guests, they ski over my land in winter and pick flowers in summer on my land but he has no land'. I remember quoting this lament to my dear friend Adolf von Allmen of the Hotel Eiger at Murren, from whose shrewd and humorous comments i have learned so much. he replied, 'I have a little land in the Blumental. it is not much use to me, but I will not sell it because if I do they will also say I have no land'.  I am not suggesting that the Bergler equivalent of U and non-U is the distinction between L and non-L, but merely that there is no necessary connection in the mind of the Bergler between democracy and egalitarianism.

SW is often held up as a model which Europe should follow, a country in which 3 different races live together in harmony. true enough, but fortunately this harmonious co-existence does not weaken regional loyalties. Protestant Vaud and Catholic Uri will often unite in fierce opposition to new legislation merely because it originates in the Federal capital, Berne. against, whereas in England resistance to the encroaching tyranny of bureaucracy can be represented as the resistance of die-hard Tories to modern progress, in SW the resistance to centralisation is identified not with any political party but with regional loyalties. Kantonligeist, literally 'the spirit of the little canton'. is irritating to planners, but the DISUNITY of SW is at least an insurance against the Moloch of the omni-competent state.  'the love of the little platoon (def - a group of person sharing a common characteristic or activity) we belong to in society',  wrote Burke is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affection',
and nowhere is this 'germ' more active than in SW. admittedly the love of one's own little platoon occasionally inspires an unjustified distrust of other platoons, as emerges for instance in the comments reported to me by a friend of mine in Zermatt, of an old guide of Tasch, on the citizens of the neighbouring village of Randa..(these Randa people are an accursed godless nation.

here is a less extreme example of this same 'platoon'loyalty.  some years ago the organisers of a famous international ski race,  the lauberhorn cup at Wengen, had ignored the tradition that the referee of such an event should be a foreigner. a mild criticism of mine evoked the indignant reply, 'but we DID appoint a foreigner'.  the foreigner was a Swiss from Berne.

90  since I was a boy, many of the Berglers have been captured for socialism, mainly, I suspect, because the LiberalParty, the Freisinnige, failed to realise the importance of securing the alliance of schoolmasters.the schoolmasters were courted by the Socialists and ignored by the Liberals...

the Socialism of the Berglers is not the socialism of Marx.  the peasant has learned in a hard school that you have to work for and not merely vote for prosperity and that Virgil's justissima tellus, 'most just earth', gives nothing for nothing...

92'our cattle alps,  Herr Nobbs once remarked to me, 'are an excellent example of primitive Socialism'. I disagreed. a communal cow alp is an example of primitive capitalism. neither the cows nor the cheeses belong to the community. the alp is a kind of limited company of which the Senns are the directors. the owner of cow-rights invests his cows and draws interest in the form of cheese.

the trouble about capitalism is not that there are too many, but too few capitalists. the small capitalist, who owns his own land or little business, is a bulwark of freedom. it is the distribution of property, particularly property in the means of production, which is the best insurance against totalitarianism, and the totalitarians have everything to gain from the gradual transformation of independent owners into employees either of the State or of chain stores. the Swiss have always believed in the distribution of property and their legislation reinforces the instinctive bias of the Swiss against anything which tends to concentrate landed property in the hands of the few.

'it has always been very difficult, a Swiss friend of mine explained, to persuade a peasant to sell. he says 'Land is worth more than money'.
'just before the outbreak of the Second World War a rich Swiss manufacturer tried to but part of a cow alp, for he felt that if he owned the alp he would at least be sure of butter and cheese, but the Government stepped in and forbade  the sale, on the ground that he was not a farmer and would have to hire somebody to run the alp for him....
,a case in point was the reaction of the mountain people to the attempt of a brilliant businessman in Berne to start chain stores for the sale of ski, toboggans, ice-axes, etc. the mountain people felt that it was far better that natives and foreigners should pay 10% more for their sports equipment to a free man who
owned his shop and who had his roots in the village than ten per cent less to the employees of an absentee owner in Berne.
'unfortunately, the growth and development of co-operatives is tending to put the small man who owns his shop out of business...
'Swiss democracy works because it is both conservative and progressive, the Tory democracy of which Disraeli dreamed but which he never achieved.

'I came to regard SW  (writes Mr Eugene Bagger in his book, For the Heathen are Wrong) as the finest democracy in the world, a democracy based on the effort of hard thinking, and the dignity of hard work and the beauty of self-imposed discipline. it was the one democracy in Europe that was on the one hand truly democratic, and on the other hand WORKED: and this was because of all the European democracies it remained most faithful to the Christian origin of our civilisation. it was the most advanced of the European nations, because it was the most conservative. '

there are many reason fro Swiss prosperity, of which the tourist industry is far less important than the fact that the Swiss still believe in the dignity of work and that their democracy still finds a place for duty as well as for right. government and private enterprises work on the average 44 to 48 hours a week. there is no five-day week in SW, perhaps because the townsmen are influenced by the Bergler way of life.

Chapter 10 - Murren (M)

Murren (5,400 ft.) is situated just above the great cliff which overhangs the Lauterbrunnen valley...

...the view from M is perhaps the noblest view from any of the Alpine resorts. Mr Sydyey Clark in his book All the Best in Switzerland...writes:
'M is my own personal absolute, first choice of all the beauty spots in SW.  such a statement, or any ONE choice in such abundance, seems rash to the point of recklessness, and the selection has not even the merit of originality, but I cannot seem to worry much about that. I love M. I love its incomparable green shelf placed squarely opposite the Bernese alps.  I love its isolation from the scurry of the lower and larger places. I love its deep fir forests and its gentian carpets...I have seen M in almost every sort of weather, including steady rain, and it never fails to stir me with its magic, but in June i go mildly mad over it'.
96  in 1874 T.E. Brown, the Manx poet, visited M.

'so the Jungfrau (he wrote ) vis a vis you frankly through the bright sweet intervening air. and then she has such moods;  such unutterable smiles, such inscrutable sulks, such growls of rage suppressed, such thunder a avalanches, such crowns of stars
97  one evening our sunset was the real rose pink you have heard of so much. it fades, you know, into a deathlike chalk-white. that is the most AWFUL thing. a sort of spasm seems to come over her face, and in an instant she is a corpse, rigid, and oh, so cold! well, so she died, and you felt as if a great soul had ebbed away into the Heaven of heavens:  and thankful, but very sad I went up to my room. I was reading by candle-light, for it gets dark immediately after sunset, when A. shrieked to me to come to the window. what a Resurrection - so gentle, so tender - like that sonnet of Milton's about his dead wife returning to vision! the moon had risen; and there was the Jungfrau.

98 Murren, the cradle of Alpine ski-racing

M was first opened as a winter sports centre in December, 1910 by my father, Sir Henry Lunn.

my short leg and open wound, the result of a crippling mountaineering accident, relegated me to the class of those unfit for military service and I spent most of the First World War in SW as managing director of the Palace Hotel, Montana, and the Palace Hotel, Murren, the former of which was occupied by French and the latter by British, prisoners of war.

...the first modern slalom was set on the practice slopes at m on January 21st 1922. there were four competitors, who finished in the following order: J.A.Joannides, R.B.McConnell, Dame katharine Furse, G.B.E., and L.L.B.Angas...

on January 340th 1924 the Kandahar Ski Club was founded at M under the presidency of major L.L.B.Angas,M.C.,  to promote downhill and slalom racing and to campaign for the international recognition of these heretical British events. the club takes its name from the Earl Roberts of Kandahar Challenge Cup which was first held at Montana in the Rhone valley on January 6th 1911,

it was at Murren in January, 1923, that the world's senior club for lady skiers was founded - the Ladies' Ski Club. there was a time when our ladies were world-beaters. on the first occasion when a downhill race was included in the World Chanmpionship - at Zakopane, Poland, in 1929 - there was no separate race for ladies, and I insisted on entering two ladies ..Miss Doreen Elliott and Miss Audrey Sale-Barker...Miss Elliott was 14th and Miss Sale-Barker 15th.

103  Chapter 16 - Lauterbrunnen

105  ...in the 18th century there were lead and zinc mines, long since abandoned, in the upper reaches of the valley. on July 12th 1783 four Catholic miners crossed the Wetter-Lucke to receive the sacraments in the Lotschen-Tal, lauterbrunnen being by then protestant. but this was certainly not the firs traverse of the Wetter-Lucke, for it is almost certain that the Lotscherglocke (1483) in the parish church was transported across the Wetter-Lucke. this hazardous route for the transport of the heavy church bell, a present from the Lotschen-Tal to the Lotscher colony in Lauterbrunnen, was chosen because of the strained relations between the Catholics of Lauterbrunnen and the Augustinian Convent in Interlaken.
106  as far back as 1349 the Oberland peasants had risen in armed revolt as a protest against the taxes imposed by the monastery. moreover, the proposal to build a church in Lauterbrunnen had been resisted by the monks of Interlaken because the parish church of Gsteig between Interlaken and Zweilutshcinen, which till then the Catholics of Lauterbrunnen had attended, was under the jurisdiction of the monks. the good people of lauterbrunnen, however, were determined to build their church to save themselves the 6-mile walk to the parish church of Gsteig.

it was in order to avoid all risk of the Lotscher bell being confiscated by the monks of interlaken that the long and easy route round by the valleys was rejected in favour of the route across the Wetter-Lucke. the lower rim of the bell is damaged, probably because it was dented during this rough journey. from time immemorial mountain peasants have mastered the technique of carrying huge weights - wood, for instance - for the building of chalets and cowsheds on the loftier alps, and there was nothing to prevent them carrying the bell across the wetter-Lucke. the southern slopes of the  pass present  no difficulty and the snow-slopes and glaciers on the northern side, though a test of courage in those times, were a formidable obstacle.

The Arrival of the Tourists
Archdeacon William Coxe explored SW in 1776..79..85-6  and in his Travels in SW is a

107  valuable source for students of SW in the 18th century. in 1776 he spent a night at Lauterbrunnen with the local Pfarrer. 'the clergyman and his wife, he writes were very singular characters and immoderate talkers, but strongly marked with good nature and benevolence and so very desirous to oblige and furnish us with every possible convenience that their civility was absolutely embarrassing' . he adds that the livings in the Canton of Berne are 'extremely moderate'.

110  Chapter 12 - Wengen and Wengern Alp

Wengen (4,190 ft) commands one of the loveliest views in the oberland. indeed, there are few places from which the Jungfrau appears to greater advantage. it is reached in 24 minutes by train from lauterbrunnen.
the first recorded mention of Wengen is in a deed of sale dated 1268. the name itself is a corruption of Wang or Wangen, a dialect word signifying a steepish slope.

115  Leslie Stephen's (1832-1904) book, The Playground of Europe still ranks as one of the most fascinating books in alpine literature. only one writer, Hilaire Belloc, has surpassed Stephen in the subtle and difficult art of describing scenery. few alpine pioneers had a longer list of first ascents than Stephen...his spiritual home was the Oberland in general and the Wengern Alp in particular. it was among these mountains that the agnostic discovered if not a satisfactory substitute for the faith which he had lost, at least some elusive hint of a beauty which is not wholly of this world. (he writes..)

'If I were to invent a new idolatry  (rather a needless task ) I should prostrate myself, not before beast, or ocean, or sun, but before one of those gigantic masses to which, in spite of all reason, it is impossible not to attribute some shadowy personality. their voice is mystic and has found discordant interpreters; but to me at least it speaks in tones at once more tender and more awe-inspiring than that of any mortal teacher. the loftiest and sweetest strains of Milton or Wordsworth may be more articulate, but do not lay so forcible a grasp upon my imagination.

116  Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau

from nowhere is the famous trinity (named above) seen to better advantage than from Wengern Alp and this would therefore seem to be the appropriate place in which to describe, if only in outline, the human associations of this noble range.
...many of the great Alpine peakes, among them Mont Blanc, the Finsteraarhorn, Wetterhorn, Ortler, Todi and Bernina, were climbed by continental mountaineers before the foundation of the alpine Club.no mountaineers up to 1850 had a better record than the Swiss, but none of these pioneers created a school. it was the British who were the first to organise mountaineering as a sport and the firs to found a mountinieering club - the alpine Club. the Monch (13,468 ft) was first climbed in 1857 by Dr Sigismond Porges of Vienna with Christian Almer and Ulrich and Christian Kaufmann.

117  the Eiger was first climbed on August 11th 1858 by an Irishmen, Charles Barrington. his guides were Christian Almeer and Peter Bohren...
most of the early English pioneers were not natural athletes. they had enterprise and imagination and the courage not to be daunted by the tradition of inaccessibility which still clung to the great mountains. Barrington (B), on the other had, was far less impressed by the difficulties and dangers of mountaineering than most contemporary mountaineers, including, as we shall see, some guides. his experience of mountaineering was limited, but he had the courage and the natural balance of an accomplished horseman, and it was B, not the guides, though one of theme was the great Christian Almer, who seems to have been the leader on this first ascent. he described the climb in a letter to his brother Richard.
'on Thursday, August 5, 1858 (writes B) I left Grindelwald about 4 o'clock p.m. and walked up the glacier to a small hut, in which we spent the night. it was occupied by a goat-keeper. I was eaten up with fleas. next morning i started with my two guides, Almer and Bohren and a French gentleman and crossed the Starahlegg to the Grimsel, where we arrived on Friday evening, the 6th.
on the 7th I started with the same two guides, and walked to the Rhone valley and up to the Eggischhorn Hotel. on Sunday the 8th, I slept at the hotel, and in the evening started with Almer and Bohren and two men to carry provision. had about 4.5 hours walk to the Faulberg and slept in a small cave. started early Monday and got to the top of the Jungfrau and walked to Grindelwald, where I put up at the Bar-Hof. here I met some alpine men whose footsteps i had tracked down the glacier. talking about climbing, I said to them I did not think
118  much of the work I had done and was answered, 'try the Eiger or the Matterhorn'.

'all right, I said, slept with a beefsteak on my face. in the evening of the next day, the 10th, I made a bargain with the same guides for the Eiger, and walked up to the hotel on the Wengern Alp, stopping to play cards for an hour on the way and found it wuite full at 12 o'clock at night. threw myself on a sofa and started at 3.30 a.m. on Aug. 11 for the Eiger. we took a flag from the hotel. when we came to the point where one descends into a small hollow, I looked well with my glass over the face of the Eiger next us, and made up my mind to try the rocks in front instead of going up the other side, which had been tried twice before unsuccessfully. Almer and Bohren said it was no use, and declined to come the way i wished. 'all right, I said;  you may stay; i will try.' so off I went for about 300 or 400 yards over some smooth rocks to the part which was almost perpendicular. i then shouted and waved for them to come on and after 5 minutes they followed and came up to me. they said it was impossible; I said, 'I will try. so, with the rope coiled over my shoulders, I scrambled up, sticking like a cat to the rocks, which cut my fingers, and at last got up say 50 to 60 feet. I then lowered the rope, and the guides followed with its assistance. we then had to mark our way with chalk and small bits of stone, fearing we might not be able to find it on our return. we went up very close to the edge, looking down on Grindelwald, sometimes throwing over large stones to hear them crash down beneath the clouds. we got to the top - the two guides kindly gave me the place of fist man up - at 12 o'clock, stayed about ten minutes, fearing the weather and came down in four hours, avoiding the very steep place, as, looking down from above, we found out a couloir, down which we came and just saved ourselves by a few seconds from an avalanche.

'I was met at the bottom by about 30 visitors, and we went to the hotel. they doubted if we had been on the top until the telescope disclosed the flag there. the hotel proprietor had a large gun fired off, and I seemed for the evening to be a 'lion'.
119  the Eiger-Joch was first climbed on Aug. 7th 1859.  Leslie Stephen and William and George Mathews left the Wengern Alp at 4 a.m. 'the Mathews were accompanied by 2 Chamonix (def - a valley in SE France,NW of Mt. Blanc)  men, Jean-Baptiste Croz and Charlet, while I had secured the gigantic Ulrich Lauener, the most picturesque of guides.
there was from the first a decided rivalry between Lauener and the Chamonix men.

'we had already  (writes Stephen) had one or two little races and disputations in consequence, and Lauener was disposed to take a disparaging view of the merits of these foreign competitors on his won peculiar ground. as, however he could not speak a word of French, nor they of German, he was obliged to convey this sentiment in pantomime, which perhaps did not soften its vigour. I was accordingly prepared for a few dispute the next day - an annoyance which occasionally attends a combination of Swiss and Chamonix guides'.

the first great obstacle is the famous ice-fall, the condition of which varies from year to year. Hans Lauper, who with Max
120  Linniger made the first ascent of the North Face of the Monch, wrote:
'the Eiger icefall is almost unique among the galciers of the alps for its gigantic crevasses and its ice pinnacles of marvellous form and variety. it yields only to deep stratagem and craft, to the most accurate diagnosis and determined assault ...soon we found ourselves cutting up an ice fall in order to gain a  narrow icy ridge from which the next pinnacle could be attacked. a bold jump across a gaping crevasse followed by delicate balancing along the narrow ledge - below us the fathomless crevasses, above us a dangerously insecure serac. (def - a pinnacle, sharp ridge or block of ice among the crevasses of a glacier)
during the first ski ascent of the Eiger by this route we felt that Lauper had by no means exaggerated the difficulties of the ice-fall, but in recent years the glacier has changed the ice-fall. I am told that it no longer presents any great difficulties.
of this ice-fall Stephen writes:
'some of the deep crevasses apparently stretched almost from side to side of the glacier, rending its whole mass into distorted fragments. in attempting to find a way through them, we seemed to be going nearly as far backwards as forwards, and the labyrinth in which we were involved was as hopelessly intricate after a long struggle as it had been at first. moreover, the sun had long touched the higher snow-fields, and was creeping down to us step by step. as soon as it reached the huge masses amongst which we were painfully toiling, some of them would begin to jump about like hailstones in a shower, and our position would become really dangerous. the Chamonix guides, in fact, declared it to be dangerous already and warned us not to speak, for fear of bringing some of the nicely-poised ice-masses down on our heads. on my translating this well-meant piece of advice to Lauener, he immediately selected the most dangerous-looking pinnacle in sight and mounting to the top of it sent forth a series of screams, loud enough, I should have thought, to bring down the top of the
121  Monch. they failed, however, to dislodge any seracs and Lauener, going to the front, called to us to follow him'.
there are two Eiger-Jochs: the North Eiger-Joch, just to the East of the Monch, which is easily accessible by snow-slopes from the South but only accessible by an ice-slope from the North and the south Eiger-Joch, just to the west of the Eiger, which is reached by easy snow-slopes from the north but has never yet been crossed, for the southern slopes consist of exceptionally difficult rocks.

Stephen's party naturally tried the southern Eiger-joch first.

'After a short climb of no great difficulty, merely pausing to chip a few steps out of the hard crust of snow, we successively stepped safely on to the top of the ridge. as each of my predecessors did so, i observed that he first looked along the arete (e'rAt; a sharp-crested ridge in rugged mountains, then down the cliffs before him, and then turned with a very blank expression of face to his neighbour. from our feet the bare cliffs sank down, covered with loose rocks, but too steep to hold more than patches of snow, and presenting right dangerous climbing for many hundred feet towards the grindelwald glaciers. the arete offered a prospect not much better: a long ridge of snow, sharpe as the blade of a knife, was playfully alternated with great rocky teeth, striking up through their icy covering, like the edge of a saw. we held a council standing and considered the following propositions: First, Lauener coolly proposed and nobody seconded, a descent of the precipices towards Grindelwald....
...'finally, we unanimously resolved upon the only course open to us - to descent once more into our little valley and thence to cut our way straight up the long slopes to the shoulder of the Monch.

'considerably disappointed at this unexpected check, we retired to the foot of the slopes, feeling that we had no time to lose, but still hoping that a couple of hours more might see us at the top of the pass. it was just 11 as we crossed a small bergschrund and began the ascent. lauener led the way to cut the steps,
122  followed by the 2 other guides, who deepened and polished them up. just as we stared, i remarked a kind of bright track drawn down the ice in front of us, apparently by the frozen remains of some small rivulet which had been trickling down it. I guessed that it would take some 50 steps and half-an-hour's work to reach it.  we cut about 50 steps, however, in the first half-hour, and were not a quarter of the way to my mark; and as even when there we should not be half-way to the top,  matters began to look serious, the ice was very hard and it was necessary, as Lauener observed, to cut steps in it as big as soup-tureens, (def - te 'rEn; a deep and usually covered  bowl from which foods (as soup) are served; CASSAROLE) for the result of a slip would in all probability have been that the rest of our lives would have been spent in sliding down a snow-slope, and that that employment would not have lasted long enough to become at all monotonous. time slipped by, and i gradually became weary of a sound to which at first i always listen with pleasure - the chipping of the axe, and the hiss of the fragments as they skip down the long incline below us. moreover, the sun was very hot and reflected with oppressive power from the bright and polished surface of the ice. I could see that a certain flask was circulating with great steadiness amongst the guides, and the work of cutting the steps  seemed to be extremely severe. i was counting the 250th step, when we at last reached the little line i had been so long watching and it even then required a glance back at the long line of steps behind to convince me that we had in fact made any progress.  the action of resting one's whole weight on one leg for about a minute and then slowly transferring it to the other, becomes wearisome when protracted for hours.'
it was 6 p.m. before Leslie Stephen's party reached the Eiger-Joch, and they spent the night out on the lower slopes of the Trugberg just above the Concordia Platz. I have quoted a long passage from this chapter on the Eiger-Joch for the sake of the best description that i know of what it feels like to spend hour after hour on a steep ice-wall.
by an interesting coincidence, these passes, Eiger-Joch and

123  Jungfrau-Joch, which were first crossed on foot by British mountaineers, were first explored and crossed on ski by British skiers. the first ski descent of the Jungfrau-Joch to the Scheidegg was accomplished on Easter Monday, 1939. by an Anglo-Swiss party,  Denis Fox and J. Gardner with Ernst Gertsch and Adolf Rubi.

the Eiger-joch was first REACHED on ski on May 18th 1924, in the course of the first ski ascent of the Eiger by the present writer and three Swiss friends, Walter Amstutz, W. Richardet, and Fritz Amacher. this expedition is described in The Mountains of Youth.

on April 13th 1951, Miss Angela Stormonth-Darling (now Mrs M.P. DE Klee), with the guide Oskar Gertsch of Wengen, left the Jungfrau-Joch at 7.30 a.m., crossed the Obermonch-Joch, and  reached the South Eiger-Joch by easy snow-slopes. they then strapped their ski together, slung them on their backs and cheerfully prepared to carry them up and around the jagged teeth sticking out of the rige which links the two Eiger-Jochs, the ridge which Stephen's strong party had refused  to attempt. the spent 4 and a half hours on this ridge and then skied down the Eiger glacier to the Scheidegg. a splendid performance, the subject of an admirable article by Miss Stormonth-Darling in the British Ski year book of 1951.
The Mountain Motive

the essence of sport is the invention of an artificial problem for the fun of solving it. men climb mountains not to see the view from the summit but for the fun of solving the problems which mountaineering offers to its devotees. mountaineering is exacting in its demands both on mind and on body; on the mind, for route-finding, particularly in bad weather, is a severe test of man's ability to interpret the language of the rock, ice, and snow, and of his power to decipher the subtlest of clues; on the body because the techniques of rock-climbing and step cutting in steep ice demand at least as much natural ability and acquired sill as the techniques of other difficult sports.

124  now though a mountain does not cease to be a problem, however often it has been climbed, it is clear that the most attractive of mountaineering problems are those of virgin peaks or virgin ridges. the mountaineering history of the Eiger is a perfect illustration of the variety of problems which the same peake can provide. the most obvious problem was that of the first ascent, a problem which, as we have seen, was first solved in 1858. different conditions create new problems, and for this reason the first winter ascent of any great peak is carefully recorded in mountaineering histories in the case of the Eiger this first ascent was accomplished on January 7th  1890 by Messrs (def - messengers..archaic (?) FORERUNNER, HERALD) Meade and Woodruffe.

a new phase of mountaineering opened with the exploration of the High alps on ski, for ski-ing created new problems - the discovery of good ski-ing routes - and extended the range of mountain happiness by substituting for what was too often the anti-climax of a descent on foot, the rapture of a swift descent on ski. so far as the Eiger was concerned, this problem of a ski route was solved by the writer and his Swiss friends in 1924 (page 123).
may  a mountaineer was fascinated by the East Mitteleggi Ridge of the Eiger, first climbed by a famous Japanese mountaineer, Yuko Mak, with three Grindelwald guides, Fritz Amatter, Fritz Steuri, and Samuel Brawand. the southern precipices of the Eiger, difficult even by modern standards, yielded to the determined assault of two Germans, Otto Eiden-schnik and E. Moeller, in 1937.

the great North Wall, which towers above the valley of Grindelwald, is divided into two faces, the North-eastern and the North-western, the Eigerwand. the North-eastern face is a classic climb mainly on ice, perhaps the last of the classic problems which could be solved without artificial means - pitons, for instance: that is, steel pegs - and without running risks which an older generation of mountaineers regarded as unjustifiable. this was climbed on August 20th 1932 by tow eminent Swiss amateurs, Hans Lauper and A. Zurcher, and two great guides, Joseph Knubel and alexander Graven.

125  The Eigerwand - the last great alpine problem.

whereas the Lauper route was in the classic tradition, mountaineers of the old school strongly condemned all attempts on the Eigerwand, partly because the climb would be impossible without the use of pitons, but mainly because of what the old school deemed to be the wholly unjustifiable objective risks which the ascent involves.
the Eigerwand, which towers above the bridle-path from the Scheidegg to Alpiglen, is not only unrelenting in its steepness, but is often swept by snow and ice avalanches. it is subject to sudden changes of weather, changes which have often proved fatal to climbers attempting this, the grimmest of northern faces. the Eigerwand, writes Pierre Henry in that superb alpine classic ... it was the object of a sustained siege over many years, a siege in which there were may tragedies before the final triumph.
the first attempt on the Eigerwand was made by two young Munich climbers in 1935. they spent three nights on the mountain before the weather broke and they died of exposure. in 1936 two Germans and two Austrians spent three nights on the mountain. they descended in a storm and reached a point just above the Eigerwand station of the Jungfrau railway. the rocky traverse leading to easy ground was iced, and the only hope was to abseil (rope down) to the shelf just below the station. an employee of the Jungfrau railway heard their shouts and telephoned for a rescue party, which reached the station by special train and emerged from the tunnel about 100 metres below where Toni Kurz was hanging on the rope. the abseil had failed. Kurz was the only survivor. Rainer was frozen to death, Hinterstoisser had fallen to his death and Angerer had strangled himself in the attempt to rope down. it was already dark and the rescue party could do nothing but shout encouragement.

126  Early next morning the guides reached a point about 40 metres below Kurz. he had hung in a rope-sling on the face of a cliff bombarded by falling stones and swept by rain-fed torrents. and now Kurz began his last fight for life. he needed more rope, and his first task was to climb back to one of his dead companions, to cut the rope which bound him to the corpse and to attach this rope to the rope previously used for the abseil his hands were frozen and the cliff was so smooth that he could find no secure stance while he carried through these intricate manoeuvre. for SIX HOURS he forced mind and body to the limit of mental and physical endurance and then - at last - he was ready for the final effort. he lowered the two ropes, tied together and the guides (Adolf Fubi, Hans Schlunegger, and Arnold Glatthard) attached a 40 metre rope, and to this rope they tied pitons and a piton-hammer. Kurz used his last reserves of ebbing strength to drive the piton into the rock and to complete the difficult preparations with the ropes. and then very slowly he began to lower himself, the guides below saw his feet appear over the overhand. very slowly the feet crept nearer until they could all but touch the soles of his boots with their axes. and then suddenly all movement ceased. Kurz was dead. he had endured 4 nights on the mountains. he had watched his companions die. his valiant heart had resisted the terrors of storm and solitude and misery such as mountaineers have seldom been called on to endure. he had hung in his rope-sling, buffeted by the storm, but determined not to surrender. and he did not surrender. he died. in the annals of mountaineering there is no record of a more heroic endurance.
in 1937 two Italians were killed on the North Face, bringing the death roll up to 8.

on July 20th 1938, two Austrians (Kasparek and Harrer) started for the North Face. on July 21st they were joined by two Germans (Heckmeier and Vorg), who had profited by the steps which the Austrians had cut on the previous day, and overtaken them. the two parties joined forces. one climber was struck by a falling stone which ripped all the skin off his hand.

127  the combined parties were all but wrenched from their holds by snow-slides which  poured over them incessantly. enfeebled by exposure and prolonged exertion, they battled their way to the summit through a blizzard. some distance below the summit they heart the shouts of searchers who had climbed the Eiger by the ordinary route. they refused to entertain the option of rescue.(...German quote..'don't answer', we said to each other.)the Austrians had been on the mountain for 4 days, the Germans for 3. the issue between life and death was still in grave doubt. only those who have been very close to death can measure the stubborn courage of the men whose ambition forbade them to accept help in the last desperate phase of their climb.

the Eiger has lost nothing of its old prestige. it still continues to exact a steady toll of life and it is still the ambition of every modern expert. there are excellent descriptions of the Eiger Nordwand in two modern classics of mountaineering: the climbing autobiographies of Gaston Rebuffat and Hermann Buhl.
131  14 parties had succeeded in climbing the Eigerwand before Corti was helped to the summit, but the number of climbers, 17, who have been killed on this face exceeds by three the number of successful parties. by way of contrast let us note that until 1935 the Eiger was one of the few famous peaks on which no mountaineer had lost his life.
the prestige of many famous climbs has been dimmed, but the Eigerwand still retains its reputation as the most exacting test of courage and skill, since 1952 all attempts have failed. though many a life is destined to be lost on the Eigerwand, let us hope that the proportion of casualties to successful ascents will not remain at its present terrifying figure.

Chapter 13 - The Scheidegg and the Jung frau-Joch

134  the first book which I remember reading for myself was Whymper's Scrambles Amongst the alps, and when my nurse announced that I was to be taken up a mountain I was thrilled.  i was only 6 years of age at the time, and did not expect to be led up the Wetterhorn next day, but great was my disappointment when no guide with rope and axe turned up at the train to the Scheidegg. from the Scheidegg we followed the bridle -path up the Lauberhorn, and when we reached the summit i looked down the precipice that falls away sharply to the North and asked hopefully, 'do we go down there?
'no,' said my nurse...

Chapter 14 - Grindelwald

145  Grindelwald (G) (3400-3500 ft) is 12 miles from Interlaken by train or by a good road, and is the loveliest of all Alpine valleys.  many Alpine valleys are trenches fenced in by step mountain slopes, the scanty grass climbing with difficulty to terraces of smooth gneiss or limestone.

G owes much of its charm to the contrast between the majesty and power of the cliffs of the Wetterhorn (W) and Eiger (E),  and the graceful sweep of the gentler rounded slopes on the northern side of the valley. G is low enough to enjoy the beauty of a varied vegetation. above 5000 ft the vegetation tends to be monotonous, for the sombre pine rules supreme, but tends to be monotonous, for the sombre pine rules supreme, but the lower slopes of G are rich in walnut, alder, birch, and beech and the valley is a song of beauty in the spring and autumn.
the view of the W from G has only one rival in the Alps, the Matterhorn from the Riffel Alp. many gifted writers have tried to find words to suggest the elusive impression made on them by the W.

'the W (writes Sir Gavin de Beer) affords I.F. Benson the opportunity for a very striking allusion to its defiance
146  of time by introducing metaphorically the notion of patience:  'the W rose in glacier and snowfield, and its superb and patient beauty...'
samuel butler borrowed his analogies from music to describe the W: 'when I last saw the W I caught myself involuntarily humming 'And the government shall be upon his shoulder' (note - right above these words are the accompanying musical notes from Handel's Messiah)

the big shoulder of the W seemed to fall just like the run on 'shoulder'.

there is a fine view of the Schreckhorn (Sch), invisible from the village itself, from the road or train at a point where the valley opens out just above Burglauene. 'Schreckhorn' may be a corruption of 'Schraghorn', Schrag meaning peak, but for centuries the popular derivation 'Peak of Dread' has prevailed. in the Middle Ages local legends have associated the two small slopes of snow near the summit with the imprisoned souls of two nuns from the old convent of Interlaken, who broke their vows.
an early guide-book (Daniel Wall's published in 1819 thus describes the range of the Fiescherhorner between the Mettenberg and the Eiger:
'above the upper extremity of the little glacier rise on the S. the Viescherhorns, which are known by the dazzling whiteness that characterises the eternal snows with which they are covered.  from those mountains issue a log range of pointed peakes, of a whimsical appearance, that descend towards the Eigher interieur'.
the Finsteraarhorn (14,026) ft), the highest peak in the Bernese Oberland, can just be seen from the western end of the village beyond the lower peaks of the Fiescherhorner.

The Story of Grindelwald
147  'Grintel' or 'Grindel' in old High German can mean a bolt or wooden fence or barricade, and G might mean 'the wood at the wooden fence', or 'the wooden fence at the wood'.

legend and linguistic remains suggest the existence of Celtic-Helvetic settlements in and above G. the 'Heitbuhl' (heathen hill) on the Ross Alp was the dwelling-place of the first valley settler. Gidisdorf, the name given to the centre of Grindelwald, is derived from 'Gidi', the man from Gassenboden who warned the natives of an approaching cold spell.
Gassenboden, just below the peak of the Faulhorn, is the site of the legendary village of Z'Gassen. on this site and on the Grindel Alp have been found mineral components which have been identified as slag from a smithy. Herr Hans Michel, in his well-illustrated booklet, Grindelwald, which can be obtained locally in an English translation, writes:
'the mixture of iron and coal found indicates the work of miners of long ago, the mining was begun by the mountain Celts and it continued until almost all the woods of the Grindel-Alp were cut down'.

the first recorded mention of G is in a document dated 1146, in which a great part of G was given to the newly founded monastery at Interlaken.
in 1191 the barons of the Oberland rose against the imperial bailiff, Duke Berchtold V of Zahringen , and after being defeated in the plains, retreated into the valley of G and were finally routed on Good Friday, April 13th 1191.  this battle probably took place on the slopes just below the Mettenberg at Burgbuhl.  about half a mile from the gorge through which the Lower Glacier once extended into the valley.
when Berne accepted the Reformation, the peasants of G, like the peasants of Saanen...took up arms in defence of the old religion, but were finally forced to accept the Reformation.

148  the glaciers of G
the glaciers of G have been famous for centuries. in 1669 a description of them was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Archdeacon Coxe, who traveled through SW in 1776, visited these glaciers and had the bad taste to be disappointed by them. true he was badly led, for his guide, 'who by the way was very stupid and did not seem to understand his profession', strongly discouraged the adventurous Archdeacon from setting foot on the glaciers. we must forgive him this slight, for he paid a handsome tribute to G itself, which he tells us 'exhibits a scene wonderfully agreeable and picturesque'.
Byron visited the upper glacier after crossing the Kleine Scheidegg and described it as a 'FROZEN HURRICANE' (mine) a perfect simile which says more effectively in two words what Byron takes 30 words to say in Manfred:
'O'er the savage sea,
the glassy ocean of the mountain ice,
we skim its rugged breakers, which put on
the aspect of a tumbling tempest's foam,
frozen in a moment.
'in the 13th century the G glaciers (writes Herr Michel) were probably much further advanced than they are today and around 1540 they had shrunk to the smallest size known, disappearing between the northern slopes of the W, Mettenberg and Eiger. Joh. Rudolf Wyss writes that according to popular legend a pine wood grew on the bed of the lower glacier around 1560 and after the last retreat of the glacier a pine trunk almost one metre in diameter was exposed rising out of the side-moraine (def - unstratified glacial drift) at the Stieregg. between 1539 and 1563, when there was little snow and warm summers, the glaciers could no longer be seen from the Grindelwald valley and the icefield did not even reach over the upper cliffs. between 1565 and 1580, however, there were such heavy falls of snow that the valleys were blocked and many homes wiped out. in the following

149  two decades the glaciers advanced so far down as to cause destruction and damage in the inhabited part of the valley. the G chronicle of the time relates that houses and farms lying in the path of the glaciers had to be evacuated and it was only at the beginning of the 17th century that they began to retreat. but in 1777 the ice had again come down so far that the cold air from the glaciers delayed the harvest by many weeks.  from 1814 ti 1822 and from 1840 to 1855 the glaciers advanced again. so over the centuries there were alternating periods of advance and retreat. the last advance of the lower glacier was between 1915 and 1924 and that of the upper from 1913 to 1924, since then both are decreasing in size.
'many people still recall the advancing of the upper glacier, and thousands of people came to look at it. the ice pushed its way over everything, rocks, paths, plantations of young trees. in early summer the glacier moved as much as 40 cm a day and in winter 8 cm. the Lutschine river was blocked and had to make itself a new bed'.

The Mountaineers and the Mountain Men

in the first half of the century an occasional important but isolated ascent was made by enterprising Swiss. thus the Jungfrau was, as we have seen, climbed as early as 1811 by the Meyers of Aarau, the Finseraarhorn in 1829 by 2 guides from the Hasli-Tal, Jakob Leuthold and Johan Wahren and the Wetterhorn in 1844 by two guides from Meiringen.
the guides who took part in these ascents climbed because they were paid, and for no other reason. it was not the inhabitants of mountain valleys, the Berglers, who were the first to discover that mountains were beautiful and that it was fun to climb them. the Bergler only climbed when he had to as a smuggler, for instance, across the passes into Italy, or in pursuit of chamois, (def - 'shamE' -an agile, goatlike antelope on the mountains of Europe) but the Berglers were both surprised and pleased to discover that some crazy foreigners were prepared to pay guides to lead them to the summit of peaks which nobody but a man with more money than sense would wish to climb.

150  characteristic was the reaction of the Berglers to a Rumanian Coutess, Helene Kolzow-Massalsky, who made an unsuccessful attempt on the then unconquered Monch. she arrived at the final snow-ridge in a state of complete exhaustion and abandoned the attempt. in her book about her Swiss tour, the Countess, better known under her pen name of Dora d'Istria, describes her arrival on the SUMMIT, where she kissed the Rumaninan flag and raise her heart to God, but not here feet to the actual summit, some distance above the point where she stopped. she reprints a testimonial in which the guides praised her heroism and gave her credit for making the first ascent. the berglers must have cracked a lot of jokes about this testimonial, but there was one of the Countess's guides who refused to put his name to a testimonial which he knew to be bogus, a guide destined to become famous - Christian Almer. 2 years later, in 1857, Almer led Kr Porges of Vienna to the summit of the still virgin Monch. clearly not only Almer, but any one of the guides who propelled the Countess to the upper Monch-joch, where she stopped, could have repeated the climb unencumbered by the Countess, and completed the ascent on any fine summer's day. why then did Almer allow the Monch to remain unclimbed for 2 more years? probably because there was a tacit and never explicitly formulated understanding that no guide would spoil the market by climbing a virgin peak for fun when foreigners were prepared to pay handsomely for the privilege of making a FIRST  ascent. I cannot think of a single important Alpine peak which was first ascended by a party composed exclusively of Berglers, excepting when the Berglers in question were being paid to explore the route for an amateur, as was the case on the first ascent of the Wetterhorn (Wet)

if it were possible to leave a 'Herr' under the illusion that he was in point of fact making a first ascent, then nothing was to be gained by simultaneously decreasing his happiness and the number of francs in one's pocket. Peter Bohren, for instance, had certainly climbed the Wet both from Grindelwald and from Rosenlaui before he accompanied Alfred Wills on his historic

151  ascent, but he none the less allowed wills to believe that he 'was the first to scale that awful peak'.
the Wet consists of 3 peaks of approximately the same height, the central peak, the Mittelhorn (12,166 ft), being the highest. the Hasli-Jungfrau, commonly known as the Wet, is the peak which overhangs the meadows of Grindelwald, and is the only example I know of the first ascent of a lower summit of a mountain group ranking as more important than the conquest of the highest point.  the Hasli-Jungfrau, I.e. THE Wet, was first climbed on august 31st 1844 by two guides from Meiringen, Jaun and Banholzer, who had been engaged by Edouard Desor, a scientist of Heidelberg University, to find the best route to the summit.

Wills' Ascent of the Wet

Mr. Justice Wills' ascent of the Wet from Grindelwald (Grin) on sept. 15th 1854 had an important influence on the development of mountaineering. his description of the climb in his book Wanderings among the High Alps converted Leslie Stephen to mountaineering and did a great deal to popularise systematic mountaineering among the English. here is what he wrote:

'while we had been making our short halt at the edge of the plateau, we had been surprised to behold two  other figures, creeping along the dangerous ridge of rocks we had just passed.  they were at some little distance from us, but we saw that they were dressed in the guise of peasants and when we first perceived them, Lauener (L) (who was a great hunter himself) shouted excitedly, 'Gensjager!' but a moment's reflection convinced us that no chamois-hunter would seek his game in this direction; and immediately after wards we observed that one carried on his back a young fir tree, branches, leaves and all. we had turned aside a little to take our refreshment and while we were so occupied, they passed us, and on our setting forth again, we saw them on the snow slopes, a good way ahead, making all the haste they could, and evidently determined to be the first at the summit.

'after all our trouble, expense and preparations, this excited the vehement indignation of my Chamouni guides - they declared that, at Chamouni, anyone who should thus dog the heels of explorers and attempt to rob them of their well-earned honours would be scouted; nor were they at all satisfied with the much milder view the Oberlanders took of the affair. the pacific Balmat was exceedingly wroth and muttered something about 'coups de poing', and they at length roused our Swiss companions to an energetic expostulation. a great shouting now took place between the tow parties, the result of which was , that the piratical adventurers promised to wait for us on the rocks above, whither we arrived very soon after them. they turned out to be two chamois-hunters, who had heard of our intended ascent, and resolved to be even with us, and plant their tree side by side with our 'Flagge'.  they had started very early in the morning , had crept up the precipices above the upper glacier of Grin, before it was light, had seen us soon after day break, followed on our trail and hunted us down. Balmat's anger was soon appeased, when he found they owned the reasonableness of his desire that they should not steal from us the distinction of being the FIRST to scale that awful (def - 'dread') peak and instead of administering the fisticuffs he had talked about, he declared they were 'bons enfants' after all, and presented them with a cake of chocolate;  thus the pipe of peace was smoked and tranquility reigned between the rival forces.

'Once established on the rocks and released from the ropes, we began to consider our next operations. a glance upwards showed that no easy task awaited us.
'in front rose a steep curtain of glacier, surmounted, about five or six hundred feet above us, by an overhanging cornice of ice and frozen snow, edged with a fantastic fringe of pendants and enormous icicles. this formidable obstacle bounded our view, and stretched from end to end of the ridge. what lay beyond it, we could only conjecture; but we all thought that it must be crowned by a swelling dome, which would constitute the actual summit. we foresaw great difficulty in forcing this imposing

153  barrier;  but after a short consultation, the plan of attack was agreed upon and immediately carried into execution. L and Sampson were sent forward to conduct our approaches which consisted of a series of short zigzags, ascending directly from were we were resting to the foot of the cornice. the steep surface of the glacier was covered with snow; but it soon became evident that it was not deep enough to afford any material assistance. it was loose  and uncompacted and lay to the thickness of tow or three inches only; so that every step had to be hewn out of the solid ice. L went first and cut a hole just sufficient  to afford him a foot-hold while he cut another. Sampson followed and doubled the size of the step, so as to make a safe and firm resting-place. the line they took ascended, as I have said, directly above the rocks on which we were reclining, to the base of the overhanging fringe. hence, the blocks of ice, as they were hewn out, rolled down upon us and shooting past, fell over the brink of the arete by which we had been ascending and were precipitated into a fathomless abyss beneath. we had to be on the qui vive to avoid these rapid missiles, which came accompanied by a very avalanche of dry and powdery snow. one, which I did not see in time, struck me a violent blow on the back of the head, which made me keep a better look out for its successors. I suggested that they should mount by longer zigzags, which would have the double advantage of sending the debris on one side and of not filling up the footsteps already cut with the drifts of snow. Balmat's answer, delivered in a low, quiet tone, was conclusive. (note -quote in french follows translated..) 'but where would they fall, sir, if unfortunately they should slip? at present there would be a chance that we could help them; but if they slipped to the side - look, sir!'

'for nearly an hour, the men laboured intently at their difficult task, in which it was impossible to give them help; but,
154  at length, they neared the cornice and it was thought advisable that we should begin to follow them. Balmat went first, then I, then Bohren, and the two chamois-hunters, who now made common cause with us, brought up the rear. we were all tied together. we had to clear out all the foot-holes afresh, as they were filled with snow. a few paces after starting, when we were clear of the rocks, I ascertained the angle of the slope, by planting my alpenstock upright, and measuring the distance from a given point in it to the slope, in two directions, vertically and horizontally. I found the two measurements exactly equal; so that the inclination of the glacier was 45 degrees;  but at every step it became steeper; and when, at length, we reached the others and stood, one below another, close to the base of the cornice, the angle of inclination was between 60 and 70 degrees! I could not help being struck with the marvellous beauty of the barrier which lay, still to be overcome, between us and the attainment of our hopes.  the cornice curled over towards us, like the crest of a wave, breaking at irregular intervals along the line into pendants and inverted pinnacles of ice, many of which hung down to the full length of a tall man's height. they cast a ragged shadow on the wall of ice behind, which  was hard and glassy, not flecked with a spot of snow and blue as the 'brave o'erhanging' of the cloudless firmament. they seemed the battlements of an enchanted fortress, framed to defy the curiosity of man and to laugh to scorn his audacious efforts.
'a brief parley ensued. Lauener had chosen his course well, and had worked up to the most accessible point along the whole line, where a break in the series of icicles allowed him to approach close to the icy parapet, and where the projecting crest was narrowest and weakest. it was resolved to cut boldly into the ice, and endeavour to hew deep enough to get a sloping passage on to the dome beyond. he stood close, not facing the parapet, but turned half round and struck out as far away from himself as he could. a few strokes of his powerful arm brought down the projecting crest, which, after rolling a few feet, fell headlong over the brink of the arete (def - a sharp,rigid mountain ridge produced by glaciation)...ie. the movement of glaciers), and was out of sight in an

155  instant. we all looked on in breathless anxiety;  for it depended upon the success of this assault, whether that impregnable fortress was to be ours, or whether we were to return, slowly and sadly, foiled by its calm and massive strength.
'suddenly, a starling cry of surprise and triumph rang through the air.  a great block of ice bounded from the top of the parapet, and before it had well lighted on the glacier, L exclaimed,...(I see blue ski!) a thrill of astonishment and delight ran through our frames. our enterprise had succeeded! we were almost upon the actual summit. that wave above us, frozen, as it seemed, in the act of falling over,  into a strange and motionless magnificence, was the very peal itself! L's blows flew with redoubled energy. in a few minutes, a practicable breach was mad, through which he disappeared; and in a moment more, the sound of his axe was heard behind the battlement under whose cover we stood. in his excitement, he had forgotten us, and very soon the whole mass would have come crashing down upon our heads. a loud shout of warning from Sampson, who now occupied the gap, was echoed by 5 other eager voices, and he turned his energies in a safer direction. it was not long before L and Sampson together had widened the opening; and then, at length, we crept slowly on. as I took the last step,  Balmat disappeared from my sight; my left shoulder grazed against the angle of the icy embrasure, while, on the right, the glacier fell abruptly away beneath me towards and unknown and awful abyss; a hand from an invisible person grasped mine; I stepped across and had passed the ridge of the Wetterhorn!
'the instant before, I had been face to face with a blank wall of ice. one step and the eye took in a boundless expanse of crag and glacier, peak and precipice, mountain and valley, lake and plain. the whole world seemed to lie at my feet. the next moment, I was almost appalled by the awfulness of our position. the side we had come up was steep; but it was a gentle slope, compared with that which now fell away from where I stood. a few yards of glittering ice at our feet and then, nothing beneath

156  us and the green slopes of Grindelwald, 9000 feet beneath. I am not ashamed to own that I experienced, as this sublime and wonderful prospect burst upon my view, a profound and almost irrepressible emotion - an emotion which, if I may judge by the low ejaculations of surprise, followed by a long pause of breathless silence, as each in turn stepped into the opening, was felt by others as well as myself. Balmat told me repeatedly, afterwards, that it was the most awful and startling moment he had known in the course of his long mountain experience. we felt as in the more immediate presence of Him who had reared this tremendous pinnacle, and beneath the 'majestical roof' of whose deep blue Heaven we stood, poised, as it seemed, half way between the earth and sky'.

157  ...there are few climbing centers which offer such a wide range of mountaineering from the easy Wetterhorn (easy, that is, by the normal route) to the North Face of the Eiger, which is still one of the most desperate of Alpine climbs.

Chapter 15 - Meiringen, Posenlaui, and the Grimsel Pass  p172

176  The Susten Pass

the road from Meiringen crosses the limestone kirchet ridge  (600 ft high),  but pedestrians should take the alternative route through the impressive gorge of the Aar. Innertkirchen (2050 ft) , 3.75 miles from Meiringen, is the starting point for the Susten pass and the wild Urbach-Tal, which leads up to the Gauli Hut.  the Gauli glacier, below the Wetterhorn, was the scene in 1946 of the rescue of the passengers of an aircraft wrecked on the glacier.
the Susten Pass, completed in 1945, has a long history. it is the frontier between the Cantons of Berne and Uri - the word Susten being derived from Sust, a toll or customs house. in


177  general, the relations between the men of Hasali and the men of Uri have been good, and even in periods when the relations between the Protestant and Catholic cantons were strained or definitely belligerent, the occasional conflicts on or near the Susten Pass were less bitter than they would have been but for the ties of friendship formed in peace. in the first Villmergen War (1656), in which Protestant Berne and Zurich declared war on the 5 Catholic cantons of Central Switzerland, Bernese spies were caught near the Susten pass by the men of Uri and sent back with a courteous message to the bernese, who were invited to a friendly conference on the Susten Pass itself.

relations were less friendly in the second Villmergen War.  the men of Uri attached to a post on the Pass a contemptuous poem, the general sense of which was that, if the Bernese Bear wandered over the Susten pass, he would get into trouble and that he had therefore better not venture out of his nest.

on June 17.1712 the bernese advance guard penetrated some distance below the susten pass, but were taken prisoner, and once against the Urners returned the prisoners with a friendly note. a few weeks later the Urners carried off a hundred sheep, and these also were returned with a polite letter to the effect that the Urner Government did not approve of this robbery.

when the Balais was incorporated by the French Republic into the Department du Simplon, the bernese were virtually cut off from the Grimsel and other Valaisian passes. in order to keep open a commercial route to Italy, Berrne and Uri resolved to improve and widen the existing route across the Susten Pass. the magnificent modern road, perhaps the finest road across any Alpine pass, was completed in 1945 with the help of war refugees from Germany and Italy.

Chapter 16 - The Oberland Glaciers on Ski

182  the Oberland glaciers are unrivaled not only for superb ski-ing but also for the splendour of the mountain scenery which each new glacier pass discloses. there is no corner of this glacier world in which I have not left tracks of my ski, and in this concluding chapter of a book which is intended not only as a travel companion, but also as token payment for the infinite happiness which I have found among the peaks, passes and glaciers of this glorious range, let me do what i can to encourage the skiers who know nothing of glacier ski-ing, to escape if only for a few days from overcrowded pistes.
(def - a downhill ski run) and from the dictatorship of the skileteriat into the austere solitudes of Lauteraar and Wetterkessel.
inevitably I must write of things about which i have already written, a fact which raises an obvious problem. the late C.E.M.Joad was often criticised because he included long passages from earlier works in his later books. 'unfortunately, he replied, 'it isn't enough to make a good point once. you will often need to make it again in different contexts, but  when I have said something as well as I can say it, why re-write it?  I am inclined to agree, but in general it is less irritating to the reader if the author makes it clear that he is quoting from an earlier book. it is of course only the exceptional reader who would remember that he had seen such passages before, for the average reader only retains the haziest general impression of a book that he has enjoyed; sometimes he will even forget the name of the
183  author. I remember, for instance, being strongly urged by a priest to read a book which in point of fact I had written. he said it would do me good, as indeed it might have done had I not known the author. I hope therefore that the exceptional reader who has not only read but remembered my mountain books, will forgive the inclusion of two passages from The Mountains of Youth which I preferred to quote as written - in the mood of youth - rather than to re-write, for if re-written they would inevitably have been tinged by what Gibbon calls 'the brown shade which colours the end of life'.
I arrived in the Oberland exactly one year after the first pair of ski had appeared in Grindelwald.  in my life-time I have seen ski-ing evolve from the pursuit of a few eccentric individuals into the sport of the masses. ski-ing today is so different in ideals and in practice from ski-ing at the turn of the century that it has become an almost completely different sport. it was the introduction of ski-lifts and other methods of transporting a skier without effort to the heights, which has revolutionised ski-ing, a revolution which on the whole has been beneficial, for the modern skier averages ten to twenty times as much down hill ski-ing in the day as did the pioneers.  in consequence, the novice learns more in a week than the pioneers in a month. moreover, whereas 50 years ago there were many days when ski-ing was impossible either because the snow had not settled after prolonged snowfalls or because the snow had been ruined by foehn or rain followed by frost, there is no day on which the artificial snow of the piste is not skiable.
there has, however, been loss as well as gain. the pioneers were ski mountaineers and ski tourers who mastered the technique of ski-ing on NATURAL  snow, but the majority of modern skiers seldom deviate by ten yards from the piste and regard themselves as experts if they are fast on hard snow runs with every yard of which they are familiar, an illusion encouraged by the distribution of Olympic medals to ski-racers who have proved themselves masters of piste ski-ing.

184  in my youth our conception of good ski-ing was very different, and no man would have been regarded as an expert who could not lead a party safely among the mountains and who was not both fast and steady when ski-ing on natural snow over ground down which he had never skied before. the dull uniform surface of the modern piste varies little from day to day, but natural snow is never the same, and there is a subtle fascination in mastering the scholarship of snow as shaped by frost and thaw, sun and wind.
ski-racing is a great sport, but it is only one branch and by no means the most important branch of ski-ing. the highest from of ski-ing cannot, praise be to heaven, be tested, competitively. Olympic medals are not and should not be awarded to ski-mountaineers, for mountaineering is not a sport. it is a vocation.
The Glaciers of Winter

on january 8th 1897 a party of five germans (if V. de Beauclair who came from Freiburg in Baden and who though naturalized a citizen of the Argentine, may be reckoned as a German) left Guttannen near Meiringen to cross the Oberland on ski. their names were W. Paulcke, V. de Beauclair, R. Monnichs, Dr. Ehlert and W. Lohmuller. they crossed the Oberaar-Joch and Grunhorn-Lucke, attempted the Jungfrau, and descended to the Rhone valley via Bel Alp.

in the course of January, 1909 the present writer with a Genevese, F.F. Roget and Kandersteg guides made the first end-to -end ski traverse of the Oberland from Kandersteg to Meiringen.

it may perhaps help the young skier to understand what Alpine ski-ing meant to the pioneers if I evoke some fugitive memories of that 6 day tour among the Oberland glaciers in 1909. neither the Lotschberg tunnel nor the Jungfrau railway was built and the first link in our end-to-end traverse of the Oberland glaciers was he petersgrat pass, which we crossed from Kansdersteg to the Lotschen-Tal on January 2nd-3rd.
185  our equipment was primitive. detachable sealskins had only just come into the market and I alone possessed them. (foot - for the benefit of the reader who does not ski I should explain that long strips of sealskin are attached by straps to the running surface of the ski to prevent back-slipping on the ascent.) the guides tied knotted string round their ski. my own more primitive method before I acquired sealskins was, as I have already said, to dip the ski into a stream or water-trough so that the running surface was covered with a thin film of ice which gave a grip on the ascent.

our technique was as primitive as our equipment. we used the single stick or two sticks held together, to help out our turns. none of us could have passed the modern third Class test, but owing to our mastery of stick technique we were quite as stead and not very much slower on really difficult snow than a modern second Class runner. our bindings gave ample play, and consequently in those days broken lags were exceptions . this was just as well, for whereas the modern piste skier finds himself on a rescue sleigh within a few minutes of breaking a leg, a broken leg in January in the High Alps might have had the most disastrous consequences.
on January 4th 1909 we left the little inn at Kippel long before the dawn. I remember Venus dipping behind the curve of the Lotschen-Lucke, and the Bietschhorn pyramid, an opague shadow silhouetted against the transparent darkness of the star pointed corridors of unending space. ours was a reward denied to the modern skier who saunters out after a late breakfast and hooks himself on to a ski-hoist. a skier who is transported rapidly from the valley to the heights has neither the time nor the inclination to study and to enjoy the subtle transitions of tone and snow texture, the snows de-chilled rather than warmed by the newly risen sun and the same snow shot with incipient hints of colour at noon.
I remember, after all these years, our first halt just after the sun had scattered the shadows on the slopes which we were ascending. the tracks of skiers who had crossed the pass in the

186  opposite direction glinted in the young light. they were the only tracks in all that vast snowscape.
it was to take us 12 hours from Kippel to the Lotschen-Lucke, but a modern skier can reach the Lotschen-Lucke in an easy 2 hours from the Jungfrau-Joch railway station. if he is energetic he can breakfast in Wengen or the Scheidegg, take the ttrain to the Jungfrau-Joch, cross the Lotschen-Lucke, catch the Lotschberg train at Goppenstein, and return to Wengen that same night. there have been days when as many as a thousand skiers have crossed the Lotschen-sucke. indeed after a spell of fine weather there is often a well-defined piste down the pass. not so in 1909. between Paulcke's crossing of the Oberland in 1897 and ours in 1909 hardly a dozen ski parties crossed the Lotscen-Lucke, and we were the first to cross from West to East.
'in the first years of this century, my friend Othmar Gurtner once said to me, I could put a name to almost every ski track which I saw between the Kleine Scheidegg and the Schiltgrat.  so few people skied that one knew their different styles.
we could not identify the tracks of the skiers who had crossed the Oberland glaciers from Est to West, tracks which we only lost 4 days later in the Grimsel Gorge, and I have never to my knowledge met them since,and yet this record of their adventures etched into the snow seemed gradually to create a fragile but definite link between us. some afterglow from the flame of speed still seemed to linger in the spoor which dived down the slopes they had taken straight, some lingering echo of the hiss of powder snow in the banked curves thrown up by their ski as they linked their turns down the steeper slopes.
it is difficult if not impossible to convince a downhill-only skier that climbing can be enjoyable and yet there is a very real enjoyment in a long steady ascent on ski which begins before the dawn and ends after the sun has set. there is indeed a growing sense of achievement as one watches the ever-widening horizon. I can remember after all these years the precise point at which on that January day in 1909 we first saw the distant range of
187  Mont Blanc climb into the Western sky above a minor buttress of the massive Bietschhorn.

slowly the morning merged into the afternoon and the afternoon into the evening. just below the final slope to the pass we made a last halt. far away in the West the rose of sunset withered on the dome of Mont Blanc, and the cold austere light of the winter moon gradually triumphed over the fading twilight.
the Lotschen-Lucke is the one obvious exit from the long Lotschen valley. throughout those long hours my eyes had returned again and again to the magnet of our pass, that gentle curve slung between the Sattelhorn and Aletschhorn. what lay beyond? as a boy I had explored the lesser Faulhorn range above Grindelwald, but had only seen the Aletetschhorn glacier from the distant peaks. this was, indeed, my first big expedition in the central chain of the Oberland. I knew from photographs what to expect, but I was eager to translate anticipation into things seen, and as we approached the watershed my excitement rose. I remember looking up  and calculating that two more long zig-zags would carry me on to the pass. a final spurt and the Finsteraarhorn lifted itself above the watershed and the pass was ours. the last webs of light, spun by the fading sunlight, were dissolving on the summit crests as we looked down on to the glacier valley to the Concordia Platz, where three great glacier rivers meet. this vast expanse of shimmering snow, bewitched by the magic of the moon, seemed less to reflect the moon than to radiate its own serene light from some secret source, as if the snowfields were indeed semi-transparent. and suddenly our pass ceased o be a mere watershed between valleys and was transformed into a magic casement opening on to snow which no man would ever cross and revealing changeling peaks which no man would ever climb.

I wish I could find the words to describe or even faintly to suggest the numinous wonder of moments such as these. (foot - quotes St. Augustine..'if nobody asks me I know. if I wish to explain I do not know'.)
188 two days later we climbed the Finstraarhorn. I stripped to the waist and the sun poured its bounty on to my unsheltered body. a perfect hour of windless peace passed like 5 minutes. I made no attempt to record on the tablets of memory the details of a panorama which included every peak of importance from Mont Blanc to the Ortler, from the Dauphiny to the Dolomites, and what I still remember  is less the individual aristocrats in this hierarchy of mountain majesty than the benediction of the alpine sun insinuating iridescent colour into a monochrome of back rock and white snow and so long as life lasts i shall not forget the last moment of that memorable day.

we had finished supper in the Finsteraarhorn hut and before turning in for the night I stepped outside. the glorious pyramid of the Finsteraarhorn soared into the arch of heaven, where the stars had abandoned competition with the radiance of the moon. facing the hut I could see the Grunhorn-Lucke, which we had crossed from the Concordia, the soft shimmer of its moonlit snows pencilled by the pattern of our ski tracks, the snow thrown up by swings showing like the delicate burr of a silver point etching. seldom have I know a happiness so unquestioning and so complete. even if the weather broke, nothing could stop us completing our high-level traverse. all our anxieties were at end. we had done what we had set out to do.
in all achievement there is an element of self-satisfaction, but less in unambitious mountaineering than in most human activities. it needs an Everest expedition to make the headlines, for the desperae conquest of terrible cliffs, such as the North Faces of the Matterhorn and Eiger, only evokes a momentary ripple of interest outside the mountain brotherhood and even within that brotherhood. as I knew full sell, few would know and fewer still would care, whether the Oberland glaciers had or had not been traversed from end-to-end on ski.


The Glaciers in Spring

I hope that this chapter, the last of the book, will be of some use to skiers who turn to it for information about the ski-ing possibilities of the Oberland Glaciers, but my main purpose is to convert the reader who does not ski into a skier and the piste skier into a ski-mountaineer. the chapter therefore falls
190  naturally into three parts:  the first part an attempt to interpret the austere appeal of the glaciers in mid-winter, the second the enchantment of glacier ski-ing in may, and the third the story of a patriarchal expedition of farewell to the mountains of my youth.

the pioneers of ski-mountaineering explored the glaciers in january, but it was not long before we discovered the delights of the glaciers in the late spring. the dry powder-snow of mid-winter is soon ruined by the winds which sweep the exposed crests and glaciers of the High Alps, but a spell of fine weather which is no guarantee of good ski-ing in january inevitably produces perfect snow conditions in May and in June, for the snow which melts in the day is transformed into hard crust at night, and the skier has only o time his descent for the period when the crust is softened, but only superficially softened, by the sun to ensure perfect ski-ing even before the crust has been softened by the sun. film crust gives excellent purchase both for straight running and also for turns and purchase was all important before steel edges had been invented and when our ski were ash with rounded edges. I remember the misery of a continuous slither down hard crust which refused to soften in the cold north wind which had defeated us on the Zinal-Rothorn.
I discovered the joys of spring ski-ing during the First World War. after being rejected more than once by the Army  (and the navy),  I found work at Murren, where many badly wounded British officers and men were interned.
among those whom I taught to ski at Murren were three officers who became my dearest friends: Ralph du Boulay Evans, who had been shot in the arm; Bob Middleditch, whose leg had been broken by a shell; and Tristram Carlyon,  who had lost an eye. Evans, who was a goood slow bowler, had been twelfth man at Cambridge. after leaving Cambridge he joined the Geological Survey. Carlyon was a Cornish squire with estates in
191  Cornwall and new Zealand, and Middleditch was a regular officer. we differed on many things and Evans and i argued fiercely, but the four of us were united by our love of the mountains, and there are few closer ties than this. love of the mountains, be it noted, not love of mountaineering. one can love mountains without being a mountaineer.  no man loved mountains more passionately than Ruskin and no man attacked mountaineers more bitterly: 'You have made racecourses of the cathedrals of the earth... the alps themselves which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear garden, which you set yourself to climb.

again, one can be a moutaineer and yet not love mountains, for there are cragsmen for whom the mountains are a mere arena for athletic achievement, rock gymnasts who would dismiss as high-faluting fancy Ruskin's perception of 'that mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the alp'.

similarly, there are skiers for whom mountains, to adapt Ruskin's phrase, are greased planes rather than soaped poles and there are skiers for whom the ecstasy of a swift descent is only one element in the happiness of mountain ski-ing.
I remember once inviting  a charming cavalry officer, with whom my friends and I had skied more than once in the low hills, to join us in a glacier tour. we had hardly left the Junfrau-Joch before we began to suspect that we had blundered, and our suspicions were confirmed when we reached the Concordia hut.  whereas we were overjoyed to have returned to this glacier shrine, our friend was ill-at-ease and unmoved by the beauty of the great sweep of glaciers which meet at the Concordia. we exchanged glances of dismay and i, who was responsible for his inclusion in our party, felt that sense of guilt which afflicts those who have secured the election to an exclusive club of a candidate who has subsequently proved to be completely unclubbable. whereas we settled down with delight to the fine confused feeding of a typical club hut mean, he seemed to have lost his appetite. after supper I took him aside and suggested tactfully that perhaps he was not enjoying the expedition as much as he had
192  hoped. if so it might be best to cut his losses. we would lend him a guide to take him back to the Jungfrau-Joch next day if he thought this a good idea. he did think it a good idea, and so did we.

my friends were not mountaineers as this term is understood by the Alpine Club, but they were mountain-lovers whose happiness on these glacier tours was an unspoken but none the less eloquent tribute to 'the chief things of the ancient mountains and the precious things of the lasting hills'.

let me, in my effort to tempt others to explore this paradise of glacier ski-ing, recall the best of many a glorious expedition with the friends whom I have lost, a ski tour in may, 1918.  starting from the Jungfrau-joch, we crossed the Monch-joch,  Grunhorn-Lucke, Oberaar-joch, and Lauteraar-sattel and brought our tour to an end at meiringen. we climbed en route the Fiescherhorner and one of the three wetterhorn peaks. the tour was memborable not only for the variety of views but also for the variety of snow surfaces ranging from perfect powder to spring snow at its best (sulz on the Fiescherhorn, film crust on the Oberaar-joch). never have I enjoyed glacier ski-ing more. here is a contemporary account of a perfect glacier run.
'we were cautious until we had spotted the bergschrund, but then we let our ski have their heads. the summit slopes are concave, like a shallow funnel cut in two, an ideal ski-ing slope. we swept from side to side, running across the central flow and using the bank to turn on just as a motorist uses the baked turns of a racing track. long, linked Christianias followed swift and sure. as the ski cut round, the superficial film of soft ice fell away and rippled down the slope with a sound like the soft splash of a glacier stream , an underlying melody that disputed the bolder music of the wind. near the end of the summit slopes we set our ski for a straight run. we crouched down, the wind sang its last song, the steepness relented into a long unchanging gradient; the breeze died away, four rapid swings and four breathless ski-runners faced the slope whose swift joys they had squandered all too soon.

193  'we threw ourselves on the snow and looked up at our pass. we had run down nearly two thousand feet in just under five minutes, but moments such as this cannot be measured by the prosaic standards of time. theirs is a music which goes on echoing in one's heart, a music which never wholly dies away. for many months the four of us had skied together and sometime one and sometimes another had skied well, but this was one of those days when the four of us were ski-ing on the top of our form. there is a subtle joy in doing something delightful not as an individual, but as a member of a team, a pleasure which is nowhere greater than in ski-ing, especially when you know your friend's ski-ing as thoroughly as you know his jokes, his best swing as well as you know your own virtues and his weak turns as completely as he knows your vices solos have their charm, but there is a ski-ing joy known only to a quartette of friends, all of whom ate moving well together, placing their swings at the right point and neither over-running the leader nor impeding those that follow.

'Glacier running has its own peculiar charm. on these long unchanging gradients the sense of personal motion often dies away. it is the foreground that rushes up to meet you, and your ski seem a narrow skiff anchored in midsteam, a slender boat that sways gently as the river sweeps round the bows. in late spring the illusion is emphasised when you reach  the limits of the snow kingdom, where the sun has cut wrinkles in the ageing forehead of winter, and where the snow ids furrowed and moulded like waves of a ground swell. as the speed dies the hills adopt a sedater measure. the magic network of dancing shadow and fugitive light sobers into separate and successive ridges. the wind that thunders in one's heart melts into a fitful breeze. the snow in front of the ski hunches itself together and thrusts the ski backwards. suddenly the world gives a little jerk, the mountains stop moving and you know that you are a creeping thing once more'.  (foot - The Mountains of Youth, pp. 140-2)
but the glaciers in May have even greater attractions than

194  perfect ski-ing. it is good to begin the day linking Christianias down the perfect snow of some alpine peak, and surely the perfect end to such a perfect day is to stroll down through meadows prodigal in the splendour of gentian and buttercup. in the hierarchy of mountain beauty there are no memories that rank higher than those of May valleys seen from the heights.

those who are content to worship the mountains from below understand neither the splendour of the mountains nor the real beauty of the valleys in spring. never has Grindelwald seemed lovelier to me than from the Lauteraar-Sattel. in May, a pass which proved to be not only the watershed between two valleys but also between two climates.
'Winter is never so visibly queen of the High Alps as in the month that witnesses her passing, for the soft, damp snow of may finds a purchase and resting-place on rocks from which the dry powder of winter is torn off by the fist gust of wind.
'we had toiled for hours up the long glacier, and only the rose of dawn and the blue of the sky had relieved the monotony of black and white. then, as the last stage of our climb approached, we found ourselves on a steep snowy wall with our horizon limited to the few feet just in front of our noses. suddenly, one thrust one's arms through the cornice where Knubel's axe had broken a breach - a last struggle - a breathless effort and we had burst the prison gates.

'we looked down from the Lauteeraar-Sattel on the sudden glory of Grindelwald in its spring dress. we gazed on another world, another climate, another season. it is contrast only that brings home the miracle of may. many years ago I returned from the parched brown of Greek hills, and as the train carried me through sussex fields in all their april freshness,  I saw something which I had had to leave England to discover. so in the Alps, if you live in the valleys, the slow approach of may dulls the surprise of her beauty, but the mountaineer who passes days among the dazzling monotony of the glaciers and then suddenly reaches some little window looking our on to the world of men,

195  discovers with a shock that the commonplace fields seem transfigured, their greenness incredibly different. you realise that you have never really seen this new and wonderful green, a colour with a suggestion of the transparent, as if the view was painted on stained glass through which the sun shines. the effect is intensified by the contrast with snowy expanses in the immediate foreground. (foot - pp147-8)
a long, hot traverse from the Lauteraar-sattel brought us to the Rosenegg Pass, from which we climbed the Rosenhorn, the first of the three Wetterhorn peakes to be conquered as far back as 1844.  after returning to the Rosenegg we skied down the Wetterkessel, one of the loveliest of alpine snow -fields and yet rarely visited by ski-runners. British skiers are a little lacking in enterprise. they take the train to the Jungfrau-Joch and thence re-join the valleys by the classic routes, Lotschen-Lucke,  Galmi-Lucke, and Oberaar-Joch, but seldom attempt any variations. the expedition which I am describing - one of the finest in the alps - was not repeated by any British skier until by a Downhill-Only Club party including R.E.H.Edmonds, who crossed the Lauteraar-sattel in may, 1954, and wrote an entertaining account of the tour in the British ski Year Book for that year.

'we ran down to the end of the glacier, and took off our ski somewhere below 6000 feet. we had left the snow, and had come back to the promised land which we had seen from the lauteraar-satte.  man is perverse; he leaves the green valleys with delight and wanders among the glaciers with joy, only to discover that he is haunted among the snows by the beauty that he has deserted, only to long for the welcome of meadows and streams and flowers and trees scented with the promise of May. a few days later and he will be looking from those same meadows at the peaks of old adventure, and if three or four days of tantalising fair weather follow, he will scarcely find strength to resist their upward call.

196  'running water is always beautiful, but it is only among the may mountains that you feel the full magic of the oldest music in the world.
'our ski seemed oddly out of place in this shrine of May, where everything proclaimed the triumph of the sun over the snow. the firm touch of the turf, the scent of the pines, the very taste of spring which lingered in the breeze, the serenade of the streams - such was the feast of the five senses which may re-welcomed her prodigals' return from the land of winter. (foot - 152-3)

never have I known a mountain journey on which all the conditions were perfect: perfect companionship, perfect views, and perfect ski-ing.
'perhaps, wrote Evans from Mesopotamia, perhaps the four of us will get together for another may run when we have gone over to the 'other side', as Lodge puts it. we shall never get all the conditions right again in this life'.
Evans was killed a few years later in a motor smash, Middleditch died about the same time, and Carlyon returned from new Zealand to fight once again for England in the second world War and died in a military hospital. but, as Evans said, we may get together for another may run if we deserve and attain the Beatitude which sill, i hope, include the heavenly archetypes of mountains and ski-ing.

Farewell to the Glaciers

I gave up mountaineering in 1926, as my wife and young family would have been ill-provided for if i had dropped into a crevasse.  my last ski tours were in the oberland range...

197  Adolf Rubi (R), a former Swiss champion, was one of the guides on that memorable tour, and by a strange coincidence R was also one of the guides in a big party when I returned to the Oberland glaciers thirty years later. on the day after my 67th birthday I started for what was intended to be a farewell visit to the Oberland Glaciers. my companions were Kaspar von Almen (A), a fine skier and an expert rock-climber even by modern standards, a Swiss friend of his, Karl Brunner (B), Colonel Archie Crabbe, (C) and his 13 year old son Colin, Hns Graf to llk after me, and Rubi to look after the Crabbes.
it was delightful to get on a Jungfrau-Joch train packed with tourists, and to feel all the lovely old climber snob feelings and superiority complex, and to thank God (like Hilaire Belloc) that 'I was delivered from being a tourist'. and not one of 'a crowd of drawn, sad, jaded tourists that had come in by a train'. we passed through the little tunnel, put on our ski and slid down on to the glacier. and the mountains, which did not interest me
198  when seen from the windows of the Jungfrau-joch station, suddenly looked different. as if they were not exactly welcoming me back, but in an aloof, detached fashion, were conscious that I  had returned.  this was where I belonged. this was home.
we skid down to the Concordia Platz on fair snow, wind-packed, but not icy. on the short traverse round, Kaspar did some wonderful turns in film crust.

here was the parting of the ways. to the left the easy option, to the right the Hollandia hut on the Lotschen-Lucke - 2.5 hours away for an average party, 4 hours as it proved for an elderly gentleman, quite out of training. we paused for a few minutes while the guides put on our skins, but did not lunch, which was a mistake as higher up it was too cold to stop. while the skins were being put on something in the setting brought back the past with a sharp click, as when things suddenly come into focus. it was just as if the intervening years had vanished without trace and i had picked up the dropped threads of my mountaineering life - and i was young again (an illusion which did not last long).
I had been in Germany for a month and had only been at the Scheidegg for a few days and a 500 ft climb back to the Scheidegg from the foot of Black Rock was the only climbing I had done the whole winter.
I had left my mitten gloves at Murren and had borrowed a pair, which I stupidly put over gloves with fingers. I ought to have borrowed, as i did next day, a pair of fingerless woollen mitts. at one point i had to take my glove off and my fingers began to freeze up and never got warm until i reached the hut. for there was a bitter north-easterly wind blowing and by a maddening trick of fate, though at 14000 ft the wind was east to north-east, there was also a cold west wind blowing down the pass, so that one had a perishing wind in one's face, which of course aggravated one's exhaustion.

I had thought that the mountains had nothing more to teach me so far as the sensation of extreme fatigue was concerned.  I was wrong. I learned quite a lot about brother body in extremis

199   before I became dimly aware of Kaspar pouring something hot down my throat. this was tea with a drug good for the heart. I found myself lying in a bunk with the Crabbes, father and son, rubbing my wrists - the best way to get circulation back into numbed fingers - an I vaguely remember two Italians making pleasant noises. Italian is a lovely language at all times, but especially so for compliments. they had been told who I was and there were a lot of 'bravos'  for the old gent who had made it. Brandy and hot coffee soon put me right and in less that an hour i was fully restored. tired, of course, but not collapsed - a deflated rather than a punctured tyre.

I went outside to see my last alpine sunset from the heights. just below was the Lotschen-Lucke, and I remembered those first moments on the pass 46 years before and the Oberland peaks, which I had still to climb, in all the luminous magic of the full moon.

I shall never forget that moment and I shall never see again what i saw then, for to climb is to lose something of the first adoration of the unknown. those mountains which I saw then were built of the fabric of dreams, not the solid peaks of granite of whose rough embrace one still carried some memory in one's finger-tips. but there was gain as well as loss. in fact I think  the view moved me more now than it did in 1909. up the long snow-slopes from the Concordia my friends and I had dragged our ski on one expedition, swept down triumphantly on another. there is nothing so empty as a room once tenanted by somebody one loved. but it is so easy to people a distant mountain with the mountain friends that have gone, because they would not be visible even if they were still climbing it. I remembered St Augustine's (latin quote...'mine eyes sought him and he was not there and I hated every place because it held him not'.)  but the mountains hold the dead.

I went back into the hut and opened by chance my little Greek Testament at St John 21.18.  Our Lord said to St Peter:  'when you were young you girded yourself and went where you wished but when you are old another will gird you and carry you
200  where you don't wish to go'. an omen, perhaps...No more mountains...but though another girded me - Hans Graf putting on my ski - I still went where I wanted to.

the old hut in which i had slept in 1909 has been pulled down and the new one is on the same site,  it is very comfortable as huts go. i did not find it easy to sleep because i was over-tired - and again i went outside. there was no moon, but the sky was cloudless and the shadowy mountain masses faded into the sharp star-pointed sky. how often have i stood outside a hut at night and rejoiced in the certainty of fair weather and in the prospect of a great climb!

I fell asleep somewhere about 3 a.m., and I remember a drowsy moment between sleeping and waking which in its own odd way evoked by youth more vividly than anything else in the expedition. I heard the mutter of the guides preparing breakfast. there is something indefinably High alpine in the sound of guides mumbling to each other in a hut. and then i emerged into the sharp outlines of a new day and realised with a pang that i should probably never again wear those wooden, felt-lined slippers of an Alpine hut or eat a boring breakfast with suppressed excitement. far in the west, Mont Blanc, cloud-capped the previous evening, occupied the western sky and i remembered the full moon reflected from Mont Blanc as i reached the pass on the evening of january 4th 1909. and there was the aiguille du Tour, my first peak and the first Alpine hut in which I had ever slept, 54 years before.

Hans Graf and I left and i left at 7.20 a. m. and crossed from the sun on the eastern slopes into the shadows of the western ones. it was very, very cold and the first 3000 ft of downhill ski-ing was abominable - icy crust varied by caked powder - but mostly hard. my longest run this winter had been 1200 ft, and my game leg has been increasing troublesome in recent years. it gave me hell.

as I stood up again  and prepared to resume the descent I looked up at the lotschen-taler Briethorn cliffs and suddenly they seemed tranformed. the majesty, might and dominion of

201  the great mountains seemed concentrated in the windswept snow and flutings of ice and savage ribs of granite leading to the peak which I had climbed many, many y years ago. any tripper who emerges from the Jungfrau train and walks to the Jungfrau-joch can see cliffs as majestic as those I saw, but the accidents of rock and ice are like the notes on a piano and the emotions which they awaken depend on whose fingers touch the notes. or, to put it another way, (note - german quote) which saying of Goethe's may be paraphrased: 'the outward form of the mountain can be seen by all, its beauty and significance only by those who contribute something of themselves.'

and as the old spell asserted its power on my mind I felt a moment of utter misery because I knew that my mountain past had been recalled in a moment of parting.  I manage in the lowlands to forget who much I miss my above-the -snow-line life, but now I knew what I had lost.

the Crabbes had waited, hoping for the sun to soften the snow, which it did not do appreciably on the upper slopes, and they skied past us and disappeared  into the valley. very soon that lovely music of spring torrents ruffled the silence and there came glimpses of young grass below. this was different from 1909. paradoxically the temperatures had been far lower on this spring trip than in that january, the snow far more wintry - icy slabs instead of the pleasant powder - but now we were getting down to the spring. I was glad that my last glacier tour should be perfect in its contrasts both in climate and in snow, the extremes of winter and the soft beauty of the alpine spring.

Blatten is, I think, rather more than 5000 ft below the pass and here the journey ended. we found our friends in the pub. my back was terribly tired from the strained position on the ice, so I surprised the innkeeper by lying flat on the floor for 10 minutes - after which i was more than ready to attack his excellent Spiegeleier and Fendant. there is now a motor road up to Blatten and this lovely and once remote valley is losing its charm. 'horrible modern houses are being build, said Adolf

202  Rubi,  'in the old days there were many houses built on which only the axe and saw were used'.

i left my friends, wandered up the village street and mourned