It was no part of the
general ascent, but a mere obstacle which might have been outflanked.
At another time I stopped for a good quarter of an hour at an edge
that might have been an indefinite fall of smooth rock, but that
turned out to be a short drop, easy for a man, and not much longer
than my body. So I went upwards always, drenched and doubting, and not
sure of the height I had reached at any time.
At last I came to a place where a smooth stone lay between two
pillared monoliths, as though it had been put there for a bench.
Though all around me was dense mist, yet I could see above me the
vague shape of a summit looming quite near. So I said to myself -
'I will sit here and wait till it grows lighter and clearer, for I
must now be within two or three hundred feet of the top of the ridge,
and as anything at all may be on the other side, I had best go
carefully and knowing my way.'
So I sat down facing the way I had to go and looking upwards, till
perhaps a movement of the air might show me against a clear sky the
line of the ridge, and so let me estimate the work that remained to
do. I kept my eyes fixed on the point where I judged that sky line to
lie, lest I should miss some sudden gleam revealing it; and as I sat
there I grew mournful and began to consider the folly of climbing this
great height on an empty stomach. The soldiers of the Republic fought
their battles often before breakfast, but never, I think, without
having drunk warm coffee, and no one should attempt great efforts
without some such refreshment before starting. Indeed, my fasting,
and the rare thin air of the height, the chill and the dampness that
had soaked my thin clothes through and through, quite lowered my blood
and left it piano, whimpering and irresolute. I shivered and demanded
the sun.
Then I bethought me of the hunk of bread I had stolen, and pulling it
out of my haversack I began to munch that ungrateful breakfast. It was
hard and stale, and gave me little sustenance; I still gazed upwards
into the uniform meaningless light fog, looking for the ridge.
Suddenly, with no warning to prepare the mind, a faint but distinct
wind blew upon me, the mist rose in a wreath backward and upward, and
I was looking through clear immensity, not at any ridge, but over an
awful gulf at great white fields of death. The Alps were right upon me
and before me, overwhelming and commanding empty downward distances of
air. Between them and me was a narrow dreadful space of nothingness
and silence, and a sheer mile below us both, a floor to that
prodigious hollow, lay the little lake.
My stone had not been a halting-place at all, but was itself the
summit of the ridge, and those two rocks on either side of it framed a
notch upon the very edge and skyline of the high hills of Brienz.
Surprise and wonder had not time to form in my spirit before both were
swallowed up by fear. The proximity of that immense wall of cold, the
Alps, seen thus full from the level of its middle height and
comprehended as it cannot be from the depths; its suggestion of
something never changing throughout eternity - yet dead - was a threat
to the eager mind. They, the vast Alps, all wrapped round in ice,
frozen, and their immobility enhanced by the delicate, roaming veils
which (as from an attraction) hovered in their hollows, seemed to halt
the process of living. And the living soul whom they thus perturbed
was supported by no companionship. There were no trees or blades of
grass around me, only the uneven and primal stones of that height.
There were no birds in the gulf; there was no sound. And the whiteness
of the glaciers, the blackness of the snow-streaked rocks beyond, was
glistening and unsoftened. There had come something evil into their
sublimity. I was afraid.
Nor could I bear to look downwards. The slope was in no way a danger.
A man could walk up it without often using his hands, and a man could
go down it slowly without any direct fall, though here and there he
would have to turn round at each dip or step and hold with his hands
and feel a little for his foothold. I suppose the general slope, down,
down, to where the green began was not sixty degrees, but have you
ever tried looking down five thousand feet at sixty degrees? It drags
the mind after it, and I could not bear to begin the descent.
However I reasoned with myself. I said to myself that a man should
only be afraid of real dangers. That nightmare was not for the
daylight. That there was now no mist but a warm sun. Then choosing a
gully where water sometimes ran, but now dry, I warily began to
descend, using my staff and leaning well backwards.
There was this disturbing thing about the gully, that it went in
steps, and before each step one saw the sky just a yard or two ahead:
one lost the comforting sight of earth. One knew of course that it
would only be a little drop, and that the slope would begin again, but
it disturbed one. And it is a trial to drop or clamber down, say
fourteen or fifteen feet, sometimes twenty, and then to find no flat
foothold but that eternal steep beginning again.
