Now the
Aar was left behind in the icy glen where it rises, and the road went
in an artificial and carefully built set of zig-zags up the face of
the cliff. There is a short cut, but I could not find it in the mist.
It is the old mule-path. Here and there, however, it was possible to
cut off long corners by scrambling over the steep black rock and
smooth ice, and all the while the cold, soft mist wisped in and out
around me. After a thousand feet of this I came to the top of the
Grimsel, but not before I had passed a place where an avalanche had
destroyed the road and where planks were laid. Also before one got to
the very summit, no short cuts or climbing were possible. The road
ran deep in a cutting like a Devonshire lane. Only here the high banks
were solid snow.
Some little way past the summit, on the first zig-zag down, I passed
the Lake of the Dead in its mournful hollow. The mist still enveloped
all the ridge-side, and moved like a press of spirits over the frozen
water, then - as suddenly as on the much lower Brienzer Grat, and (as
on the Brienzer Grat) to the southward and the sun, the clouds lifted
and wreathed up backward and were gone, and where there had just been
fulness was only an immensity of empty air and a sudden sight of clear
hills beyond and of little strange distant things thousands and
thousands of feet below.
LECTOR. Pray are we to have any more of that fine writing?
AUCTOR. I saw there as in a cup things that I had thought (when I
first studied the map at home) far too spacious and spread apart to go
into the view. Yet here they were all quite contained and close
together, on so vast a scale was the whole place conceived. It was the
comb of mountains of which I have written; the meeting of all the
valleys.
There, from the height of a steep bank, as it were (but a bank many
thousands of feet high), one looked down into a whole district or
little world. On the map, I say, it had seemed so great that I had
thought one would command but this or that portion of it; as it was,
one saw it all.
And this is a peculiar thing I have noticed in all mountains, and have
never been able to understand - - namely, that if you draw a plan or
section to scale, your mountain does not seem a very important thing.
One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to
feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in
one's hand - yet one does.
