CHAPTER XIII.
THE “MAIDEN” AND THE “MONK.”
A REMINISCENCE.
“Over the ground white snow, and in the air
Silence. The stars, like lamps soon to expire,
Gleam tremblingly; serene and heavenly fair,
The eastern hanging crescent climbeth higher.
See, purple on the azure softly steals,
And Morning, faintly touched with quivering fire,
Leans on the frosty summits of the hills.”
—WILLIAM CALDWELL ROSCOE.
Time, nine o’clock on a cloudless evening some years ago; place, the Bär Hotel at Grindelwald; season of the year, the middle of September, the most enjoyable month in the higher Alps, given fine weather, of all the twelve. Grindelwald lies in well-earned repose this lovely night. No more do tourists in their thousands infest village, hotel salons, and dining-rooms. No throng of touting guides and mule-drivers lingers in the courtyard; no crowd of aspiring travellers makes noisy preparation for the morrow’s excursions.
To me this tranquillity is very pleasant, as on the evening in question, before the age of railways in that district, I drive up the familiar valley, overshadowed by the huge walls of the Eiger, rising amid myriads of twinkling stars, and as I alight at the doors of the Bär, I congratulate myself upon many things.
“Now, Herr Fritz, hunt out my guide from the supper-room for me, please. What! he is not here? Is there no telegram from him? Well, this really is too bad! and the weather is magnificent! However, as he’s not here, I certainly won’t sit and wait for him; so get me a couple of guides, and to-morrow I will go for a walk amongst the mountains.”
Dinner over, enter the “couple of guides.” Here is sturdy old Peter Baumann, and there, at the door, stands old Peter Kaufmann. “Well, what shall we do to-morrow? where shall we go?” “All is good,” they say; “we will go where you like.” “Very well; then let the Jungfrau be our goal. I can start for it at 1 A.M., if you wish.” They smile pityingly and remark, “It is nine hours to the Bergli hut, so we shall have quite enough if we go there to-morrow, and up the mountain next day.” I don’t believe them, and consult Boss; he says eleven hours. That settles the question; so I retire to bed. I leave word with the guides to order provisions, and to have me called at as late an hour as is consistent with reaching the Bergli before nightfall. Result—they lay in a store of meal-soup, and other atrocities, and arouse me from slumber at 6 A.M. By eight o’clock we are well on our way to the Bäregg, and have overtaken another Jungfrau party—two Austrian gentlemen, with cheery “English” Baumann and old Christian Almer. They progress upward at a measured pace, but at the Bäregg restaurant we meet again, and spend an idle hour, while our respective guides tie up emaciated pieces of white wood into bundles of such extraordinary neatness, that they might be “property” faggots appertaining to an amateur theatrical company. Then on again, down rickety ladders, over swelling waves of ice, and up a narrow track, with the sun beating on our backs, and never a drop of water to be had. At last we all sink in a melting condition on a grassy knoll, and insist on the production of drinkables. The guides, in response, wriggle into sundry fissures of the earth, and extract therefrom cupfuls of icy water, which they dole out in niggardly quantities, exhorting their charges to be sparing in its use.
On again and up, till, with a desperate spurt, we assault the slippery slopes of the glacier, and deposit ourselves in a panting heap on some rocks facing the Bergli.
“How far to the hut, Baumann?” “Oh, two hours or so!” And it is now 11.30 A.M.! For this were we dragged from our downy couches and made to walk up burning slopes under the rays of the autumnal sun! For this were we hurried away from the seductive, though backless, benches of the Bäregg! For this were we denied our second breakfast in three and a half hours, on certain stony pathways where we would fain have halted!
11.30! Very well; here we shall remain and repose ourselves till 3 P.M.
We don’t, however. Two hours of gazing at the Eiger, the Mönch, and the Schreckhorn produce an unpleasant stiffening of the joints; so shortly after discovering this we collect our baggage—scattered over about an acre of ground—and proceed across the level glacier towards the steep snow slopes coming down from the Mönchjoch. After an hour or two of threading our way amongst huge chasms, varied by passages in tight-rope style over knife-edges of ice, we reach our hut. From here we witness an acrobatic performance without having to undergo the expense of an entry fee; indeed, the accommodation of the front row of stalls is too shamefully bad for any one to suggest that we should pay for it. Far down below us on the snow toil our fellow-travellers. From time to time one of them, who, at starting, had declared himself to be “no mountaineer,” casts himself on the white surface. The guides and his friend haul. He slithers along a little; then suddenly rights himself like a gutta-percha figure with a weight inside. On again—down again—up again, so does the party advance.
Of the supper the less said the better; and yet I have heard of Englishmen who like meal-soup!
Now to bed. Pleasant dreams, sweet repose. Repose! Yes! Audible repose for the Austrian after his gymnastic feats; for his friend, for me, even for the guides, none. Well, we count to a hundred, to two hundred, to two hundred backwards. We light lucifer-matches and examine our watches. We even contemplate cutting the cords of the ambulance arrangement, so that it may come down with a run on our slumbering companion. We are fairly worked up to a murderous state of mind, and almost of body, when—“Zwölf Uhr!” resounds in stentorian accents, and we spring from our hay, and viciously shake the source of all our discomfort. “What?” he says sleepily. “Twelve o’clock? No, thanks; no Jungfrau for me!” and thereupon turns over and loses himself once more in the land of dreams.
More meal-soup, followed by coffee, buttoning up of gaiters, packing up of all the things we ought to have left behind, uncoiling of ropes, jodeling of guides, and off we go.
What a joy to swing along over the frozen snow, from which countless ice-crystals gleam up to us with bright innocent eyes, nowise resentful that at every step they go crunch, crunch under our great clumsy boots. The glacier streams down in a silver flood to our right. The mountain-tops, bathed in brilliant moonbeams, seem to hang in the sky. The radiant beauty of the night, the still, keen air, the silence of the surroundings, all combine to make the seventeen minutes which it takes us to reach the Mönchjoch, pass like so many seconds. From here, dazzled by the startling loveliness of the view, and looking anywhere but at my feet, I carelessly slip into the bergschrund. I am pulled out, and in twenty-five minutes more we cross the Ober-Mönchjoch, and see in front of us the shining robes of our “Maiden.” A jodel from the guides, and we are running wildly down the snow slopes, across the plateau, and on to the very mountain itself. It is now very cold, with the chill of early dawn in the air. We have not gone far above the Roththal Saddle when the purple of the sky grows warmer and warmer, till at last the peak above us blushes in the rays of the rising sun. A short half-hour more, and we cluster on our goal, pitying our friend below in the hay of the Bergli.
It is early yet, and Baumann, good old sportsman that he is, says, “Now we will go up the Mönch.” “No,” I reply, “I am out of training, and to-morrow I must cross the Strahlegg. We will now go home.” But Baumann blinks his eyes, and when we reach the plateau, makes a dead halt. “The Bergli or the Mönch?” he inquires. The Mönch looks near, and I weakly give in. Our fellow-travellers here leave us. We get on to the ridge running up from the Ober-Mönchjoch. All goes swimmingly. We reach the final crest. Alas! it is shining ice from end to end. Old Kaufmann is awfully done; from time to time he crawls on to the cornice. Baumann, from behind, shouts warningly. We seem to make no progress. An hour passes. We are not half-way along the arête. “Now, then,” I say, “let me get right on to the ridge and see the view; then I am going home.” The guides protest, but I am obdurate; the cornice and the great fatigue of Kaufmann have decided me. Eventually we go down. Hurrying along the level snows, halting for as short a time as possible at the Bergli, sliding and running where we can, at last we reach the Grindelwald glacier. By now it is pitch-dark; our lantern won’t behave properly; our candle continually goes out, and we wander for an interminable time over ice and moraine. Finally, by a process akin to that of “the survival of the fittest” (having tried about every route on the glacier), we strike the Bäregg ladders, and thence hasten down to the valley.
Having described the pleasures of climbing in autumn, it is but fair that I should not ignore the single occasion on which I have experienced bad weather at that season. It was on October 2nd, a year later, that, with Ulrich Almer, Christian Jossi, and Herr Theophile Boss, I set out from the Roththal hut to cross the Jungfrau. The weather had been perfect for several days past, but on the previous evening the sunset gave signs of a change, while the lightning, which trembled along the western horizon, was another indication that a storm was imminent.
It being, therefore, doubly important to make an early start, the guides commenced by over-sleeping themselves, and it was nearly 5.30 A.M. before the hut was quitted. A lot of step-cutting retarded our progress, and it was 11.35 A.M. before we halted, three or four minutes below the summit, for our second breakfast since starting. Clouds were now drifting up on all sides; but the more serious part of the business was done, so the weather could not matter greatly to us. We remained but a moment on the top, and then amidst shrieks of “Schnell! Vorwärts!” from Jossi, we turned to descend in the teeth of a blinding snowstorm. Well, it was cool; certainly it was not cold, for we wore our gloves in our pockets. We had excellent steps, too, thanks to a party who had ascended from the Bergli a couple of days previously. The walk to the Mönchjoch was deadly dull, the only objects visible being our noble selves. Under the leadership of such guides as ours, however, we never deviated from the right direction for an instant, though the tracks were, of course, by this time entirely obliterated. A comfortable night at the Bergli was a good preparation for the descent, through waist-deep snow, to the valley.
During the evening the guides had discoursed at much length on a feature of the morrow’s route, which, with all the picturesqueness of inaccuracy, they described as an ice-wall. Now, an Eiswand conveyed to my imagination a green cliff, shiny of surface, slippery to the touch, and perpendicular in formation. All these features were, however, absent. The “wall,” which was about 170 feet in height, was certainly of ice, but the ice was coated with firm snow to a depth of several inches. I am not learned in angles, but I should say that seventy-five degrees was somewhere near the slope of the first five steps, after which the steepness steadily decreased. The last man, assisted by a bit of whipcord doubled round a piece of firewood driven in at the top, took seven minutes to come down, so the difficulties of the way were not unduly great. I am obliged to enter into these details because the character of this highly inoffensive slope was cruelly maligned by the party previously referred to, and on our return to the village, after a descent over the Zäsenberghorn, monotonous by reason of its entire simplicity, we were questioned by a curious crowd as to the horrors of the ice-wall. Our predecessors had already left the place, so we could but fight the united army of credulous persons whom they had left behind, and in whose imaginations the ice-wall of the Mönchjoch no doubt lives even to the present day as one of the terrors of mountaineering.
I have now told the worst of my experiences of autumn in the Alps. How easily hundreds of climbers could cap it with their accounts of summer in those regions!