APPENDIX.
As I put forward no claim whatever for originality in this little work, I shall perhaps escape blame from climbers, and earn some thanks from the general public, if I place in the way of the latter a poem, the greater part of which appeared in the Alpine Journal (volume xiv., page 64), and which consequently was not likely to have attracted the attention of the non-mountaineering traveller. Through the courtesy of the author, I am enabled to reprint it in full in these pages. We who spend much of our time amongst “Heaven’s nearest neighbours,” grow to love our surroundings more and more. It is often said that people ascend peaks in order to boast of their achievements. Of some, no doubt, this is true. But I cannot give better proof of how such persons are looked upon by the true mountain-climber than by quoting the lines I have referred to, with the spirit of which I, and thousands more, are entirely in sympathy. The poem, entitled, “Mountain Midgets; or, Thirty Years After,” is supposed to have been copied from a stranger’s book in a well-known mountain resort, and is headed:—
TO MY FELLOW-GUESTS.
(An Original Member of the Alpine Club speaks.)
I was with the men who conquered all the Alps, and climbing higher
Watched, from Caucasus or Andes, Phosphor soaring like a fire;
But, successors of De Saussure! You, presumably with souls,
Who treat Heaven’s nearest neighbours as the pit-bear treats his poles,
Show your foolish “forms” upon them, “cutting records” as you run,
Craving of a crowd that jeers you, notoriety—your bun!
You, who love an “Alpine centre” and an inn that’s full of people,
Where the tourists gape in wonder while their Jack beflags his steeple;
Stars, who twinkle with your axes, while girls “wonder what you are,”
Through a village, that’s the image of a Charity Bazaar;
Stars, who set beneath the wineshop, where “the men must have a drink”:
So the idler leads the peasant down the path where he will sink,
Till discredited, discarded, game for snobs who “stand a treat,”
The old guide of twenty summers touts for custom in the street!
Lads, whose prate is never-ceasing, till the table d’hôte is crammed
With the gendarmes you have collared, and the cols you’ve spitzed or kammed!
Not for you the friendly Wirthshaus, where the Pfarrer plays the host,
Or the vine-hung Osteria, where the bowls go rattling most;
Not for you the liquid splendour of the sunset, as it dies,
Not for you the silver silence and the spaces of the skies,
Known of men who in the old time lodged in hollows of the rocks,
Ere those Circe’s styes, the Club-huts, harboured touristdom in flocks.
There you lie beside your porters in tobacco fumes enfurled,
And think more of cold plum-pudding than “the glories of the world”;
There you ponder with your fellows on the little left “to do,”
Plotting darkly Expeditions that may, partially, be New;
Boasting lightly, while the brightly-beading Bouvier brims the glasses,
How you’ll “romp up” avalanche tracks and you’ll rollick in crevasses;
Dreaming fondly of the glory that such “azure feats” must get,
When your guide narrates the story in the Grindelmatt Gazette;
Gloating grimly on the feelings Hobbs and Nobbs will strive to smother,
When they learn the Gross Narr Nadel has been just “bagged” by another:
Hobbs and Nobbs, who, slily stealing to our Grün Alp telescope,
May find solace in revealing how you faltered on the rope.
Mountain Midgets—thus I hail you, who to littleness your own
Fain would drag down Nature’s Greatest, leave earth’s minster-spires alone!
Yet in vain an old man preaches. What is brought shall still be found,
Still the raw, relentless athlete make the Alps his running-ground;
Still the Greater breed the Lesser on through infinite degrees,
And the mountains have their Midgets—as the glaciers have their fleas.