Leaves in the Wind Part 10

Do not tell me I have never been to these places and a thousand others like them. I swear that I have. I have traversed them all in the kingdom of the mind, and if you will give me a map and a rainy day (like this) I will go on a holiday more entrancing than any that Mr.

Cook ever planned. It is not taking tickets that makes the traveller.

I have known people who have gone round the world without seeing anything, while Th.o.r.eau could stay in his back garden and entertain the universe.

But if maps of the unvisited earth have the magic of romance in them, maps of the places you have known have a fascination no less rich and deep. They, too, take you out on a holiday, but it is a holiday of memory and not of the imagination. You are back with yourself in other days and in other places and with other friends. You may tell me that this was a dreary, rainy morning, sir, and that I spent it looking out over the dismal valley and the sad cornfields with their stricken crops. Nothing of the sort. I spent it in the Bernese Oberland, with an incomparable companion. Three weeks I put in, sir, three weeks on the glaciers. See, there, on this glorious map of Frey's, is Murren, from whence we started. In front is the mighty snow ma.s.s of the Jungfrau, the Monch and the Eiger, shutting out the glacier solitudes whither we are bound.

There goes our track up the ravine to Obersteinberg and there is the Mutthorn hut, standing on the bit of barren rock that sticks out from the great ice-billows of the Tschingelhorn glacier. Do you remember, companion of mine, the mighty bowls of steaming tea we drank when we reached that haven of refuge? And do you remember our start from the hut at two o'clock in the morning, roped with our guide and with our lanterns lit--and the silence of our march over the snow and ice beneath the glittering stars, and the hollow boom of distant avalanches, and the breaking of the wondrous dawn over the ice-fields, and the unforgettable view as we reached the ridge of the Petersgrat and saw across the Rhone Valley the great mountain ma.s.ses beyond--the Weisshorn, the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, and the rest--touched to an unearthly beauty by the flush of the new-risen sun? And the scramble up the Tschingelhorn, and the long grind down the ice-slopes and the moraine to the seclusion of the Lotschenthal? And then the days that followed in the great ice region behind the Jungfrau; the long, silent marches over pathless snows and by yawning creva.s.ses, the struggle up peaks in the dawn, and the nights in the huts, sometimes with other climbers who blew in across the snows from some remote adventure, sometimes alone as in that tiny hut on the Finsteraarhorn, where we paid three and a half francs for a bunch of wood to boil our kettle?

There is the Oberaar hut standing on the ledge of a dizzy precipice.

Do you remember the sunset we saw from thence, when out of the general gloom of the conquering night one beam from the vanished sun caught the summit of the Dom and made it gleam like a palace in the heavens or like the towers of the radiant city that Christian saw across the dark river? And there at the end of the journey is the great glacier that leaps down, seven thousand feet, between the Schreckhorn and the Wetterhorn, to the gracious valley of Grindelwald. How innocent it looks on this map, but what a day of gathering menace was that when we got caught between the impa.s.sable creva.s.ses, and night came on and the rain came down and ... But let the magic carpet hasten slowly here....

It was still dark when Heinrich of the Looking Gla.s.s leapt up from our bed of hay in the Dolfuss hut, lit the candle and began to prepare the breakfast. Outside, the rain fell in torrents and the clouds hung thick and low over glacier and peaks. Our early start for the Gleckstein hut was thwarted. Night turned to dawn and dawn to day, and still the rain pelted down on that vast solitude of rock and ice. Then the crest of the Finstraarhorn appeared through a rent in the clouds, patches of blue broke up the grey menace of the sky, the rain ceased.

Otmar and Heinrich hastily washed the iron cups and plates and swept the floor of the hut, and then, shouldering our rucksacks and closing the door of the empty hut, we scrambled down the rocks to the glacier.

It was 8.15 and the guidebooks said it was a seven hours' journey to the Gleckstein. That seemed to leave ample margin; but do not trust guide-books in a season of drought when the creva.s.ses are open.

This wisdom, however, came later. All through the morning we made excellent progress. The sun shone, the clouds hung lightly about the peaks, the ice was in excellent condition. Heinrich, who brought up the rear, occasionally broke into song. Now, when Heinrich sings you know that all is well. When he whistles you are in a tight place. For the rest he is silent. Otmar, his brother, is less communicative. He goes on ahead silently under all conditions, skirting creva.s.ses, testing snow-bridges to see if they will bear, occasionally pausing to consult his maps. Once only did he burst into song that day--but of that later. Otmar is an autocrat on the ice or the rocks. In the hut he will make your tea and oil your boots and help Heinrich to wash your cups and sweep the floor. But out in the open he is your master. If you ask him inconvenient questions he does not hear. If you suggest a second breakfast before it is due his silence as he pounds forward ahead humiliates you. If your pace slackens there is a rebuke in the taut insistence of the rope.

It was eleven when we halted for our cold tea and sardines (white wine for Otmar and Heinrich). The pause gave Heinrich an opportunity of taking out his pocket looking-gla.s.s and touching up his moustache ends and giving a flick to his eye-brows. Heinrich is as big and brawny as an ox, but he has the soul of a dandy.

It had been easy going on the furrowed face of the ice, but when we came to the snow slope that leads to the Lauteraar saddle our pace slackened. The snow was soft, and we sank at each step up to our shins. Otmar eased the pa.s.sage up the slope by zigzagging, but it was one o'clock when we came face to face with the wall of snow, flanked by walls of rock, which form the "saddle." Otmar led my companion over the rocks; but decided that Heinrich should bring me up the snow face.

Step cutting is slow work, and though Otmar, having reached the top of the saddle, threw down a second rope, which Heinrich lashed round his waist, it was two o'clock before that terrible wall was surmounted, and we could look down the great glacier that plunged seven thousand feet down into the hollow where Grindelwald lay with its red roofs and pleasant pastures, its hotels and its tourists.

We had taken nearly six hours to surmount the pa.s.s; but we seemed, nevertheless, to have the day well in hand. Four thousand feet down on a spur of the Wetterhorn we could see the slate roof of the Gleckstein hut. It seemed an easy walk over the glacier, but in these vast solitudes of ice and snow and rock, vision is deceptive. The distant seems incredibly near, for the familiar measurements of the eye are wanting.

The weather had changed again. Clouds had settled on the mighty cliffs of the Schreckhorn on our left and the Wetterhorn on our right. Mist was rolling over the pa.s.s; rain began to fall. We cut short our lunch (cold tea, cold veal, bread and jam), and began our descent, making a wide detour of the glacier to the right in the direction of the Wetterhorn. We descended a rocky precipice that cleaves the glacier, crossed an ice slope on which Otmar had to cut steps, and came in view of Grindelwald, lying like a picture postcard far down below--so immediately below that it seemed that one might fling a stone down into its midst.

At half-past three it began to dawn on me that things were not going well. Otmar had, during the past three weeks, been the most skilful of guides over most of the great glacier pa.s.ses of the Oberland and up many a peak; but so far we had seen nothing like the condition of the Grindtlwaldfirn. The appalling slope of this great sea of ice makes a descent in normal times a task of difficulty. But this year the long drought had left open all the yawning creva.s.ses with which it is seamed, and its perils were infinitely increased.

Again and again Otmar sought a way out of the maze, taking us across perilous snow bridges and cutting steps on knife-edges of ice where one looked down the glittering slope on one side, and into the merciless green-blue depths of the creva.s.se on the other. But wherever he turned he was baulked. Always the path led to some vast fissure which could be neither leapt nor bridged. Once we seemed to have escaped and glissaded swiftly down. Then the slope got steeper and we walked--steeper and Otmar began cutting steps in the ice--steeper and Otmar paused and looked down the leap of the glacier. We stood silent for his verdict. "It will not go." We turned on the rope without a word, and began remounting our steps.

It was half-past four. The mist was thickening, the rain falling steadily. Below, the red roofs and green pastures of Grindelwald gleamed in the sunlight of the valley. Nearer, the slate roof of the Gleckstein on its spur of rock was still visible. Two hours before it had seemed but a step to either. Now they seemed to have receded to another hemisphere.

For the first time there flashed through the mind the thought that possibly we should not reach the hut after all. A night on the glacier, or rather on the dark ridges of the Wetterhorn! A wet night, too.

The same thought was working in Otmar's mind. No word came from him, no hint that he was concerned. But the whole bearing of the man was changed. In the long hours of the morning he had led us listlessly and silently; now he was like a hound on the trail. The tug of the rope became more insistent. He made us face difficulties that he had skirted before; took us on to snow-bridges that made the mind reel; slashed steps with his ice axe with a swift haste that spoke in every stroke of the coming night. Once I failed to take a tricky snow ridge that came to a point between two creva.s.ses, slipped back, and found myself in the creva.s.se, with my feet dancing upon nothing. The rope held; Otmar hauled me out without a word, and we resumed our march.

Heinrich had been unroped earlier and sent to prospect from above for a possible way out. We followed at his call, but he led us into new mazes, down into a great cavern in the glacier, where we pa.s.sed over the ruined walls and b.u.t.tresses of an ice cathedral, emerging on the surface of the glacier again, only to find ourselves once more checked by impa.s.sable gulfs.

It was now half-past five. We had been three and a half hours in vainly attempting to find a way down the ice. The mist had come thick upon us. The peaks were blotted out, Grindelwald was blotted out; the hut was no longer visible. Only an hour and a half of light remained, and the whole problem was still unsolved. The possibility of a night on the ice or the rocks began to approach the sphere of certainty. My strength was giving out, and I slipped again and again in the ice steps. A kind of dull resignation had taken possession of the mind.

One went forward in a stupor, responsive to the tug of the rope, but indifferent to all else.

Otmar was now really concerned. He came from a valley south of the Rhone, and was unfamiliar with this pa.s.s; but he is of a great strain of Alpine guides, is proud of his achievements--he had led in the first ascent of the Zmutt ridge of the Matterhorn that year--and to be benighted on a glacier would have been a deadly blow to his pride.

He unroped himself, and dashed away in the direction of the ridge of the Wetterhorn that plunged down on our right. We watched him skimming across creva.s.ses, pausing here and there to slash a step in the ice for foothold, balancing himself on icy ridges and vanishing into a couloir of the mountain--first depositing his rucksack on the rocks to await his return. Five minutes pa.s.sed--ten. Heinrich startled the silence with an halloo--no answer. A quarter of an hour--then, from far below, a faint cry came.

"It will go," said Heinrich, "get on." We hurried across the intervening ice, and met Otmar returning like a cat up the rocks. Down that narrow slit in the mountain we descended with headlong speed.

There were drops of thirty and fifty feet, slabs of rock to cross with negligible foot and hand holds, pa.s.sages of loose rock where a careless move would have sent great stones thundering on the heads of those before. Once Heinrich lowered me like a bale of goods down a smooth-faced precipice of fifty feet. Once he cried: "Quick: it is dangerous," and looking up at the crest of the Wetterhorn I saw a huge block of ice poised perilously above our downward path.

The night was now upon us. We were wet to the skin. A thunderstorm of exceptional violence added to the grimness of the setting. But we were down the ridge at last. We raced across a narrow tongue of the glacier and were safe on the spur of rocks where we knew the Gleckstein hut to be. But there was no light to guide us. We scrambled breathlessly over boulders and across torrents from the Wetterhorn, each of us hardly visible to the other in the thickening mist, save when the blaze of lightning flashed the scene into sudden and spectral clearness. At last we struck a rough mountain path, and five minutes later we lifted the latch of the hut.

"What is the time, Heinrich?"

"Half-past eight."

"What would you have done, Otmar, if we had been benighted?"

Otmar did not hear. But as he got the wood and made the fire, and emptied the rucksacks of our provisions, he began to sing in a pleasant tenor voice. And Heinrich joined in with his full ba.s.s.

And presently, stripped of our wet clothes and wrapped in blankets, we sat down to a glorious meal of steaming tea--in an iron teapot as large as a pail--tongue, soup, potted chicken, and jam.

"That was a narrow escape from a night on the mountains," I said.

"It is a very foolish glacier," said Heinrich.

Otmar said nothing.

Five hours later Otmar woke us from our bed of hay.

"It is fine," he said. "The Wetterhorn will go."

As I look up it is still raining and the sad sheaves still stand in the sodden fields. But I have been a journey. I have had three weeks in the Oberland--three weeks of summer days with a world at peace, the world that seems like a dream we once had, so remote has it become and so incredible. I roll up my magic carpet and bless the man who invented maps for the solace of men.

ON A TALK IN A BUS

I jumped on to a bus in Fleet Street the other evening and took a seat against the door. Opposite me sat a young woman in a conductor's dress, who carried on a lively conversation with the woman conductor in charge of the bus. There were the usual criticisms of the habits and wickedness of pa.s.sengers, and then the conductor inside asked the other at the door how "Flo" was getting on at the job and whether she was "sticking it out."

"Pretty girl, ain't she?" she said.

"Well, I can't see where the pretty comes in," replied the other.

"Have you seen her when she has her hat off? She's pretty then."

"Can't see what difference that would make."

"She's got nice eyes."

"Never see anything particular about her eyes."

"Well, she's a nice kid, anyway."

"Yes, she's a nice kid all right, but I can't see the pretty about her--not a little bit. Pretty!" She tossed her head and looked indignant, almost hurt, as though she had received some secret personal affront.

I do not think she had. It was more probable that on a subject about which she felt deeply she had suffered a painful shock. She liked "Flo," thought her "a nice kid," but mere personal affection could not be permitted to compromise the stern truth about a sacred subject like "prettiness."