The Alps Part 10

But when all the dramatic stage of their existence is over, and the fires are out and the earth around has ceased from quaking; when trees have gathered over the lava torrents and rich vegetation has covered up cinders and ash; when the sulphurous vents are become sapphire pools of clear water overshadowed by foliage, and all the ghastly details of tragedy are covered up by the splendid garments of tropical vegetation; then you may approach and ascend if you please, but it will not be as a climber, for the climber is one who seeks the naked places of the earth, and does not wander for choice in gra.s.sy dells and tree-embosomed shades.

He, however, who should converse about volcanoes and say no more than this, would leave a most false impression upon his hearers, for Nature always provides compensations for her sincere and humble lovers, and even in the barest volcano she has not failed. The very rapidity with which they yield to destructive forces leads to results not discoverable in stronger and more resolute peaks. Frost, winter, and snow breach their sides with exceeding facility. Torrents dig gullies into them. The very winds blow their substance away. Hence it comes that a volcano in active process of destruction often provides detailed scenery of astonishing grandeur and boldness. Its vertical-walled gullies, its cliffs, its castellated ridges are like none other. There is no aspect of durability about them, no signs of h.o.a.ry antiquity, none of the dignity that belongs to archaean rocks. They are visibly in rapid decay, yet, for all that and even because of it, they are strangely imposing with a sort of rococo grandeur. If the Meije and Ushba are Romanesque, if the Matterhorn, Masherbrum, and Siniolk.u.m are Gothic, we may describe the world's shattered volcanoes as Flamboyant. They boast a greater and more unusual variety of forms, a multiplicity of details that bewilders.

The spiry exuberance of Milan Cathedral can be paralleled in the neighbourhood of Aconcagua. Nowhere are b.u.t.tresses more emphatic, points of rock in perilous precipitance of decay more plentiful, cliffs more abrupt, the skeleton of the mountains more nakedly displayed.

Yet better deserving of note is the brilliancy and variety of the colouring by which volcanic rocks are often characterised. The local colouring of Alpine rocks is seldom rich. The Dolomites indeed have a reputation for the richness of their tints, but it is mainly derived from the sunrise and sunset colouring which they reflect so brilliantly that it almost seems to proceed from them. The general effect of Alpine rocks is some variety of grey or brown, the tone of which is deepened by contrast with the snows. Except in volcanic districts, it is only in Spitsbergen, and at one or two spots in the Himalayas, that I have observed the local colouring of the rocks to form a prominent factor in the beauty of a mountain view. There indeed the red and yellow sandstones display their rich tints with great effect, so that the colour, shining over the wide expanses of Arctic glacier and snow-field, becomes a main element, and reduces the forms of the peaks to a secondary consideration. Yet in Spitsbergen this only happens in a relatively small area, within Kings Bay.

In volcanic districts, however, the colouring of the rocks is almost always remarkable. It seems as though Nature had emptied her whole palette upon them. Hardly any tint, from white to black, is missing.

Other mountains depend for their colour upon the atmosphere. These are independent of that source. Their own colour is predominant. All they ask for is transparent air and bright sunshine to display them. Their combination is so unusual, their chord so unlike any to which we are accustomed in ordinary natural surroundings, that they cannot fail to be the chief element in the view. That is why photographs of volcanic scenery convey an impression so different from actual sight. The normal blues, greens, and browns of the temperate habitable regions; the black, greys, and whites of the snowy world; the blue sea, white sand, and red cliffs of a Devonian coast: such chords of colour are usual; the eye expects them. Even a tropical landscape, except for its occasional blazes of blossom, belongs to the same category. Autumnal glories, first of golden harvest, later of iridescent foliage, are an accustomed sight.

But all these schemes of colour belong to a wholly different category from that which volcanic rock-ma.s.ses display. They bring together, combine, and contrast a whole series of unusual tints. Their purples are not the purples which we elsewhere know. Their greens are not the greens of vegetation. Their yellows are not the yellows of a blossoming field or a fading forest.

Were I to catalogue in a list the colours I have seen in a volcanic panorama, it would little serve, for it is not the names that count but the special significance of each, and that is not capable of brief statement. Such a scene as I am recalling astonishes by the mult.i.tude and close juxtaposition of an apparently countless number of coloured strata. It looks as though Nature had kept changing her mind and staining each successive ejection with a different tint. Sometimes there comes a considerable thickness of a certain coloured rock, but above and below it thin strata will succeed of all sorts of colours. If such a series of deposits is intersected by a cliff, its face will be ruled across by a polychrome mult.i.tude of bands. Oftenest, however, the whole ma.s.s will be riven into gullies and weathered into pinnacles of all heights and varieties. Or short cliffs and elbows will alternate with slopes of debris. In such cases any sense of order in the succession of colours may be lost. A blue pinnacle will stand before a yellow one, and that beside a red with a green top. In one b.u.t.tress purple may predominate, in another grey, in a third orange.

The effect on slopes of debris is often most peculiar. Naturally they derive their tint from that of the rocks above, out of whose fragments they are formed. If those rocks are a ma.s.s of a single colour, such will be the tint of the debris slope. But if they be fed by the splintered fragments of two different beds, as for example one red, the other yellow, the slope below will be a kind of orange, varying in tone according to the supply of the two ingredients. Sometimes a slope will be, let us say, purple throughout its upper portion till it comes down to a point where white rocks emerge. Below them it will be streaked as by splashes of whitewash. In the floor of a valley, where all these ingredients mix together in sandy intimacy, the general tone will be of a light neutral tint, the colour being destroyed by the intimacy of the mixture, the minuteness of the fractures, and the multiplicity of the incidence and reflection of light.

Where there is snow aloft its melting will enforce the local colour of the rocks or debris over which it flows. Similar will be the effect of a spring bursting out of the hillside. These waters will themselves be brilliantly stained, and if they chance to flow over a bed of snow, they will stain it in their turn. I have seen a blood-red area of snow produced in this fashion.

The reader may not derive from the foregoing description an idea of any effect produced by the reality save strangeness. One should be a landscape-painter of remarkable skill to convey any other. But the actual effect in nature, when the first shock of strangeness has worn off, is an effect of remarkable beauty. The colours in their great variety and mult.i.tude do in fact harmonise and agree together. Being fashioned in one work-shop, the work-shop of Nature, the self-same that fashions the eyes and intelligences of men and implants in them the idea of beauty as part of nature's law, they do not appear chaotic or inharmonious to the natural man. On the contrary they are bonded together and informed by the sense of a common origin, a common purpose, and a common meaning. When this unity is felt and perceived by the eye, not only do the forms, for all their jagged and splintered multiplicity, harmonise into compositions of remarkable grandeur, but their rich and varied colouring enn.o.bles and distinguishes those forms.

Views of this kind affect the imagination and impress themselves upon the memory more than most. Amongst the many wide vistas or actual panoramas which a mountain-climber of a few years' experience must have seen, he will doubtless freely admit that there are few which he can recall to his memory with any completeness. The first he ever saw overwhelmed him with their intricate elaboration. Later on, when he knew better what to look for, his susceptibility to impression was already lessened. The same is likely to be true of valley views. How many of them can we conjure up in any detail? The Matterhorn from Zermatt, Mont Blanc from Chamonix, and a few other similarly well-known prospects we know by heart; but of how many valley views, that we have only beheld once or during a short interval, can we form a visual image in our minds. My own experience leads me to conclude, though without making any allowance for a possibly large personal equation, that desert views are more memorable than those in which fertility predominates. Various views in the naked Indus valley are firmly fixed in my mind, though none of them were more than briefly beheld. The same is true of the scenery in the desert volcanic regions with which I am acquainted: the neighbourhood of Arequipa in Peru, parts of the provinces of Oruro and Potosi in Bolivia, the surroundings of the volcanoes of Ascotan in Chile, and of Aconcagua in the Argentine. In all these districts the scenery I beheld remains photographed in my memory with exceptional vividness, not merely its strangeness but its beauty, and the element in the scenery most vividly memorable is the element of colour.

In fact both colour and forms are strange to an eye accustomed to look upon the fertile and normally habitable regions of the earth. This is true not merely of the mountains themselves and their const.i.tuent parts but of all their surroundings. I have never looked down upon the boiling interior of an active volcano, such as travellers to Hawaii are privileged to behold on the top of Mauna Loa. That must be a sight pa.s.sing wonderful. Nor have I ever beheld an erupting volcano from near at hand. But I have seen enough in the volcanic districts of South America to realise the marvels and fascinations they contain. Let me be forgiven for quoting one or two pa.s.sages from my book on the Bolivian Andes, which were written when the impressions were fresh, though not a detail of them has yet escaped me.

Near Ollague, on the Chile-Bolivian frontier, is an active volcano. It was puffing steam in white jets from its top when I pa.s.sed. All the hills and ground beneath, utterly bare of vegetation, were red or yellow in colour, or of white ashes dotted over with black cinders. Proceeding southward for some 200 kilometres, this kind of scenery continued. We wandered in and out among volcanoes, lava-streams, and great level sheets of white saline deposit, like frozen lakes covered with snow.

Most of the volcanoes were extinct, but some retained the perfection of their form--wide, infinitely graceful cones outlined by a pure unbroken curve against the clear sky. The surface of the hills was often coloured in the most brilliant fashion imaginable. The combinations of the rich colours and strange forms rising beyond, and apparently out of, the large, flat, greyish-white surface of the saline deposits were most beautiful. One white imitation lake was framed in a margin of black volcanic dust and cinders, merging upward into grey sand. White dust-spouts were dancing on its white floor. A riven hill near by revealed streaks of blood-red, chrome yellow, and I know not what other bright colours.

Presently came the smoking volcano San Pedro, with a smaller cone at its foot, from which there stretched to a distance of two or three miles a flow of lava, long cold, but looking as it lies on the sandy desert as though newly poured out. It resembled a glacier with steep sides and snout much creva.s.sed and all covered with black moraine. With this strange product of volcanic convulsion for foreground, the sunburnt and silent desert stretching around, and volcanoes great and small rising behind, San Pedro's head smoking over all, I thought I had never beheld a more weird and uncanny scene. Yet it was beautiful, beyond all question beautiful to a high degree. If a man could be transported to the surface of the Moon, say somewhere near Aristarcus or Ga.s.sendi, such, I imagine, might be the kind of landscape that would salute his eyes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 70. AFTER THE SUNSET. From the Schanzli, Bern.]

Over against these mountains there rose on the other side of the valley a polychrome hill, the Cerro Colorado, covered, they say, with magnetic sand, which leaps into the air and flies about in sheets and ma.s.ses when a thunderstorm comes near--to the very natural horror of the local Indians. At such times, amidst the roar of thunder and the electric flashes, surrounded by a desert shaken by earthquakes and dotted over by cinders, and with this dancing fiend of a hill close at hand, ignorant people may be pardoned for imagining themselves possessed by a horde of rioting devils.

Not far away is the blood-red canon of the Rio Loa, 360 feet deep. I stood at the edge of this profound meandering trench at an hour when the low westering sun struck full on one face of it and a dark shadow fell from the other. With this sanguinary hollow at my feet, I looked across a great flat plain towards countless volcanic hills, many of them perfectly symmetrical in form, shining in the mellow evening light. The sunset is the time to enjoy to the fullest this clean lunar landscape, enriched by the world's fair atmosphere, when the shadows are stealing across the flat and climbing the opposite crimson hills, whence they seem to drive the colour up to the soft still clouds, where it fades away in the purple pomp of oncoming night.

Is it possible, I wonder, by any words to convey to the reader the least notion of this sort of scenery? Picture to yourself a lake the size of Zug, or Annecy, or Orta. It is not a lake for all its flatness and the aspect of its sh.o.r.es, but a flat plain of salt, white as snow.

Its banks and surroundings are not green, but wide-spreading sand, that stretches away and yet away till it vanishes perhaps into trembling mirage. Black spots are dotted all about as though newly scattered from some enormous pepper-pot. They are ashes. You can scarcely believe they are yet cold from the fire, that ejected them, however, ages ago.

Yellow, crimson, green slopes rise nearer or farther away to form stately cones or ruined lumps of the crude earth. Alas! the picture is not paintable by me. Beheld, it smites the eye with a single indelible impression. Described, it is a mere succession of details and fragments, and there is no verbal lightning-stroke that will avail to smite them for an instant into simultaneous visibility.

Strictly speaking, what has been written above has no place in an Alpine book. Yet the interest of the Alps to me, or of any range of mountains, lies in the fact that they are a specimen range, that they resemble more or less other ranges from Arctics to Tropics, that they are examples of one large category of mundane phenomena. To understand the position and character of Alpine scenery in the scenery of mountains, we must consider what the Alps lack as well as what they possess. Every range of mountains, indeed, has its own special and purely local elements of character, but outside of them it likewise possesses many more in common with other ranges. The experienced Alpine climber will find himself, if not at home, at all events not far from home in the mountains of Spitsbergen, Greenland, or the Antarctic, in the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the Canadian Rockies; even in the snowy Cordillera of tropical Bolivia, or in the African groups of Kenya and Ruwenzori. The only kind of mountains, so far as I know, that will be wholly strange to him, and at first sight almost wholly incomprehensible, are the desert volcanoes. It has been for the purpose of bringing this fact clearly before his mind that I have felt myself justified in devoting a brief s.p.a.ce to the character of such volcanic scenery.

THE END