The Alps show their
tectonic origins beautifully as you fly across eastern France and western
Switzerland on the way to Italy - a sea of rock thrust up as the Earth's crust
buckled. Snowfields drape their eastern sides, bleached herbage tries to grow
on their western slopes, and the huge culminating massif of Mont Blanc merges
its linen whites with those of the clouds.
So the Alps were made
by the Earth, not by "the English". What the first modern (ie
18th-century) travellers from France, Italy, Switzerland and Britain found
among these highest lands in Europe was a dream-like wilderness of pinnacles,
glaciers and cliffs, seamed by valleys which peasants inhabited with their
flocks. These farmers lived on milk and months-old bread, and made cheese for
distant markets. In their houses, and in some of the inns, living room was
shared with the animals.
The wine was bitter,
the mutton stank, the straw beds were rife with fleas. In remote valleys people
were plagued with goitre and cretinism because of an iodine deficiency. When
the first women climbers omitted to put skirts on over their breeches on
returning to the villages at night, they were stoned. The super-civilised
Alpine Club was little better: an early woman climbing writer had to publish in
its journal under a male pen-name and gentleman climbers cut the ladies dead in
the streets of Zermatt.
So the climbers came,
professional guides and men of private means, scientists and academics, doctors
and priests and lawyers, carrying barometers, thermometers and crates of wine
(on porters' backs) to the highest summits and over storm-blown passes. By
1815, the tracks round Chamonix were so crowded that tourists were advised to
avoid peak hours.
The inns and roads
and bridges improved. Railways were built up extraordinary gradients and
through the roots of the mountains - the St Gotthard tunnel runs 6,000 feet
below the ridge. The "white leprosy" (Ruskin's phrase) of the hotels
transformed peasant villages into international resorts. Today there are 2,000
cable-cars and ski-lifts in Austria alone (25 in 1939), Zermatt has beds for
17,000 visitors, St Anton 300 ski instructors. In the Alps as a whole there are
600 resorts and 41,000 ski runs, able to handle 1.5 million visitors an hour.
I was dismayed, as
much as anything, at the physical suffering, the desperation, and the bad blood
that plagued so many people as they took part in what was supposed to be either
a high-minded quest or an exhilarating pastime. I am happiest among the high
lands myself, and find low lands a come-down with their sticky earths and
sluggish waters. The trouble with the extreme high ground is that it is almost
too much for human nature.
Edward Whymper, first
person to climb the Matterhorn, was a man of extraordinary grit and purpose, a
brilliant way-finder, a most incisive writer, and a draughtsman so good that
his drawings leave you with no pressing need for photographs. When he got back
to base after a 200-foot fall on the Matterhorn and a 4,800-foot down-climb in
pitch darkness, he "slunk past the first cow sheds, utterly ashamed of the
state to which I had been brought by my imbecility", and was then treated
by having vinegar and salt rubbed into his many head-wounds. When his great
rival in the "race" for the Matterhorn, John Tyndall, just failed to
climb it, Whymper venomously disputed the exact high-point Tyndall had reached
and Tyndall responded by virtually accusing Whymper of lying about who said
what to whom when the climbing parties were organised.
When Whymper reached
the summit in 1865 and saw a rival Italian party far below, he and his mates
trundled rocks down the mountainside: "The Italians turned and fled".
Then came the famous fall, which killed four of Whymper's party. When three of
the dead were found, the guide among them, Michel Croz, "was missing the
top half of his head and was identified only by his beard and by a rosary cross
which the Reverend Robertson dug out of his jaw with a penknife".
Is this really the
activity which was supposed to do so much for the inner self? Leslie Stephen,
excellent scholar-critic and Alpine pioneer, wrote that that "If I were to
invent a new idolatry... I should prostrate myself, not before a beast, or
ocean, or sun, but before one of those gigantic masses to which, in spite of
all reason, it is impossible not to attribute some shadowy personality. Their
voice... speaks in tones at once more tender and more awe- inspiring than any
mortal teacher. The loftiest and sweetest strains of Milton or Wordsworth may
be more articulate but do not lay so forcible a grasp upon my
imagination."
I almost endorse that, although "personality" is
rather fanciful. The fact remains that grappling with the ice, the often rotten
rock, and the violent weather of the highest ranges, and handling the fierce
egotism of the people competing to get up them, makes a record at least as ugly
as it is inspiring.
David Craig: An extract from an article which appeared in The Independent.Dec 30th 2000
