wave of glacier. It is strange if they do not affect him rather
more powerfully than the casual visitor who has never been initiated by
practical experience into their difficulties. To him, the huge buttress
which runs down from the Moench is something more than an irregular
pyramid, purple with white patches at the bottom and pure white at the
top. He fills up the bare outline supplied by the senses with a thousand
lively images. He sees tier above tier of rock, rising in a gradually
ascending scale of difficulty, covered at first by long lines of the
debris that have been splintered by frost from the higher wall, and
afterwards rising bare and black and threatening. He knows instinctively
which of the ledges has a dangerous look--where such a bold mountaineer
as John Lauener might slip on the polished surface, or be in danger of
an avalanche from above. He sees the little shell-like swelling at the
foot of the glacier crawling down the steep slope above, and knows that
it means an almost inaccessible wall of ice; and the steep snowfields
that rise towards the summit are suggestive of something very different
from the picture which might have existed in the mind of a German
student, who once asked me whether it was possible to make the ascent
on a mule.

Hence, if mountains owe their influence upon the imagination in a great
degree to their size and steepness, and apparent inaccessibility--as no
one can doubt that they do, whatever may be the explanation of the fact
that people like to look at big, steep, inaccessible objects--the
advantages of the mountaineer are obvious. He can measure those
qualities on a very different scale from the ordinary traveler. He
measures the size, not by the vague abstract term of so many thousand
feet, but by the hours of labour, divided into minutes--each separately
felt--of strenuous muscular exertion. The steepness is not expressed in
degrees, but by the memory of the sensation produced when a snow-slope
seems to be rising up and smiting you in the face; when, far away from
all human help, you are clinging like a fly to the slippery side of a
mighty pinnacle in mid air. And as for the inaccessibility, no one can
measure the difficulty of climbing a hill who has not wearied his
muscles and brain in struggling against the opposing obstacles. Alpine
travellers, it is said, have removed the romance from the mountains by
climbing them. What they have really done is to prove that there exist