nother was
beginning to near the old hut, twelve thousand feet high. Then and all
of a sudden the lights went out. There was a strange red glow upon the
Matterhorn, a glow which most people, as victims of tradition, call
beautiful. As a matter of fact the colour of dawn upon the rock of the
Cervin is not truly a beautiful colour. It is a hard and brick-dusty
red, very different from the snow fire seen on true snow peaks. Yet the
scene was fine and majestic, and cold and dreadful, solitary and
non-human. This fine inhumanity of the mountains is their chief quality
to me. The sea is always more human; it moves, it breathes, it seems
alive. I have been alone at sea in the Channel and yet never felt quite
alone. The human water lapped at the planks of my boat. I knew the sea
was the pathway of the world. But on the mountains nothing moves at
night. There even stones do not fall; there are no thunders of
avalanches; no sudden and awful crash of an ice-fall. Even when the sun
is hot and the mountains waken a little these motions seem accidents.
And the perpetual motion of a glacier has something about it which is
cruelly inevitable, bestial, diabolic. No, upon the mountains one is
swung clear of one's fellow-creatures; one is adrift; it is another
world; it gives fresh views of the warm world of man.

Now we plunged downwards towards the Gadmen, whence the Monte Rosa track
branches off. We went along rock, now in daylight, till we came on ice,
and went forward to the Stocknubel, a little resting-place at the base
of the Stockhorn. Here the guides made us rest and eat. Swiss guides
are, when they are good, the best of men, and ours were of the best. The
two young Pollingers of St Niklaus, Joseph and Alois, are known now by
all climbers. I am pleased to think they are my friends. I wish I was as
strong as either and had as healthy an appetite. As we sat on rock and
ate cold meats and other horrible and indigestible matters, washed down
by wine and water, we saw another party come after us, an old and ragged
guide with two strange little figures of adventurous Frenchmen, clad in
knickerbockers and carrying tourist's alpenstocks, bound for the Cima di
Jazzi. It must be confessed that our own party looked more workman-like.
For we had our faithful ice-axes, and our lower limbs were swathed with
putties, now almost universally worn by guides and climbers alike. I
fancied our guides looked on the other guide with some contempt He was