"Some hours still passed before we reached our friendly Italian hut, left some days before for a raid into Swiss territory; there on the table were our provisions and shirts as we had left them, and a solemn array of bottles full of milk carried up during our absence by our shepherd friends; and there, on the pile, in stinging comment on our late proceedings, lay a slip of paper, the tribute of some Italian tourist, bearing the inscription 'Omaggio ai bravi Inglesi ignoti.' We felt very much ashamed.
"When the soup has been eaten and the pipes are lighted, and you sit down outside your hut for the last talk before bed, you will find your guides' tongues suddenly acquire a new eloquence, and, if you are a novice at the craft, will be almost overwhelmed by the catalogue of misfortune which they will repeat to you. And so, too, upon us in the winter months comes the temptation to dwell on things done long ago and ill done, and, as we write of the sport for others, we give a false impression of peril and hardihood in things that were little more than matter for a moment's laughter. I too must plead guilty to a well-meant desire to make your flesh creep.
[Illustration: AN AWKWARD BIT OF CLIMBING.]
[Illustration: A LARGE PARTY FOR A SMALL HUT.]
"Mountaineering by skilled mountaineers is about as dangerous as hunting in a fair country, and requires about as much pluck as to cross from the Temple to the Law Courts at midday. Difficult mountaineering is for the unskilled about as dangerous as riding a vicious horse in a steeplechase for a man who has never learnt to ride. But the tendency in those who speak or write of it for the outer world who are not mountaineers is to conceal a deficiency of charm of style by an attempt to slog in the melodramatic, and I plead guilty at once.
"So we think and write as though to us our passion for the hills were a fancy of the summer, a mere flirtation. Yet no one has lost the first bloom of his delight in Alpine adventure before the element of sternness has come to mar his memory and bind more closely his affections. You find the mildly Horatian presence of death somewhere near you, and that at a moment when, whatever your age and strength, and whatever your infirmities, you are at the full burst of youth; when Nature has been kindest she has been most capricious, and has flaunted her relentless savagery just when she has bent to kiss you. The weirdest rocks rise from Italian gardens, and the forms of hill seem oldest when you are most exultant--immortal age beside immortal youth. Yet is it not this, 'the sense of tears,' in things which are not mortal which must mark your Alpine paths with memories as heavy and as definite as those inscriptions which tell of obscure and sudden death on every hillside, and invite your prayers for the woodcutter and the shepherd? You too will have seen friends go out into the morning whom you have never welcomed home. There is a danger, sometimes encountered recklessly, sometimes ignorantly, but sometimes--hard as it may be to understand the mood--not in the mere spirit of the idle youth, but met with and overcome, or overcoming, in a resolution which knows no pleasure in conquest save when the essay is fierce, and is calmly willing to pay the penalty of failure. While for ourselves we enjoy the struggle none the less because we have taken every care that we shall win, they freely give all; and for such there is surely no law. While by every precept and example we impress the old rules of the craft on our companions and our successors, how can we find words of blame for those who have at least paid the extreme forfeit, and found 'the sleep that is among the lonely hills'?