By all means visit the famous centres. A true instinct has marked them out and made them widely known as specially calculated to awaken the imagination of the town-dwelling modern world. But do not regard them as the whole Alps; do not start with the assurance that there alone is Alpine beauty to be found in highest perfection. For you, perhaps, the highest Alpine beauty resides in less well advertised localities. Let each seek out for himself that which he can most keenly enjoy. It will be his possession and not another's. Let him take it to his soul. But let him also remember that there are other capacities, which he does not possess or has not yet developed, and that for them also the mountains great and small possess powers of satisfaction as rich and manifold as any he has himself experienced.
[Illustration: 27. LOCARNO AT SUNSET, AND NORTH END OF LAGO MAGGIORE]
Mountains do not merely vary from district to district, but from time to time. Were it not so, how soon should we tire of any single outlook or the neighbourhood of any one centre! They change from hour to hour with the incidence of sunlight, and from day to day with the passing season of the year. They change also, often from moment to moment, with the inconstancy of the weather. In fact they are never twice absolutely the same. In the heyday of our scrambling enthusiasm, we perhaps regarded this variability of the mountains with less satisfaction than it obtains from us later. We should have chosen an unbroken series of long and cloudless days, with the snow all melted from the rocks, and the summit views all complete in cloudless, transparent visibility. Yet even then we found a singular joy in snatching an ascent in some brief fine interval between two spells of bad weather. Whereas the details of many a featurelessly fine ascent have passed from our minds, which of us does not remember, and recall with a keen delight, climbs accomplished in the teeth of storms, when Nature seemed to stand forth as an antagonist whom we wrestled fiercely with, and joyously overcame?
We may regard mountain moods from two points of view; as experienced by the climber, and as affecting the aspect of mountain scenery when beheld from a greater or less distance. The circumstances of his sport, though in most cases they restrict the climber to one season of the year, fortunately compel him to be on mountains at almost all hours of the twenty-four. Most sports are functions of daylight; the climber must travel by night as frequently as by day. None better than he, unless it be the astronomer, knows the full secrets of midnight beauty. What climber's memory is not stored with priceless recollections of the night and its myriad voices, its noble diapason. By day the eye is supreme; by night the ear. Then it is, when marching along upland valleys, that one hears the full chorus of the rushing torrent, now booming close at hand, accompanied by infinite ripplings and splashings of little waves, now fainter and more sibilant but no less musical in the distance. Then, too, it is that the breezes sing most sweetly among the trees; then that the glaciers are most melodious, the moulins most tuneful; then, too, on the highest levels, that the ultimate silences are most impressive. The hum of a falling stone, the rattle of a discharge of rocks, the boom of an avalanche, the crack of an opening crevasse, all these sounds should be heard framed in the silence of night, when the sense of hearing is most alert and the imagination most easily stirred.