[Illustration: 8. EIGER, MÖNCH, AND JUNGFRAU, FROM SCHERZLIGEN, NEAR THUN.]
One precious thing beside memory the retired mountaineer possesses, which he who has never climbed must lack: it is knowledge. The keenest mountain-lover who never climbed does not really know the nature of what he is looking at. Even Ruskin, the most gifted mountain-lover that never climbed, constantly reveals in his writings failures to understand. The true scale of things was never apparent to his eye. Like all beginners, at first underestimating, he presently came to overestimate the size of cliffs and ridges. Ability to see things truly is a great possession. None but an experienced mountaineer can ever so see mountains. He instinctively recognises the important features and distinguishes them from the unimportant. He is conscious of what is in front and what behind. He does not mistake foreshortened ridges for needle-pointed peaks. A range of mountains is not a wall to him but a deep extending mass. He feels the recesses and the projections. He has a sense of what is round the corner. The deep circuits of the hills are present in his imagination even when unbeheld. He knows their white loneliness. The seen end of a glacier-snout implies to him all the unseen upper course and expanse of its gathering ground. Thus every view to him is instinct with implications of the unseen and the beyond. Such knowledge well replaces the mystery of his youthful ignorance. If time has taken something away, it has amply repaid the theft. It is not his debtor. He may mingle now with the crowd who never quit the roads, and no external sign shall distinguish him from them, but the actual difference between them is fundamental. For the snows are beyond their ken and belong to the same region as the sky; but they are within his area; they form part of his intellectual estate; they hold his past life upon their crests. Where the lowlander looks and wonders, the mountaineer possesses and remembers, nor wonders less for being able to realise the immensity of the mass of beauteous detail that unites to form a mountain landscape.