An essential part of the human interest in the Alps grows out of the length of time through which history has concerned herself with them. The history of the Alpine valleys has only been written, or begun to be written, in recent years. Early visitors to Zermatt no doubt were conscious of the deep impress made by man upon the valley landscape, but they could not interpret, as we now can, the meaning of much that they saw. But when the local archives were searched and the traditions written down, when it was realised that the life now being lived by the peasantry was in all essentials the same life that had been lived by their ancestors for hundreds of years, ancestors bearing the same names and owning the same properties that are still borne and owned by their living descendants, what an increase of interest that gave to a place.
[Illustration: 63. A CORNER OF THE TOWN OF ALTDORF. The traditional scene of William Tell's exploits. Here Gessler ruled and the shooting of the apple took place. A place of patriotic pilgrimage of the youthful Swiss.]
The old tales about the village deep in Tiefenmatten, about the pilgrimage that used to cross the Col d'Hérens, about the frequented routes over Theodul and Weissthor--does it not add a new charm to the places themselves to hear them told? Who is not interested to remember, when standing on the Theodul pass, that Roman coins have been found there? Climbers have taken fully as much interest in the question of where the Old Weissthor route lay as in actually climbing the passes. I well remember the keen delight that came to me when I discovered that a pass I had crossed, as I supposed for the first time, between the Fillarkuppe and the Jägerhorn, was in fact the real Old Weissthor itself, a well-known mountain-route centuries ago. To rediscover an old track like that is far more delightful than to invent and carry through some entirely new expedition.
Correspondingly with the future as with the past--to make an expedition for the first time that others will often repeat is a lasting source of pleasure; but to make one that no sane person ever repeats or is likely to repeat is poor fun. I have had many opportunities of making new expeditions in the Alps and elsewhere, and have availed myself of a few; but none ever gave me the continuing satisfaction that I derive from the Wellenkuppe near Zermatt, a mountain that I invented, climbed, and baptized, and that immediately became and has since remained a most popular scramble.[2]