Pick up any fragment of rock you please and place it upon your table. Look closely at it and persuade yourself that it is not six inches but 20,000 feet high. On that assumption search for routes up it. Examine its faces and its ridges, its cracks and its gullies. You will be able to climb about it in a day-dream, to have accidents upon it, to succeed or to fail in various ascents. But who will care to "hear tell" of your proceedings? And yet, apart from geographical and geological considerations, which are in fact historical, any casual mountain is no more interesting in its essence than your stone. There are hundreds of thousands of mountains in the world. What intrinsic interest has one of them more than another, from a climber's point of view, except in two respects, the difficulty of the climb and the human interest? But the difficulty is of no account, for if that is what you want you can find it on Scafell, and need not wander to seek it.
No! it is above all the human interest that ennobles a peak and makes the ascent of it desirable. It is to climb an elevation that men have seen; to climb a peak that has been named, that has been looked at for centuries by the inhabitants at its base, that travellers have passed by and observed, that has a place in the knowledge and memory of men. If there were a great mountain in full view of London or Rome, how much more interesting it would be to climb than some nameless lump in Central Asia, like K2, that was never within view of any abode of men.
This was one of the main attractions of the unclimbed Alps to early explorers of the high levels. Mont Blanc was known of old. How many generations of men had looked from Thun at the Oberland giants and told stories about them. How much the famed devils and dragons added to the fascination of the Matterhorn. The Alps had looked down upon the march of armies and the flux of peoples for uncounted thousands of years. Their solitudes were peopled by the dreams of all the generations that had passed by them or dwelt amongst them. The subliminal consciousness that this was so, counted for much in the strong attraction that drew the pioneers aloft.
The pioneers in their turn have richly endowed the Alps with a further human interest. Why do so many people want to climb the Matterhorn? It is not a better climb than the Dent Blanche. The reason is because of the stronger human interest that the Matterhorn evokes. All who have any knowledge of Alpine history have read the story of the long siege, the triumphant conquest, and the dramatic tragedies of which the Matterhorn has been the scene. It is the fascination of those memories that draws men to the peak, and makes the climbing of it seem so desirable an adventure to so many people.
