He knows instinctively
which of the ledges has a dangerous look--where such a bold mountaineer
as John Lauener might slip on the polished surface, or be in danger of
an avalanche from above. He sees the little shell-like swelling at the
foot of the glacier crawling down the steep slope above, and knows that
it means an almost inaccessible wall of ice; and the steep snowfields
that rise towards the summit are suggestive of something very different
from the picture which might have existed in the mind of a German
student, who once asked me whether it was possible to make the ascent
on a mule.
Hence, if mountains owe their influence upon the imagination in a great
degree to their size and steepness, and apparent inaccessibility--as no
one can doubt that they do, whatever may be the explanation of the fact
that people like to look at big, steep, inaccessible objects--the
advantages of the mountaineer are obvious. He can measure those
qualities on a very different scale from the ordinary traveler. He
measures the size, not by the vague abstract term of so many thousand
feet, but by the hours of labour, divided into minutes--each separately
felt--of strenuous muscular exertion.
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