Unto the Hills

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22081, 1 May 1937, Page 14

Unto the Hills

A recent conjunction redirects attention to the old adage that one man's meat is another man's poison. Lord Conway, better known to two generations as Sir Martin Conway, died at about the time that Dean Inge's latest volume of essays appeared in the bookshops. Lord Conway was one of the greatest of mountaineers; perhaps, in the pioneering of the sport, in exploration, and in range of operations combined, the greatest of all. He climbed the Alps liter-, ally from end to end, pioneered in the Caucasus, and reached a height of 23,000 feet—this, be it remembered, many years ago—in the Andes and the Himalayas. Dean Inge thinks poorly of mountaineering for pleasure, though he might admit that Martin Conway had not wasted his time exploring. "If there is any " occupation which comprises in its acutest " form every element of discomfort—cold, heat, "fatigue, and danger—it is climbing a moun- " tain," he says in an essay on recreations. " Most mountains look their best from below; " and if they do not, there is the funicular rail- " way up many of them." As one version of a "popular hymn says, 'They climb the steep "' ascent of Heaven, with peril, toil, and pain, "' but oh! to me may sense be given, to follow "' up by train.' " The Biblical passage about lifting eyes to the hills may not appeal to Dr. Inge; but he has long been known not to rate highly some of the judgments of the Hebrew sages. He admits that there are men who like climbing: "It is a sad pity when they break " their necks, for many valuable lives have been "lost in this way." If it is to be assumed that there is a leaven of seriousness in these remarks, a cloud of witnesses could be summoned against him. His attitude is all the more curious in that he is a mystic; and the mystic is at home on great heights. C. E. Montague describes an Alpine night as it appeared to two men who had been near to death on the ice; one of them, indeed, finding life without savour, had deliberately sought an end on his beloved mountains arid had been saved by another's crisis. Gowned in new snow and bejewelled with sparkles of light, the Weisshorn, the greatest great lady in Nature, looked as lovely to Bell as when the first sight of that pale supreme grace had taken his breath away in his youth. At the height where they stood the frost had silenced every trickle of water; leaving all space to be filled with subtler challenges to the ear. The air almost crackled with crispness: it was alive with the massed animation of millions of infinitesimal crystallisations; The Schalliberg Glacier, a little away to their right, had its own living whisper, the sum of the innumerable tiny creaks and fractures of its jostling molecules of ice. Up here, where the quiet of night was suffused with this audible stir of the forces fashioning the earth, it felt as if some murmurous joint voi-e of all existence were abroad and life itself were trying to make its high urgency felt. Men do not write like this who woo mountains by funicular railways. Montague writes for all mountaineers, for the articulate like Whymper, Leslie Stephen, Tyndall, and A. E. W. Mason, and for the great body of the obscure. It is well known that mountaineering is a modern pastime. The ancients feared mountains and avoided them. Not till the nineteenth century did mountaineering become a sport with many followers; and perhaps we may see in its development a way of escape from the encroachments of an industrialised civilisation. Men and women love to pit their skill against the mountains and to find there ardours and endurances, beauty and spiritual values, such as no other adventure provides. Men scaling with taut finger-tips An Alpjne needle's side, Find there the mazy ways of earth Divinely simplified. All hope and all ambition live Along one outstretched arm: All life within him leaps' to guard Its mortal case from harm. Mountaineering and intellectual interests often go together; indeed, one almost instinctively thinks of a proved alpinist as one whose brain is well above the average and whose sense of values is sound. Martin Conway united in a very long and crowded life love of mountains and love of art. . He was a noted authority on art and a trustee of national collections; and it is fair to assume that, in the sport he loved, his perceptions had been sharpened and refined.