A MOUNTAIN HERMIT

Lake Wakatip Mail, Volume 4185, Issue 4185, 20 November 1934, Page 2

A MOUNTAIN HERMIT

THE HEMARKABLE COUNT RUSSELL In commemoration of the centenary of his birth a statue of Count Henry Russell, one of the first explorers of the Pyrenees, has been erected at the Chateau of Lourdes. The event is a fitting reminder of the history of that remarkable man and his mountain. The mountain, the Vignemale, was really his (writes “ W.L.M.,” in an exchange). On February 25, 1889, the communal authorities of Bareges made a formal concession to him of its eastern glacier, together with about 500 acres «f ground, including the summit, on a ninety-nine-year lease at a rent of one franc per annum. The document recording the gift represents it as being an expression of gratitude for Russell’s srevices in making the Pyrenees known by his writings. He had earned this unusual honour by a singular devotion. Bom in Toulouse of an Irish father and a French mother, Russell spent his holidays in the Pyrenees from his earliest years. His serious climbing career began in 1858, when he was twenty-four years old, and he wandered and dreamed among the mountains until within a few years of his death in 1909. He knew the whole range from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean as no-one else has ever known it. “ I have a wild soul,” he wrote in his ‘Souvenirs d’un Montagnard,’ “ and what I have most loved in Nature is the desert.” Amiri his paeans on the splendours of form and colour it is solitude that brings out his most triumphant note. Russell’s particular association with the Vignemale may be said to have begun in 1880, when the great desire came to him to have a hermitage where he could spend days and days without ever going down to the inhabited world. Inevitably the chosen mountain was the Vignemale, which had always been his favourite. His affection for it, as he wrote later, “ might almost be called filial piety.” In August, 1880, Russell went up with a guide and a porter determined to pass the night on the. summit, “ between the earth and the moon.” The two men dug him a trench, “ a sort of tomb,” and when he had lain down in his lambskin sleeping bag covered him with stones. The men lay under a rock some distance below the summit and left the dreamer to himself. A register of ascents brought down from the summit of the Vignemale some years ago and now kept in the Pyrenean Museum at Lourdes contains the entry dated August 27, 1880: “We have spent the night here. It froze almost all night. Slept a little. Left again at noon. Sunrise sublime. Cte. Henry Russell.”

THE “VILLA.” It was on this occasion that Russell chose the site for his home. He had decided its form; it was to be an artificial grotto chiselled out of the rock. In the following year miners from Gedre began to work at the base of the cliffs which rise vertically from the Col de Cerbillonas, 10,500 ft above sea level and 320 ft below the summit. This first effort ended in failure; only a shallow niche was excavated. The hard rock blunted the tools, and there was no means of sharpening them. In the summer of 1882, however, Pontet, the Gedre blacksmith, improvised a forge, and with this assistance the grotto was finished after three weeks’ work. On August 1 Russell, with a young Englishman, Mr F. Swan, and three guides, went up for the house-warming visit, which lasted three days. The grotto, 10ft by Bft and 6Jft high, turned out to be reasonably warm; the temperature was never below 7deg centigrade on these three nights, though it froze hard outside. The place became known as the Villa Russell. Russell himself gave the name to his cavern, on the justifiable ground that he had borne all the cost of making it. Entries in the register record further visits in the next year: On July 27 (“after three superb nights and days passed in my villa ”). and again on September 18 he was “ at home in my villa for a few davs.”

in the summer of 1884 the Villa Russell became famous. Eighty persons visited in in nine days. But the cave was not a place which a sybarite would choose for a summer holiday. Russell for all his mountain worship found the climate intolerable at tunes. On August 7 he wrote in the register; “ Came up here from Gavarnie to pass eight or ten days in my summer villa. Great storms yesterday and the day before. An isard (Pyrenean chamois) came to see me on Tuesday, when my guides had gone to the Oulettes to fetch food. It was a misanthropical isard, who would not consent to come into ray cavern.”

SIX MORE GROTTOES. The next two years were both stormy. On August 26, 1886, Russell recorded in the register his fifteenth ascent of the Vignemale “ after passing a week in my grotto in Siberian weather. A whole week of snow and icy fog, sdeg of frost (three nights) and 4deg the others. To-day the first fine day. Two dismal summers. Pleased with all the world, J am staying two days more in my grotto.” But next summer, on his sixteenth ascent, his stay was “ the most agreeable of all.” He had visits from several friends, including Charles Packe, the English botanist, who was liimself a great Pyrenean climber. • To this first grotto of 1882 Russell added a second, the “ Guides’ Grotto,” three years later. In 1886 he made another, the “ Grotto des Dames,” a little higher than the first two. From 1889. however, these were for several years rendered difficult of access by the caprice of the glacier, which rose continuously beyond all expectation. After having had three others made at a level which did not satisfy his soaring spirit, Russell in 1892 employed four workmen for many heroic days and nights in excavating a seventh cave, the “ Paradis,” quite near the summit. Russell continued for many years to pay long visits to his eyrie. The last was made in 1904, when he remained for seventeen days. This last ascent was his thirty-third.

The young man held her in his arms and gazed into her sweet blue eyes, “ What would you do if I tried to kiss you?” he asked heavily. “ Cry for father,” she quickly retorted. He sprang away from her and gulped nervously. “ (Ireat Scott” he cried. “ I thought he was in India!” “That’s right, he is,” she sweetly replied.