SPRING IN THE AT,PS.
SPRING in upland places is a late corner, even when the uplands lie in warmer latitudes than England. The mass of winter snow is slow to melt, and, though the hardier mountain flowers will show themselves in an icy setting, yet the white crust must have largely gone before the world can wear the green of spring. The true springtime in the Alps begins somewhere in the second week of May and continues for a month or so. It is the season when the valleys are at the height of their unique loveliness. The dead quiet of winter is im- pressive, when every torrent is muffled in ice and the snow-laden pine-woods become like the seracs of a glacier. Autumn, too, has her charms, when the big hotels close and the last summer tourist departs, and the country people draw in upon them- selves for company, and red-and-gold sunsets flame behind the snows. Yet the solemn hush of winter and the pageant of autumn may be felt as vividly in some humbler spot, such as an English heath or a Dutch pasture. But in the Alps spring shows another face than that which the world knows. Combined with her virginal freshness there is some- thing of the riot and splendour of summer. The scents are all clean and fresh, the tints delicate, the horizons clear and thin, but the sense of life and joy is so abounding that the impression left on the spectator is that of an almost tropical richness. Something of it is due, perhaps, to the fact that the defeat of winter is visible to the eyes. In a forest gap down which an avalanche has crashed, shearing off trees like a grassoutter, there is soon a confusion of young growth. The debris of the avalanche, pitted and grey, is all grown round with sorrel and anemones, and as it dwindles it provides nourishment for rich herbage. Around streams where the ice is scarcely melted there appears a carpet of pale crocuses. The edges of snowfields become gay with gentians ; and high up on the crags, among icicles and falling stones, spreads a covering of saxifrage and primula and parsley fern. The irresistible tides of spring have flowed over winter's kingdom, and driven its lord to the far heights. The fang of an old avalanche sticking up out of a bed of whortleberries and violets is the sign visible that the gentler goddess of the valleys has once again come to her own.
A Swiss glen in August is not to the present writer the most cheerful of sights. There is monotony in the level green of the trees, the meadows look worn and scorched, the road is smothered in dust, and the glaciers eight thousand feet above dazzle the eye but give no comfort. You are over- awed by the immense walls, shut in, stifled. You cease to wonder that Switzerland has produced or given a congenial home to some of the most morbid and doleful of modern philosophers. But in spring the vitality of the valleys is so great that the heights are forgotten. To most people who go there at this season the chief attraction is the luxuriance of flowers. Who can forget the sight of the meadows of globe-flowers and marguerites around Le Fayet, or some of the garden-wilder- nesses in the Vispthal P Thence you ascend through lush fields, past hedges of acacia and wild-rose, till you reach the forest, where you may find little peninsulas of turf running up among the trees, ringed with the exquisite green of young torches. The woods are English woods, only shadier, wilder, and richer, and as you ascend you see little that is strange, till the trees thin and you are on the true Alps, the upland pasture-grounds. There you stand midway between the warm, homely scents of the valley and the inhuman winds of the hills. Flowers keep you company, nevertheless, as you ascend further, ill on the very lip of the snowfields you have the bells of the gentian making a brilliant contrast against the white. If the valleys are lovely in spring, so also are the heights. The new-fallen snow is the proper mediary between the delicate green of the slopes and the clear blue of the spring sky. For the moment we have found a world of more elemental colours and fresher horizons than our own.
In the spring, too, you see the human life of the valleys in its natural dress. In May, any village which is not a winter resort is just beginning once more to get in touch with the outer world. For the past six months the people have been living their own life,—a life into which tourists do not enter. They are preparing for their six months of broken English and spoil- ing of the Egyptians, but have scarcely yet acquired their summer frame of mind, and are ready to treat the traveller as a friend and equal. Officially it is not a season for climbing,
and for most places there is much reason in the arrange- ment. The Matterhorn in May is still noisy with avalanches, on many rock peaks there is too much snow, and on many snow ones well-known aretes and couloirs of ice are overlaid with dan- gerous fresh-fallen stuff. But after all this cuts both ways, and the chief discomfort is for the unadventurous tourist. He will find little hills like the Gorner Grat and the Brevent, which have roads to their summits, covered with unfamiliar snowfields, and be compelled to turn himself into a pathfinder, to his certain discomfort and probable danger. But if there is a spell of settled weather—as you may easily find for a fortnight in late May or early June—the greater mountains will be in admirable condition. Many rock peaks which later in the season are fit only for the expert may be done by a novice when difficult couloirs are filled with convenient snow. It is entirely a question of the weather. The nominal season begins in July, and there are people who regard earlier ascents as criminal. But on many mountains a clear day in May, provided the climber gets early enough on the snows, is as good as any day in August. This is especially true of rock summits. Peaks such as the Grepon, or the Charmoz, or the Dent des Requins, where little snow lies, are as accessible in late spring as in the normal season. And one advantage June gives which August denies. On returning, instead of a weary tramp over boulders and screes, you may glissade merrily down the snow- fields almost to the edge of the pines.
True first ascents are in the Alps now a thing of the past. But the climber may still get some taste of the satisfaction of the pioneer by making the first ascents of the season. He will find something unfamiliar even in mountains he knows well. Winter works changes, and some rock chimney, formerly hopeless, may now "go," or some once easy arete prove an affliction. He will find the guides keener and better, when they are new released from a winter's idleness, than in the later months, when the edge has been taken off their eagerness by the frequent repetition of ascents in indifferent company. Even in the high regions where no vegetation appears, be will seem to find traces of the spring. The snow is purer, the distances more infinite, the air more crystalline. The wonderful granite crags of the Chamonix aiguilles never se em so remote and eerie and virginal as when they shine white in the spring sun above their beds of whiter snow. The blasé mountaineer would do well to try the Alps a little out of season before he pronounces them a discredited playground. One assumption, to be sure, we make,—a reasonable degree of fineness in the weather. Without sun the Alps are no better than other places, and spring in the Val Tournanche, when the rain falls in sheets and the hills are mist to their base, is very much like the same weather in Kent.
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