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76 THE EXL'LORATION OF THE CAUCASUS
feels transported to the verge of a higher sphere. Great mountains
may be only '
the highest parts of the dust of the world, '
bring us nearer to what lies Beyond.
The man to whom, as Byron wrote, '
feeling,' will lie happy
the '
High
but they
mountains are a
in the Caucasus. But how will it be with
grimpeur moyen sensuel'? In the minds of the multitude
who travel or climb for the .sake of health and variety, the quest of
beauty
or the satisfaction of a '
vague
emotion '
hold no great place.
They are intent on adventure, exercise, change, novelty. Scenery
is not enough for them ; scientific problems are beyond their ken.
For this class, most of all, Switzerland has become inadequate. For,
as far as novel adventure and exploration are concerned,
it must be
admitted that the Alps are almost exhausted. They can hardly
be to another generation what they have been to their discoverers,
to the men who forty years ago joined to fill up a gap in
the maps of Central Europe, to explore the wilds of Tyrol and
Dauphine, to survey the chain of Mont Blanc and the Graian Alps,
the then untrodden snowfields of the Ortler, the Adamello, and
the Grand Par-adis. Mountaineers g-ifted with acute minds have
lately found themselves reduced to studying personal rather than
ascents have been catalogued under a dozen
topographicfil details ;
different headings, from the first of all to the first by ladies without
guides. Alpine literature has grown at once highly technical
and intolerably minute and voluminous. Ardent climbers, urged
on by a thirst for novel adventure, have been led to climb
mountains by paths prepared by Providence for the descent of
avalanches, or in the search for sensation have broken with the
established rules of their craft. The romance of novelty, the
excitement of the unknown and the uncertain, have been not
unfrequently sought for in ways that are only too likely to bring a
noble pursuit into discredit, to turn a game of skill into one
of chance in which the stake is what no man has a right to
venture deliberately for mere pleasure— life itself Climbers, both
guides and amateurs, have lost their sense of danger. The many
succeed, but of a sudden the one— the one least expected, perhaps
— fails, and we deplore another Alpine accident. The impulse