s in battle with Nature. They love the struggle and the
danger, the exercise and the excitement. They find health and good
temper, jollity and good-fellowship, through their exertions. They glory
shamelessly in useless scrambles which demand the sweat of their brow
and the concentrated attention of their minds. They seek to emulate the
chamois and the monkey in hanging on to rocks and insecure footholds.
When they do not climb, they fill libraries with descriptions of their
achievements, dull and unintelligible to the uninitiated, bloodstirring
and excellent to the members of the brotherhood. They write in a jargon
of their own of chimneys and buttresses and basins and ribs, of boulders
and saddles and moraine-hopping. They become rampant at the thought of
the stout, unworthy people who are now dragged to the tops by the help
of rope-chains and railings. They sarcastically remark that they may
have to abandon certain over-exploited peaks through the danger of
falling sardine-tins. They issue directions for climbing calculated to
chase away the poet from the snow-fields, as when Sir Martin Conway says
that a certain glacier must be "struck at the right corner of its
snout," and "its drainage stream flows from the left corner."

They do not hesitate to admit that they would continue to climb even if
there were no views to be enjoyed from the tops. "I am free to confess,"
wrote A. F. Mummery, "that I would still climb, even though there were
no scenery to look at." And Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond echoes this sentiment
in a defiant challenge to their uncomprehending critics. "To further
confound the enemy," she writes, "we do not hide the fact that were no
view obtainable from the summit a true climber would still continue to
climb."

Why do they climb? The motives are many--the result joy. Yes, joy, even
in the providential escapes and the "bad five minutes," beloved by our
naive scribes of the ice-axe, in the perils and death which they court
for the sake of adventure and exploration. Sir Martin Conway speaks of
the systematic climber as the man for whom climbing takes the place of
fishing and shooting. How depressingly banal! Yet Sir Martin Conway has
written some of the finest tributes to the glories of the Alps, and has
shown himself a master of artistic interpretation of their wealth of
beauty. Whymper excels in matter-of-fact history of climbs, yet there is
an undercurrent of reverence for the mysteries of Nature's beauty.