My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus

Alp-climbing exercises a weird fascination over some souls, and draws them with a potency known only to the lovers of Lorelei. The high, pure air, the snowy distances, the charm of inaccessible peaks that dance and dazzle on the horizon, the sublime solitude and icy majesty -- the very geniiin and Edelweiss that embroider the hem of the eternal glacier -- fraternize with the soul and pull it with elusive and resistless power to themselves, there to tiptoe on giddy precipices, and sometimes to rush into the beautiful, terrible arms of a loosened avalanche. This fairy fascination of Caucasian valleys and Matterhorn crags has kindled the eye of every traveller that has ever peeped into Himalayan abysses or at Alpine aiguilles. It wrapped itself about the spirit of the late Mr. Mummery, whose thrilling mountain climbs are recorded in the book before us, and who but lately, in a daring ascent of the Himalayas, perished in the mysterious way so familiar to readers of such records. Mr. Mummery was a perfect type of the simple Alp-lover, pure and unadulterated. He did not care for science or topography, for theodolites or plane tables, for barometers or botany. To him mountain-climbing was the most exquisite form of physical exercise -- a play for giants in lungs and legs, athletics glorified and transfigured by daring, danger and poetic experience. It is the joy and frolic of sunshine holidays that sparkle in his pages and fill them with the breezy exhilaration of a genuine mountain-lover. To him, conquering a gorgeous Swiss summit never trodden except by the ghostlike feet of an Alpine sunset, was a real conquest: Matterhorn, Tempelsgrat, Col du Lion were to him Goliaths whom it was infinite fun to go out to slay: the great Gargantuan monsters might guffaw in his very face and yet he would attack them invincibly, and, roped together with his Swiss guides, would defy them to the teeth, climb their very spines, and finally crawl up on their very crowns, thence to dart inextinguishable delight and sarcasm at the timorous dwellers below. Chapter after chapter in this delightful book -- delightful even in winter, with its thrills of physical joy and its exciting adventures -- recounts the conquest of chasm and ridge and sérac; gullies of black-shining ice disappear almost magically before the indefatigable climber and his wife; there are no abysses for a man that climbs with teeth and toes: the crawling, bluish flames and flicker of innumerable will-o'-the-wisps around the Schwarzer See fail to terrify this healthy, exuberant Englishman. Brilliant ascents of trackless snow-wastes and "needles" encourage to more perilous encounters with the Spirit of the Brocken, and the traveler gazes with fascination over great ice walls into inky darkness and absolute silence. Mr. Mummery's graphic pen traces these adventures with marvelous distinction; cold shivers run through us as we read his breathless threading of crevasses and howling couloirs, along razor-edged ridges, through foaming mists and hysterical mountain torrents. Fancy looking through an eye-hole in a creviced rock into a vale 3000 feet deep! Mr. Mummery revels in descriptions of the Caucasian passes he .has traversed; he indignantly repels Mr. Ruskin's assertion that Alpineers regard mountains as "greased poles" and themselves as "mere gymnasts." A streak of vivid poetry runs through his book, whose watchword is " Health and Fun and Laughter." What a loss to the profession is his untimely death! --The Critic, Vol. 28