Who Shall Ascend Into the Hill of the Lord?

THE Jungfraubahn Lift stopped its upward motion, the steel doors slid back, and out of the half-darkness of the elevator a score of tourists, muffled in overcoats and shading their eyes against the sudden brightness, stepped out upon a broad cement platform, white in the terrific glare of the sun shining out of a blue-black sky. And in a moment the tourists were ranged around the edge of the terrace, looking out upon the brilliant panorama which the Jungfrau summit commands.

All sorts and conditions of men were here. On one side a group of burly Bavarians, with their inevitable rücksacks and alpenstocks, muttered over and over again, softly, their formula of vast appreciation: ‘Schön, schön, ach wunderschön!’ Their honest Frauen touched elbows on the parapet with a heavily-veiled French actress, a halffrozen Baltimore girl in a white polo coat, and an imitation Englishman from New York. A little aloof from the others stood a trio of ladies from London; still farther along a group of harsh-voiced Italians pointed out the tiny gleam of the Staubbach waterfall in the far valley below, and celebrated their discovery by shouting discordantly. Over all blew a bitterly cold wind; for if the temperature on the Jungfrau at eleven in the morning is usually well above the freezing-point, still the wind which strikes straight across from the blue line of the Jura Mountains is unmerciful to those who have come up the Jungfraubahn clad as if for the tea-tables of Grindelwald.

Barrington — the young Englishman in the Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers — had made straight for the southwest corner of the platform; and now, his elbows propped on the parapet, he stood looking steadily out upon the pageant of the Alps. One glance at his face, —a gaunt face, by the way, with high cheek-bones and an almost painfully haggard chin — must have shown any observant person that he was not in the habit of reaching mountain-tops by cog-rail, for he was tanned a rich brown by the fierce sundazzle of former ascents. At this moment his eyes were on the distant peaks; he looked not at the purple chasm of the Roththal gaping beneath him, but at his old friends of the Oberland and the Valais: the pyramid of the Finsteraarhorn, the jagged white ridge of the Trugberg, the crystal pinnacle of the Aletschhorn; and farther off on the dim horizon, a row of tiny points delicately penciled with violet —Monte Rosa, the Matterhorn, the Weisshorn, the Grand Combin, Mont Blanc! The Englishman drew a quivering sigh of delight as his eyes took in one after another of the noble company.

He opened a black leather case and adjusted his Zeiss binocular. There, in the brilliant picture which leaped before his eyes as he lifted the field glass, stretched the very ridge up which he had struggled to the summit of the Dom, not ten days before; he saw a blue cloud-shadow slide down the gleaming slope of the Lyskamm, where he had battled with stinging snow all one gray morning in the preceding September, and then had slumped down ingloriously to the Riffelalp and defeat; a shining snowfield close by — the Alphubel Joch — marked the place where, long years ago, he had seen his first mountain sunrise. Barrington leaned farther over the parapet and looked down at the glittering Roththal Sattel, two thousand feet below him, where four tiny figures were moving, step by step, toward the very platform on which he stood. As he looked, an ice-axe flashed; the leader was cutting steps. Something of the absurdity of the situation tickled Barrington’s sense of humor; four men were risking everything to attain unto the height that he had reached by the Jungfraubahn. He chuckled audibly, and immediately turned round guiltily to see if any one had noticed.

A young fellow beside him — an American, from the cut of his coat — was watching him with curiosity and open admiration.

‘You’ve been here before, then?’ asked the stranger kindly. (Barrington’s supposition was right, for the stranger’s unaffected pronunciation of the participle as if he were referring to a receptacle for coal instantly proclaimed his nationality.)

Barrington nodded. ‘How did you find that out?'

The American moved imperceptibly nearer. He was not tanned like Barrington; under his wind-beaten Panama hat his face showed only the normal color of the healthy inn-dweller of Grindelwald.

‘ I don’t know; just guessed it, I suppose. Was it before they put the railroad through?’

The Englishman smiled assent. ‘ Four years ago, he replied. ‘There was nothing here then but a narrow ridge of clean snow, twenty feet long. That was before the buyers and sellers made this temple a den of thieves.’

‘I gather,’remarked the American, ‘ that you don’t like — this? ’ He waved his hand vaguely toward the exclamatory Germans and the picture-postcard stand.

‘Decidedly not.’

‘And yet, now that the Jungfraubahn is here, you don’t mind riding on it?’

Up to this moment the Englishman had been looking out across the dazzling mountains; now he turned his gray eyes on his argumentative neighbor, and spoke earnestly.

‘I don’t wish to put on airs,’ he explained, ‘ but I feel that my case is somehow different. I have climbed before; I am in a sense one of the initiated. What I object to is the presence here of people whose noisy irreverence is an insult to the mountain, — to the Creator, one might almost say. I compared them with the buyers and sellers in the temple, did n’t I?’

‘Yes.’ The young American smiled. ‘And I object,’ he said, warming to the argument, ‘that the analogy does n’t hold, — if we except only the postcard rack. You know the story of the Frenchman who prayed in Westminster Abbey? He was put out for “brawling.’ The verger said, “If we allowed that, we should have them praying all over the place.” You ’re like the verger; you don’t like promiscuous worship. If you were a clergyman—’

It was Barrington’s turn to smile. ‘I am,’ he put in quietly.

‘I thought so,’ said the American. ‘You quote Scripture so well for your purpose. I suppose, then, that you bar strangers out of your church?’

‘I should undoubtedly bar out those who shouted and threw paper boxes about, and otherwise desecrated the House of God.’

‘Thereby excluding at the same time hundreds of true worshipers. I’m afraid, — ’the American proceeded with hesitation, tracing a pattern on the rough parapet with his finger, and watching the process minutely, as if he did n’t quite care to meet Barrington’s eye for the moment,—‘I’m afraid you mountain-lovers are just as selfish as the churchmen who drive Jews, Turks, and Infidels from their doors. You like to be alone, because solitude makes reverence easy; and you like to think of yourselves as — well, the elect — the chosen ones — who are not as other men are. Excuse me if I use Biblical language too; I did n’t mean to poach on your preserves. You would banish the thousands who come up here — ’

‘—To yawn, and complain of the cold, and get nauseated by the altitude, and say commonplace things, and hurry back? Yes, they have no right here. They are not educated for it.’

The man in the Brooks Brothers coat looked at his clerical neighbor with polite incredulity. ‘If this is n’t going to educate them, what will? You talk of the desecration of the temple; how about the consecration of the people?’

Barrington shrugged his shoulders slightly, and turned half away as if disposed to let the subject drop, but in a second he wheeled about again.

‘It’s impossible to do justice to my side of the case,’ he said, his voice softening, ‘because it is a matter of instinct rather than of logic. To me there is something fundamentally wrong — dishonest — in achieving this high reward without the hitherto inevitable perils and — and delights — of the climb: the glacier walk, the mountain hut, the scramble up the couloir, the step-cutting, the knife-edge; avoiding these things is somehow cheating in a great and wonderful game. My position may seem unreasonable: you simply can’t realize how we mountaineers feel about it.’

The American’s finger paused in its pattern-tracing course over the parapet. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said, softly. ‘And yet — I’ve waited three years to see this glory —’

He was suddenly interrupted by a shrill voice behind him: ‘Oh, look, Mamie! Look at those specks! They ’re people! Well, if they don’t look just like ants!’

‘Original comment!’ muttered Barrington, scornfully. He crossed the platform, looked down the mountainside with the rest of the tourist-crowd, and then turned about.

‘It’s very interesting,’ he said. ‘Come over and look.’

The American came; but his manner of coming was not quite what the Englishman expected. For he limped badly, and the clergyman could tell at a glance that no mere sprained ankle could account for this particular inequality of gait.

’I — I’m very sorry,’ stammered Barrington. ‘Did I say — anything—'

‘Oh, forget it,’ replied the American, genially. ‘You just did n’t quite get my point of view. Perhaps you would if I explained that it happened right down there.’

There was a moment’s pause; Barrington waited in respectful silence, whereupon the American continued, almost as if talking to himself.

‘I had been staying at the Eggishorn Hotel. You know it — the Alps all on review out in front, and the Rhone Valley spread out like a map below? — Well, I was wild about the place; scrambled all over the Eggishorn day after day, and watched the climbers setting out up the Aletsch glacier. I had dreams of doing the big snowpeaks myself; finally I decided on the Jungfrau, and hired two guides with the money that was to keep me ten days in Geneva. We started off on a bully August afternoon.

‘I suppose you’re familiar with the Concordia Hut, too, then? The little lame waiter in the dingy dress-suit? And his omelets? The bed-rooms that look out on thirty square miles of snow, and the little platform where you put out your boots to dry? Then you can understand why the whole place seemed to me enchanted ground. I sat on the rocks with my guides till the sunset had burned out; then I got Brunner to overhaul my boots and reinforce the nails while I clumped round in those funny felt shoes. I turned in early, but I could n’t sleep.

‘At one-thirty Brunner banged on my door. We roped up at two by lantern light, — Orion and the Pleiades and the rest, blazing overhead. I still remember how the scream of our hobnails as we stumbled down over the rocks gave way to a crisp crunch and squeak as we stepped out on the snow, and how the lights of the Finsteraarhorn party bobbed off to the right through the dark. I was tense with excitement.

‘Pretty soon the stars paled and the mountains took the light, and before I knew it the sun was up behind the Trugberg and we were at the edge of the bergschrund, with this old peak standing over our heads against an incredibly blue sky. The guides pointed out the Jungfraujoch station of the railway — a little spot on the shine of the snow — and I remember feeling, just as you do now, that the completion of that railway would mean the utter desecration of the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I forgot that, the mountains were made for man.

‘Then we tackled the bergschrund. It was unusually broad that year: a crevasse varying from ten to twenty feet in width, crossed by a couple of tricky-looking snow bridges, and extending in either direction to the cliffs. Brunner looked over the left-hand snow bridge. The thing had shrunk considerably since his last ascent, but Brunner was confident. We braced ourselves hard and paid out the rope, while he walked across, — safe as a church. We all breathed again. The next moment I found myself stepping out on the thing with a blue chasm below. Then — suddenly — there was a little crumbling sound; everything dropped out from under me, and I fell, with a crash of splintering ice, on a sort of ledge about ten feet down. The guides caught me with the rope, and I hung ages on that shelf, watching the rainbow lights in the icicles and holding on to nothing at all for dear life. When they finally dragged me out on the glacier again, half an hour later, I found I’d broken my hip.

‘The rest of it was n’t—well, exactly fun. They carried me down somehow to the hotel, where the doctor took mercy on my groans and set the fracture. But — I suppose too much time had elapsed, or else the doctor did a clumsy job; I ’ve never found out. Anyway, I spent the rest of that summer looking at the Alps from that silly tea-terrace at the Eggishorn, vowing that I’d get up the Jungfrau or die in the attempt. When I reached New York, the physicians shook their heads and said I’d never climb again.

‘So I waited three years while they built the Jungfraubahn. Here I am. Would you — bar me out?’

He made a little gesture of appeal.

The English clergyman turned to him with a smile of true humility. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘My notions of the elect can stand revision. I wonder how I came to quote so much Scripture without remembering that the Lord delighteth not in any man’s legs.’