A Sun-Dazzling Spire Of
Alp Hangs Suspended In Mid-Sky Among Awful Glooms And Blackness; Or
Perhaps The Edge
Of some great mountain shoulder will be designed
in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance bright
Like
a constellation, and alone 'in the unapparent.' You may think you
know the figure of these hills; but when they are thus revealed,
they belong no longer to the things of earth - meteors we should
rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but for a
moment and return no more. Other variations are more lasting, as
when, for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some
windless hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand each
stock-still and loaded with a shining burthen. You may drive
through a forest so disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling
silently in the cleft of the ravine, and all still except the
jingle of the sleigh bells, and you shall fancy yourself in some
untrodden northern territory - Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska.
Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down
stairs in a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by
the glimmer of one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find
yourself by seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight and a
freezing chill. The mail sleigh takes you up and carries you on,
and you reach the top of the ascent in the first hour of the day.
To trace the fires of the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak,
to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted
sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading
shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half
glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the
greyness of the western heaven - these will seem to repay you for
the discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and
these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther
side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with
such another long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another
senseless watercourse bickering along the foot. You have had your
moment; but you have not changed the scene. The mountains are
about you like a trap; you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold
the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can
change only one for another.
CHAPTER X - HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has
followed in the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the
wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some
basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting
in dusty olive-yards within earshot of the interminable and
unchanging surf - idle among spiritless idlers; not perhaps dying,
yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after
livelier weather and some vivifying change. These were certainly
beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its
softness. Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were
not certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores
would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death. There was a
lack of a manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write
bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you did not feel that
here was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve.
And it appears, after all, that there was something just in these
appreciations. The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a
ruder air shall medicine him; the demon of cold is no longer to be
fled from, but bearded in his den. For even Winter has his 'dear
domestic cave,' and in those places where he may be said to dwell
for ever tempers his austerities.
Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental
railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived,
after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and
dismal moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone,
the southern sky. It is among these mountains in the new State of
Colorado that the sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of
his ailments, but the possibility of an active life and an honest
livelihood. There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a
working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong and begin anew
his life. Instead of the bath-chair, the spade; instead of the
regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare
air of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick-room - these
are the changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of
self-respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes and terrors,
none but an invalid can know. Resignation, the cowardice that apes
a kind of courage and that lives in the very air of health resorts,
is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect. The man can open the
door; he can be up and doing; he can be a kind of a man after all
and not merely an invalid.
But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains. We cannot all of us go
farming in Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, which combines
the medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of
the old. Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its
wholesome duties; again he has to be an idler among idlers; but
this time at a great altitude, far among the mountains, with the
snow piled before his door and the frost flowers every morning on
his window. The mere fact is tonic to his nerves. His choice of a
place of wintering has somehow to his own eyes the air of an act of
bold contract; and, since he has wilfully sought low temperatures,
he is not so apt to shudder at a touch of chill.
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