Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/145

Rh to the very utmost limit of their speed, are in no state to enjoy themselves; you might, indeed, as well ask a man trying to break the one mile cycling record to look at the view, or the members of an Oxford racing crew to see the point of a joke. The party is simply driven onward, checked only when the wind or legs of its Herr absolutely refuse to proceed a step further. During the short halt thus involved—usually designated breakfast, though no one ever eats anything—the amateurs gasp and pant and feel all, or more than all, the pangs of incipient mal de mer, whilst the guides gloomily commiserate themselves on the slowness of the Herrschaft. It is needless to say that the conditions essential to the pleasures of talk and contemplation enjoyed by the founders of the craft are wholly lacking. Woe to the town-bred Englishman, hurried along by a couple of Swiss peasants in the very perfection of wind and muscle.

The guideless climber is free from all these baneful and blighting influences. So long as there is time in hand, and very often when there is not, he prefers to lie on sheltered rocks and watch the ever changing shadows on the distant hills, or to peer down enormous depths on to the restless mists floating above the glacier. Toiling up snow slopes or screes at his top pace never commends itself to him—at such times every flat stone suggests a halt and every tiny stream deep draughts of water.