Winter Sports in Switzerland. E. F. Benson
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amazingly silly proverb which quite mistakenly tells us that “seeing is believing.” The most ordinary conjurer at a village entertainment will prove the falsity of this saying. For who has not seen one of these plausible mountebanks put a watch into a top-hat, and, after clearly smashing it into a thousand pieces with a pestle, stir up the disintegrated fragments with a spoon and produce an omelette? Or who is so unacquainted with the affairs of the village schoolroom at Christmas as not to have seen a solid billiard-ball or a lively canary squeezed out of the side of a friend’s head? Such phenomena are by no means rare, and occur periodically all over England. The observer’s eyes have told him that he has seen such things, and the verb “to see” is merely a compendious expression to indicate that on the evidence of your eyes such or such a phenomenon has actually occurred. But no one believes that the disintegrated watch has become an omelette though ocular evidence—seeing—insists that it has. It was a conjuring trick. And this leads me to the consideration of the phenomena on which this whole book is based.
For High Alpine resorts in winter are a conjuring trick of a glorious and luminous kind. Our commonsense, based on experience, tells us that ice is cold, but is melted by heat; and that snow is wet; and that unless you put on a greatcoat when the thermometer registers frost, you will feel chilly; and that if you frequently fall down in the snow you will be wet through, and if you do not change your clothes when you return home you will catch a cold. All these things are quite obvious, and he who does not grant them as premises to whatever conclusion we may happen to base on them, is clearly not to be argued with, but soothed and comforted like a child or taken care of like a lunatic. But High Alpine winter resorts give, apparently, ocular disproof of all these obvious statements, and those who go out to these delectable altitudes in favourable seasons see (which is ocular evidence) every day and all day the exact opposite of these primitively simple prepositions regularly and continually taking place. They sit in the sun, when they are tired of skating, and see that though a torrid luminary beats down on the frozen surface, burning and browning the faces of their friends, the ice remains perfectly dry and unmelted; they trudge through snow, and find that they are not wet; they see the thermometer marking anything up or down to thirty degrees of frost, and go out coatless and very likely hatless, and are conscious only of an agreeable and bracing warmth; they go ski-ing and all day are smothered in snow, and yet return dry and warm and comfortable to their hotels, and do not catch any cold whatever. Shakespeare once made an allusion of some kind (I cannot look all through his plays to find it) about hot ice, meaning to employ a nonsensical expression. But it is the most striking testimonial to the magnificence of his brain that all he ever wrote meant something, although, as in this instance, he designed it not to. For without doubt he was alluding to what appears to occur at St. Moritz or Mürren.
But it is all a conjuring trick, or so these altitudinists are disposed to think when they return home to the dispiriting chills of a normal February in England, and find that when the thermometer marks 45° or thereabouts they shiver disconsolately in the clemming cold. Even when they were out in Switzerland they hardly believed what appeared to be happening, for they found that if the weather changed, and instead of the windless calm, or a light north-wind, the Föhn-wind blew from the south-west, warm and enervating, then, in proportion as the thermometer mounted, they felt increasingly cold. All these things, though they thought they saw and felt them, were of the nature of a conjuring trick, and they never, after their return to the lowlands, really believed them. It was obviously impossible that they could have felt warm and dry, after being rolled in the snow. It must have been an illusion, capable of immediate disproof if they now went out without a coat, or sat down on a snowy London pavement. A pleasant illusion, no doubt, but clearly an illusion. It was like the omelette emerging from the top-hat, into which a watch had, only a moment before, been placed and pestled.
And if those who think they have experienced these phenomena, which so clearly contradict the most elementary laws of Nature, cannot fully believe in them when they re-enter the chilly spring of England, still less do those who have not experienced them find it possible even to simulate credulity when the foolish Alpinist recounts them. I rather fancy that people who have never been to the high altitudes in winter, believe that all those who say they have done so, and come back and tell their friends that sun does not melt ice, and that snow is dry, and that ten degrees of frost is an agreeable temperature to stroll about in without a coat, are in some sort of inexplicable conspiracy. But the conspiracy is so widely spread now, and is still spreading so fast, that one’s remarks on the subject are received with politeness nowadays, though still with incredulity. Some strange wandering of the wits has taken possession of the conspirators, who are otherwise harmless. And, such is the force with which their illusion holds them, and so anxious are they that credence should be given to it, that they employ some sort of skin-dye to add completeness to their strange tales, and appear with brown hands and faces when they come back to the anæmic metropolis. They are clearly the victims of some obscure but infectious derangement of the brain, of which the chief symptoms are those strange illusions and an immense appetite. … And, as I have said, the victims of these illusions, before they have spent many days in England, are already themselves wondering whether all these things really were so, or whether they were but the fabric of a pleasing dream. But they make plans to dream again about the middle of the ensuing autumn, and for the most part find that the vision is recapturable. It is all great nonsense; but if you take a suitable ticket at a suitable time of the year, and go where that ticket will allow you, the nonsense is found to be recurrent.
I do not know whether ice and snow, and all the forms of the “radiant frost,” as Shelley calls it, are in themselves more beautiful than the spectacle, to which we are accustomed, of an unfrozen world, or whether it is merely because we are unused to the gleams and sparkle of these whitenesses, that we find them so entrancingly lovely. It would be interesting, for instance, to ascertain whether an Esquimo or other dweller in the Arctics accustomed to ice, would go into ecstasies of admiration at the sight—shall we say—of Hyde Park Corner on a moist warm day of September, when the roadway is swimming in a thick brown soup of mud, and gusts of tepid rain stream on the wind-swept lamp-posts, thus supporting the idea that it is to the novelty of the spectacle that the arousing of our appreciation is due. Certainly it would be hard to say that anything in the world is more beautiful than a beech-tree in spring, or a crimson rambler in full flower, or glimpses of the Mediterranean in a frame of grey-green olive-trees; and I am inclined to believe that it is partly the contrast which a sunny morning in winter among the High Alps presents to all that a Londoner has known or dreamed of hitherto that partly accounts for the ineffable impressions it never fails in producing on him. And to that we must add the exhilarating and invigorating effect of the still dry air, and the sun that all day pours Pactolus over the gleaming fields. In such an air and in such a flood of light all our senses and perceptions are quickened, the vitality of our organs is increased, and with the wonderful feeling of bien-être which the conditions give, our appreciation is kindled too. I always feel that it must have been on a frosty morning that David said: “I opened my mouth and drew in my breath.” And perhaps on that day the cedars of Lebanon were covered with the crystals of hoar-frost, and below the snowy uplands the dim blue of the sea slept insapphirined at the bases of the shining cliffs. …
I lick the chops of memory, and go back in thought to the middle of December, when, having previously determined not to go abroad till January, I hurriedly fly the country, like a criminal seeking to escape from the justice that is hot on the heels of a murderer. In such wise do I fly from my conscience—conscience, I may remark, is one of the things that everybody leaves behind when he goes to the High Alps: apparently it and other poisonous organisms, such as the bacillus of tuberculosis cannot exist in those altitudes—while below my breath I again register the frequently broken vow that I will be at home again by the middle of January at the latest. For indeed it seems impossible to tolerate London any longer just now: the fogs have begun (these are the excuses with which I seek to stay the protests of conscience, before I fly from it), and for three days last week we lived in a thick and ominous twilight of dusky orange, tasting evilly of soot and sulphurous products. At intervals a copper-coloured plate showed itself above the house roofs: and, oh, to think that this mean metallic circle was indeed none other than the hot radiant giant that in the happier climes was rejoicing to run his course across the turquoise expanse of cloudless sky; that this remote and meaningless object was the same that sparkled