To a mountaineer an Alpine peak is something more than a mass of rock, snow, and ice rising to inhospitable altitudes, and however much those who gaze from below may rhapsodise at beauty of form, grace of outline, and richness of colouring, they cannot experience the feelings of the climber setting forth to the attack; his doubts and fears; the fierce joy of conquest; the downwards glimpse through a breaking mist; the relaxation of taut muscles and strung nerves on the summit.

A great peak is only to be wooed and won after much preparation, toil, and oftimes tribulation, and it is hardly surprising, therefore, to find in the caprices of mountains a close analogy to human nature. There are lucky mountains and unlucky mountains, mountains that repulse and mountains that welcome, beautiful mounVOL. CCXXIV.-NO. MCCCLIII.

tains and ugly mountains. Let those without superstition defy the Zmutt ridge of the Matterhorn, and those who believe in luck and not probability the stone-swept couloir of the Col du Lion.

of

This temperamentality mountains may be summed up in one word-weather; and of all Alpine peaks Mont Blanc is the most temperamental. I remember well the words of an old and famous guide.

"Ah, monsieur," he said, "there are many mountains, but only one Mont Blanc. He is king of all, but cruel and fickle; in the morning he may smile, but in the afternoon he may kill you."

The tourist, accompanied by guides, who ascends Mont Blanc in good weather by the ordinary snow route from Chamonix via the Grands Mulets, may return with the idea that the mountain is an easy snow

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promenade; but let him be caught on the summit ridge, or the complicated upper snowfields, by one of the sudden storms that approach with but little warning, and he will have a very different story to tell a story of roaring hurricane charged with numbing cold, paralysing to body and brain, suffocating wind-driven snow writhing in furious 'tourmente,' and a slow plod plod for hours through a blankness where naught is visible. Under these conditions it is fatally easy for the most experienced mountaineers to diverge from the correct route, and many men despairing of finding the way, and tired of placing one foot before another, have sat down to rest and died.

Yet sometimes the forces of unrest are stilled, and one may sit on the summit with only the faintest of zephyrs whispering by, and a glorious sun blazing from a sky of deepest indigo blue.

Thus Mont Blanc by the ordinary way-a route by which any able-bodied man may under fair conditions, and with guides, gain the Alps' highest summit. Modern mountaineering, seeking to exercise its skill, has invented many alternative ways, until it seemed that every possible route had been made up the mountain.

As was the case elsewhere among the Alps, Englishmen played a great part in opening up the routes on Mont Blanc, and two of the finest mountaineering expeditions in the

world, the Pétéret and Brenva ridges, were first ascended by Englishmen and their guides. The traverse of the Pétéret ridge, first made by the late Mr Eccles and his guides, is now regarded as the blue riband of mountaineering achievement; whilst the Brenva route, the classic snow and ice expedition of the Alpsconquered more than sixty years ago by Messrs Moore, Walker, and Matthews and their guides,

has since been immortalised by Mr A. E. W. Mason in 'Running Water.'

All these routes lie up the southern Italian face of Mont Blanc, grandest of all Alpine mountainsides, which rises above the meadows of Courmayeur and the Val Veni in 12,000 feet of shattered glaciers, savage precipices, and icy steeps. So great is the scale of these ridges, that the time necessary

to overcome the climbs is reckoned not in hours but in days, and the possibility of bad weather overtaking a party high up is one to be seriously considered.

Mountaineering exacts its toll, and this great side of Mont Blanc has claimed valuable lives. Professor Balfour, F.R.S., was killed with his guide, Petrus, in an attempt on the Aiguille Blanche de Pétéret; H. O. Jones, his wife, and guide, Truffer, were killed on the Aiguille Rouge de Pétéret ; and lastly, that splendid young Swiss mountaineer, Willy Richardet, was killed by falling stones in 1925 on the Aiguille