Changeless, eternal, forbidding, still, silent, and horrible--thus the snowy ranges appeared to the pre-scientific gaze. To us they seem the very reverse. We know them to be ceaselessly changing, of relatively short persistence, the theatre of movements of all kinds both violent and slow--not places of death by any means, but the home of an active, a beneficent, and a formative life--not regions cut off and unrelated to the lowlands and habitable world, but the very parent of such, the laboratory where soil is made, and the head of water collected that distributes it below; the counterbalance of the denuding forces that would level the earth with the ocean; regions beneficent as they are beautiful, and as necessary to the well-being of the habitable world as is the richest and most fertile plain.
[Illustration: 15. AT MEIRINGEN. Ridge above the Brünig Pass in distance.]
He that would know mountains and mountain regions aright must know them as the theatre of change, the domain of action. He must not merely look upon peaks as they are, but must conceive of them as they have been and will be. As this kind of knowledge grows and becomes instinctive within him, it will alter his attitude towards Alpine panoramas and broaden his grasp of the significance of mountain physiognomy.
Let us briefly consider the stages of formation and decay of a single group of mountains, not volcanic. If we go back to the very start, we may imagine their future site occupied by a plain. The slow cooling and consequent shrinking of the world involves the wrinkling of its surface, and the position of the wrinkles is determined by a variety of forces, as yet little understood, with which we need not concern ourselves. Suffice it to assume that our plain occupies the position of the next coming group of wrinkles. A single range or line of mountains hardly exists in the world outside of the commonplace cartographer's mind. Old-fashioned maps used to represent mountains by a kind of caterpillar meandering about on them, and thus gave currency to the notion that mountains are generally arranged along a single line--a notion, by the by, that (in the minds of politicians negotiating boundary treaties) has been prolific in costly disputes and misunderstandings.[1] Mountains generally exist in rows of more or less parallel ranges intricately jointed together, and they do so because, when the wrinkling that caused them began, it did not begin with a single wrinkle, but with a row of wrinkles, such as a soft tablecloth makes on a smooth table when parts of it are moved toward one another.