‘It darkens. I have lost the ford, There is a change on all things made. The rocks have evil faces, Lord, And I am awfully afraid.’
Insufficient attention is paid to the curious data that mountaineering contributes to the psychology of exhaustion. Experiences of a different character were the outcome of another struggle on the Plaine Morte against overpowering weariness.
With a friend, a sound mountaineer, but a novice on ski, I had set out some years later to cross the hills from Montana to Villars. I left my friend on the Plaine Morte, and pressed on to reach the Wildstrubel for the sunset. Incidentally of all mountain memories that lonely sundown on the Wildstrubel is the most haunting. Adelboden was hidden, and from bourne to bourne there was no suggestion of life but for the deserted snow-gagged road to the Gemmi. A chaos of crag and snowfield, with no touch of colour to relieve the greyness, reddened for a few moments, and then sank back into the shadow as night crept upwards from the valley to the summit ridges. Darkness had fallen when I again reached the Plaine Morte, and one of those bitter winter breezes blew over the glacier. Mental and physical fatigue followed the inevitable reaction after thirteen strenuous hours. The monotony of surroundings has a hypnotic effect on tired limb and brain. The alternating spaces of shadow and snow, subdued by the glimmering light of the stars, the indefinite bounding wall with a dark curving of great hills beyond, possessed a rhythmic suggestion of sleep that I found difficult to resist. I tried counting steps, but only accentuated the rhythm. I vowed not to look up till I had reached the thousand, but nothing seemed to break the maddening reiteration of those undulating snows. And then my hands and feet suddenly lost sensation.
A steady sequence of thuds disturbed me; and I realised that my friend was chopping wood outside the hut some three miles away. That Inquisition torture, the slow succession of drops of water falling at intervals of a minute on the victim’s head, had, we are told, the effect of inducing a lively loyalty to the Catholic faith. I can well believe it, for I know that the regular fall of the beats carried across the glacier filled me with zealous and unreasoning anger. It added the last artistic touch to the monotony of the Dead Plain, for it followed a different rhythm, and proved almost more than I could stand.