But this is only a single side of rock-climbing, and not perhaps the most universally popular. There are fine-day climbers who know nothing of this paradoxical pleasure born of pain. But it is the side which is generally prominent in the winter months. In the presence of ice and snow there is more of conflict, less of communion with the hills. Man enters as an intruder, and has to make good his footing. For that reason perhaps the actual joy of achievement is more keen.
But for pleasure unalloyed there is nothing to equal a climb up difficult rock on a fine summer day. Who can describe the exhilaration that comes from the use of muscles responsive to the call, from the sense of mastery and ease in the very face of danger, from the splendid situations and wide outlook? Every faculty is at full stretch. The whole being is stimulated to the intensest appreciation of beauty in all its forms--beauty of life itself and beauty of movement, beauty of height and depth and distance. It must surely have been moments such as these that Stevenson had in mind when he prayed to the Celestial Surgeon:
‘Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take And stab my spirit broad awake.’
Such moments are necessarily few. It is one of the limitations of mortal man that he cannot live for long upon the heights. But always and everywhere the climber is most vividly alive. There are continual appeals to so many sides of his nature that he cannot be indifferent to them all. Now one may come home to him, and now another, but at least he never falls a prey to that most deadly of all soul-diseases--apathy.
But though climbing, even in the British Isles, means all that we have said and more, far more, beside, there is just one grain of truth lurking at the bottom of what Ruskin said. To the rock-climber the pure æsthetic pleasure of contemplation comes in flashes, not in a steady glow. There is so much to distract him--the technicalities of his art, the continuous attention to details, half automatic as it may become, which alone makes climbing justifiable--even the voices and proximity of his companions. For though there is nothing discordant in the presence of sympathetic friends, the conscious introduction of the personal element must always widen the gulf between man and Nature. For that reason the climber should sometimes go alone. He should let his mind be as nearly as possible the empty cupboard of the old metaphysicians, and leave it to the mountains to make it a storehouse of impressions. They will be more true and vivid just because there are no counter influences to weaken them or crowd them out. If he would enter wholly into the spirit of the hills, let him go alone into some remote valley of the Scottish Highlands, till the last footpath vanishes and the highest bothy is left behind. Let him make his bed in the heather undisturbed by any sign of the presence of man or of his handiwork. The cold wind that comes with dawn will waken him as the first thin mists are gathering round the peaks three thousand feet above. As he climbs the steep slopes of heather in the half-light the mists roll down to meet him, till he is the only living, moving thing in a world of whiteness and silence. The heather dwindles, here and there black rock-ridges show for a moment and disappear. As in a dream he takes no count of time or distance, till at last he steps out upon the summit and the sun meets him, shining level with his eyes. Like an ebbing tide the mists roll back towards the valleys, leaving the mountain-tops of Scotland shining clear in the brilliance of the upper air. He is alone with the hills, and stands like one initiated into a strange and beautiful mystery.