Thus the passes gained in importance, while the peaks were afar off and terrible: they were already in use when there filtered through to Herodotus across section after section of trade route the tradition, confused in its long journey, of a town of Pyrene and a river Alpis; when a new wave of inhabitants, scarcely pushing communication between valley and valley themselves, used their mountain hardiness to extract toll from the Roman merchants whose enterprise brought them across the St. Bernard and the Mont Cenis to Vienna and Lugdunum; and each traveller added to their importance and fame, while the local paths were linked up into great highways, joining country to country, and shrine to shrine, making a way for invasions, for pilgrims, or for traders. The pass where Xenophon’s men cried θάλασσα! θάλασσα! possesses a reality and interest of its own, not shared by the almost laughable description of the mythical peaks of Krophi and Mophi in Herodotus. But for us, even as children, there was a difference: the prowess and achievements of our elders made impossible the fear which our ancestors felt even for ‘Helm Crag, Helvellyn, and Butterlip Howe’--the last-named a small wooded eminence about two hundred feet high--yet we lacked the spiritual and bodily pride which the attainer of summits must possess. What climber has not known the moment when this has failed him suddenly, and he has realised the impudence of his presence among the mountain sanctuaries and of his trial of strength face to face with the mountain’s bulk; when he either expiates the crime of his intrusion by a great and tranquillising humility, or struggles, only to find all he sees assume a mask of grinning hatefulness? The attainer of summits follows a way which, even if definite, is none the less new and none the less formidable to each successive user: we children, like them, were pass-goers, enterers of a sanctuary of a different kind, one hallowed by the slow toil of generations, where the mountains could not resent intrusion, since it was the mark of their community of life with the humble folk whom they supported.
Even then we were no longer geographers by profession, still less now, when the Alps are to us no longer a barrier to be forced, but the playground of Europe, whither we in our sophisticated age make trains convey us; and it seems as if the amateur geography of our childhood were a mere survival, to be put away together with other childish things when we grow up to be ‘modern men,’ with the climber’s devotion to peaks, and the true modern appreciation of mountains. Shall we not come to treat passes as highest minima instead of lowest maxima, and so despise them; and will not our new mystical attitude make the partial survival in us of primitive man a bar to the growth of a right spirit?