It was a water-following on a great scale; we started with the sound of the Reichenbach falls in our ears, and followed along the line of least resistance, made by the stream. Still before breakfast we passed the Schwartzwald, where the stream was already shorn of so much of its strength that it could be harnessed and made to pass through hollowed half tree-trunks to do the work of a saw-mill. Higher up was the region of bogs and grass slopes, each few hundred yards sending its half-buried tinkling trickle to join the head waters of the river itself. And then, without warning, the path took a final zig, and brought us to the top; and for the first time we saw part of the land of the other waters, with the other glaciers and snow-fields, grass peaks and stony ones, which gave them birth. We saw how the valleys bent round to Thun and Brienz, how the valley of Lauterbrunnen and the peak of the Jungfrau fitted on to a world whose horizon had been suddenly enlarged; looking for those places above all which had gained special interest and familiarity from the pictured slips in our chocolate packets.
That evening, after a hot trudge up from Grindelwald, and a cool descent along the home stream that somehow rested our tired limbs, we returned to Rosenlaui with a new sense of expansion and a vague feeling of the coherence of things, for the dead lines of the map had become actual and living before our eyes. Yet this feeling soon gave place to the disappointing yet somehow thrilling thought, that by enlarging our horizon we had only left ourselves ringed about by a wider circle of other sides, making it still less likely than before that we should ever solve the abiding questions of our childhood.
For four years the Alps remained a memory and a hope, till in 1907 the long horrors of the Certificate Examination were followed by the thrill of the night journey, enjoyed to the full owing to a constitutional inability to sleep, and a drive from Martigny to the upper part of the Val de Bagnes, a shut-in and self-centred valley presided over by the Combin. It was here that Italy became identified with the other side. Here I was first initiated as a climber, and taken up the Ruinette; and for two lazy hours on the top I watched the Italian mountains raise themselves up from the ever-thickening screen of mist with which the Lombard plains seemed to be hiding their secret. A few weeks later came twenty minutes’ actual walking on Italian soil, between the Great St. Bernard and the Col de Fenêtre. Italy lay at our feet, brought near to us by the road winding down visibly to Aosta, and by the first Italian notices of ‘Caccia Riservata,’ as well as by the southward-flowing water.