How generally the myth-maker has been extinguished in modern students of mountains may be realized by examining the tone of Alpine literature, which, once lifted above the fatiguing repetition of gymnastics, is almost invariably scientific.
Ruskin alone among prose writers on the Alps re-echoes the dim past, in ever-recurring myth-making, over cloud and peak and glacier; his is the Rigveda’s idea of nature. The varying hues which mood and emotion forever pass before his own mental vision mask with their illusive mystery the simple realities of nature, until mountains and their bold, natural facts are lost behind the cloudy poetry of the writer.
Ruskin helps us to know himself, not the Alps; his mountain chapters, although essentially four thousand years old, are, however, no more an anachronism than the dim primeval spark which smoulders in all of us; their brilliancy _is_ that spark fanned into flame.
To follow a chapter of Ruskin by one of Tyndall is to bridge forty centuries and realize the full contrast of archaic and modern thought.
This was the drift of my revery as I lay basking on the hot sands of Inyo, realizing fully the geological history and hard, materialistic reality of Mount Whitney, its mineral nature, its chemistry; yet archaic impulse even then held me, and the gaunt, gray old Indian who came slowly toward me must have subtly felt my condition, for he crouched beside me and silently fixed his hawk eye upon the peak.
At last he drew an arrow, sighted along its straight shaft, bringing the obsidian head to bear on Mount Whitney, and in strange fragments of language told me that the peak was an old, old man, who watched this valley and cared for the Indians, but who shook the country with earthquakes to punish the whites for injustice toward his tribe.
I looked at his whitened hair and keen, black eye. I watched the spare, bronze face, upon which was written the burden of a hundred dark and gloomy superstitions; and as he trudged away across the sands I could but feel the liberating power of modern culture, which unfetters us from the more than iron bands of self-made myths. My mood vanished with the savage, and I saw the great peak only as it really is--a splendid mass of granite 14,887 feet high, ice-chiselled and storm-tinted; a great monolith left standing amid the ruins of a bygone geological empire.