One evening at the Karesawa bivouac (4)

Concluded: a translation of pioneer alpinist Ōshima Ryōkichi's meditation on life and death in the mountains

Itakura "One Day" Katsunobu in 1922

And, indeed, there was much for me to ponder then. Dark, regretful thoughts pursued me; a great burden oppressed my heart. For the mountains exerted this mysterious hold on me, and all I could think was that death on a mountain would be a judgment of fate that I should accept with good grace when the time came.

At that thought, I felt an undertone, an “Unterton”, of youthful spirit and joy; a “Lebensglaube” spread through my heart. However much you think about death – and however strongly you feel it – the bright spirit of youth will shine through the gloom. Though none of us would wish for a death in the mountains, let alone seek one out, we should accept our fate without regret if it should come, as our “Prädestination”.

Above us, the night sky was clearing. The stars glittered in their countless numbers, as if hinting at the depths of eternity and setting in perspective the significance of a single life or the concept of a person’s existence.

And then it happened: a lone shooting star momentarily unfurled its dazzling tail across the sky, as if imparting a revelation. It was as if the world had been created anew. Suddenly, a friend’s voice broke through the heavy silence, as if some bond had been released. He was smiling as if some fount of happiness had overflowed within him:

“Hey, we’ll all die someday, and the mountains too will pass away.” I have to admit that I may not have recorded these events just as they really happened. Yet everything is set down here as it really was, whether that is the experiences on the mountain that I’ve described, or the fragments of our conversations that I’ve woven in. The only thing is that they may have happened at different times in different places. But, for the purposes of the above account, I’ve represented them here as if they all happened at the same time and place.

Every time we met, we talked about mountains, and from every angle. Sometimes, we’d talk about the practical (“praktisch) side of mountaineering, at other times the discussion would range widely over the metaphysical aspects. As we were young, we’d get really self-important while we talked all kind of things through. That kind of passion may be the true mark of youth. On occasion, our unvarnished fervour or “Leidenschaft” must have seemed rather childish. Or, looking backing on it after a while, there was a terribly jejune seriousness about it all. One might go so far as to admit the atmosphere was somewhat odd. But that was all the same to us. I think that people are always groping their way forward.

Yet I doubt whether today is quite the same as yesterday. So it makes no difference how great the gulf or how long the lapse of time since then. That’s why, with the aim of making this a kind of testament to our times, I’ve pulled together this account of things just as they were, without embellishing or making things up. It could be, then, that some of our thoughts might seem naïve, at least in part. But retailing all that wasn’t my intention in writing; this would have been foolish and mistaken. I will say this, though. What drove me to write this piece was to set down a part of what I could grasp in my hands when I had the power to pursue the true path of mountaineering in my youth. Trivial or strange as it may be, this is why I ventured to add this postcript.

References

Translation of Ōshima Ryōkichi, Karasawa no iwagoya no aru yoru no koto (涸沢の岩小屋のある夜のこと), in Yama kikō to zuisō (山 紀行と随想) edited and introduced by Ohmori Hisao.

The bad news about Ueli Steck came in just as Project Hyakumeizan was completing this translation. There is a moving and thoughtful tribute by Steve House on the Patagonia blog. Every generation or so, alpinists like Steck redefine the limits of the possible in mountaineering. Possibly we’ve progressed less far in dealing with the dark side of alpinism, its “penalties and dangers”. As Steve House observes,

When a major climbing figure like Ueli dies, there is always second-guessing and criticism. In my opinion, Ueli got more than his fair share of criticism. Most of the criticism, I believe, was rooted in human insecurity. People didn’t believe anyone could do what he did; their own personal fears were too overpowering to even allow the possibility of his excellence and achievement. Or they believed the risks he assumed were unjustified …

Over a century ago, Alfred Mummery anticipated such criticism in the last chapter of the book that sums up his alpinistic achievements – My climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, first published in 1895, the year that he disappeared while exploring the Rakhiot Face of Nanga Parbat. 

One generation later, in Taishō Japan, Ōshima Ryōkichi, drew on Mummery’s words to set down his own thoughts on the meaning of alpinism. The article translated above was published in the December 1924 edition of a climbing journal. Less than four years later, Ōshima himself fell to his death, on a spring ascent of the north ridge of Mae-Hodaka. He was just 28 years old.

One evening at the Karesawa bivouac (3)

Continued: a translation of pioneer alpinist Ōshima Ryōkichi's meditation on life and death in the mountains

So the four of us held our peace, each of us sensing, in himself, the mood of the others. And we were well aware that what each of us was silently thinking about was the fate that would inevitably befall some of us when climbing mountains. While we’d been chatting after dinner just now, we’d fallen to talking about a companion we all knew, whom we’d lost last winter, and how the previous summer he’d been with us up here, in the rock cave, and we’d spent a pleasant few days together. And then, as if by tacit agreement, we’d dropped the subject and fallen silent. We went outside, sat ourselves down on the rock and fell silent.

Kita-Hodaka: photo from an early editon of Oshima's writings

So, until that moment, we’d all, each in his own heart, been focused on the same thought, as if on a single point of light that appeared in all our minds – when suddenly the sound of a stone falling from the crumbling heights of Karesawa-dake rang out, breaking the silence two or three times as it bounded from the cliff. Then that impenetrable silence descended again.

That was the moment. As if tired of thinking, somebody threw out a question.

“Well, what do you think about dying in the mountains?”

Since we’d all been thinking about the same thing in the same way, it was as if we’d been looking for somebody to break the ice. Then these words were spoken. And, of course, they struck a chord. Up there on the high mountain, in the dark, we’d all been struggling to find the words to describe a new creed about these cruel “Gefahren”, the mountain hazards that could at any time rob us of our friends or even our own lives.

Somebody replied at once:

“Well, if you go climbing mountains, that’s what you’ve got coming to you.”

“Well maybe, but does that mean that everybody who climbs has it coming?”

“Not everybody, of course not. If you’re lucky, you can get away with it. There are people who climb and nothing ever happens to them.”

“And what kind of people are those that get themselves killed?”

“Come to think about it, they’re people like ‘One Day’ (Itakura Katsunobu). That’s what his older brother said to me, when we were on the train together to Toyama, after ‘One day’ was killed. My own brother was always saying to me I’d get what was coming to me in the mountains one of these days, so that was music to my ears. You could say his words caught my attention, although I was also moved by them. They reminded me of what Mummery said – it was something like this, I think: “It is true the great ridges sometimes demand their sacrifice, but the mountaineer would hardly forgo his worship though he knew himself to be the destined victim.” And so I talked with H. all night, so that I was completely exhausted the next day … But when you look at people like Mummery and One Day and see what happened to them. Well, they both got killed, didn’t they. But it’s not just this kind of person who gets killed in the mountains. People who behave recklessly or carelessly, they get killed too. But that’s not the problem, is it? The problem’s getting killed when you take care, you’ve done your homework and you’re sure of yourself. In that chapter by Mummery on the penalties and dangers of mountaineering, he goes into the dangers in detail, and there are a whole bunch of them. But there are a whole bunch of ways of avoiding them, and so winning through. But then he says there’s no way that a mountaineer can avoid bad luck, and that’s when he comes up with the sentence I just quoted. That was what happened to One Day."

"In Mountains and skis, One Day says this: “As far as one can be certain of anything, if you make cautious and modest progress, step by step, then another aspect of the mountains, one you’ve never dreamed of, will gradually start to resonate in your heart.” Maybe that was what drove him; why he was killed. If you go that far, the rest is up to luck; I’m convinced it’s luck. For people like him, mountaineering is not just a hobby or a sport, is it."

These words came vigorously, without a trace of fatigue:

“A sport or hobby? Of course not. For me right now, mountaineering is much more special than a hobby or sport. I can’t say exactly what it is, but it befits me much more than either of those things.”

Sitting there in the dark, somebody else gave a terse reply to the previous speech. There was silence for a while. Then, “Anyway, when people recognize that you can die doing this, they’re not joking about,” murmured somebody, as if cutting himself off. It was one of our company who’d been with our friend when he’d died. Out of all of us, he was the one who’d had the most intense experience at that point. More than any of us, he knew the inner meaning of a disaster in the mountains. Yet, he’d never spoken about this, making no move to reveal his thoughts to the rest of us. But now he had just this to say: “Since then, I’ve had a hard time keeping myself away from the mountains. I loved Tateyama before, of course. But since then I’ve loved the mountain even more.” He said nothing further. Again, our conversation stalled and everyone was left to mull over his own thoughts alone.

(Continued)

References

This is a translation of Karesawa no iwagoya no aru yoru no koto (涸沢の岩小屋のある夜のこと), by Ōshima Ryōkichi, in Yama kikō to zuisō (山 紀行と随想) edited and introduced by Ohmori Hisao.

"Well, what do you think about dying in the mountains?" This question, in the above passage of Ōshima's essay, leads to a discussion that leans heavily on the Edwardian alpinist A F Mummery's defence of alpinism in the last chapter of My Climbs in the Alps & Caucasus. As Ohmori Hisao points out, Ōshima refers to "that chapter by Mummery on the penalties and dangers of mountaineering" - whereas Mummery actually wrote about the "Pleasures and penalties of mountaineering". This may explain why Ōshima's essay ends on a less positive note than Mummery, whose last words are these:-

But happily to most of us the great brown slabs bending over into immeasurable space, the lines and curves of the wind-moulded cornice, the delicate undulations of the fissured snow, are old and trusted friends, ever luring us to health and fun and laughter, and enabling us to bid a sturdy defiance to all the ills and time and life oppose. 

One evening at the Karesawa bivouac (2)

Continued: a translation of pioneer alpinist Ōshima Ryōkichi's meditation on life and death in the mountains

Oshima (centre) and Maki Yuko (right)
on the summit of Yarigatake, March 1922

There were four of us, and we’d just come down through the coire of Karesawa from the north peak of Hodaka. It was now getting dark. Somehow, we’d threaded our way through the rocky debris that obstruct the floor of Karesawa. It was a perfectly clear, calm summer evening, with the sunset clouds still glowing above the jagged ridgeline of Byōbu-iwa, right in front of us.

Down below, not a sound disturbed the silence that had descended over the rock cave that evening. In that all-pervading evening calm, the mountains enfolded us. Now, on Karesawa’s floor, we were just returning to that dusky abode, the rock cave where we’d so often enjoyed a good conversation and rest. Just then, to our right, the sunset’s embers were still glowing on the very spire of Hodaka and the deep purple shadows were stealing upwards toward the top of Sennin-iwa.

Meanwhile, the dark shadow of night was already creeping over the distant valley. It was exactly then that we reached the rock cave and lit our fire of creeping pine boughs. By the time we’d finished our modest supper, night had embraced us. It was a quite splendid night, sprinkled with stars. The silence enfolded everything, as if wrapping the heights in its embrace.

Abandoning the fire, we tumbled out of the cave and sat ourselves down on a rock in the midst of that chill summer evening in the mountains. In the black night sky above us, stars glittered like fish scales in every colour and brightness. We sat there silently, the four of us on that rock, sucking on our pipes, each wrapped in his own thoughts.

Our mood was attuned to everything around us that night. We weren’t in awe of the mountains, as we would have been on a night of thunderous rain and gales; instead, they conveyed to us this tranquility, this peace, this somehow significant silence. “While the mountain may sometimes impress its mood on the spectator, as often the spectator only sees that which harmonises with his own,” writes Mummery in his account of the first ascent of the Matterhorn's Zmutt Ridge, and certainly our mood that evening was of the latter type.

Behind and beside us, rock walls and towers loomed as jet-black shapes in the gloaming, but they neither intimidated nor overawed us. Rather the mountains that more than half-encircled us felt as if they were sheltering the rock-cave in their midst, as if gently rocking us mountain babies to sleep in a cradle. Perhaps my phrasing is too fanciful, but that’s how beneficent the mountains felt to us. Yet this great silence did not tempt us to sing or jest, for the mountains’ mood and our own were in perfect harmony.

(Continued)

References

This is a translation of Karesawa no iwagoya no aru yoru no koto (涸沢の岩小屋のある夜のこと), by Ōshima Ryōkichi, in Yama kikō to zuisō (山 紀行と随想) edited and introduced by Ohmori Hisao.

Ōshima Ryōkichi (1899-1928) crammed a whole lifetime’s worth of mountaineering and writing into a brief decade. In just the year after his compulsory military service, he managed to spend fully 110 days in the mountains. He explored the ranges of Tōhoku and Hokkaidō as well as the Northern Alps. And he learned French, German, English and Italian in order to read alpine literature in its original languages. Two particular influences were A F Mummery and the French-Swiss alpinist Emil Javelle. According to Ohmori Hisao, the opening section of this essay owes something to Javelle’s evocations of the alpine pastoral.

The photo is from this blog.

One evening at the Karesawa bivouac (1)

Translation: a meditation on life and death in the mountains by pioneer alpinist Ōshima Ryōkichi

We were fond of that bivvy rock in Karesawa. It’s hard to think of any other high place that was so welcoming. “Rock cave” (iwa-koya) was the right name for it, formed as it was by the hollow under a big flat rock on top, and surrounded by piles of rock fragments in front. There was no trace of anybody’s handiwork, so that it looked natural, in keeping with its name, which was all the more pleasant. Around it, Japan’s highest, most magnificent rocky peaks rise to more than 2,500 metres.

View from the Karesawa bivvy cave

There are few lodging places to be found so high, so free, and so congenial. Or so splendidly remote from human existence. Lying on a bed of withered creeping pine boughs, you can look out from under its rocky eaves towards the summit of Mae-Hodaka and the spreading snowfields on the ridges (Grat) and corries (Kar) of Byōbu-iwa. The roof is so low that you have to crouch or lie down the whole time. As far as the scenery goes, since the cave lay on the corrie’s floor, all you could see was the peaks of the surrounding crags, the corrie’s walls, and the scoop of Karesawa, and you couldn’t even see the Azusa River valley.

Few people come this way; it’s a quiet place, and that’s exactly what we like about it. After bringing up rice, miso, a few sweet things and a bit to drink, so as to set up camp and settle in here for four or five days, I feel quite refreshed, as if for the first time I’ve come to a place where I can really smell the mountains.

When the weather’s fine, and as soon as we’ve had breakfast, we set off with ropes over our shoulders to tackle any of the surrounding rock walls we fancy, or topping out on one of those nameless “Nebengipfel” (subsidiary summit), we grant ourselves a bit of a “Gipfelrast”, or it might be interesting to clamber up a “Gratzacke” (jagged ridge) and build a “Steinmann” (summit cairn) there.

And when we’ve had enough, we’d come down to the cave and do a lizard on the big rock that forms its roof. When I say “do a lizard”, that’s what one of us said two or three years ago when he came up here, and so that’s the term we use. It means lying down and sunning oneself atop the flat rock, belly flat to the sun-warmed stone, just like a lizard, closing one’s eyes and pleasantly dozing off without a thought in one’s head.

If the weather’s bad, we’re more like mountain rats, though. We don’t think of coming out of our hole until the clouds lift. In fact, we can’t get out; we can hardly move, for fear of accidentally hitting our heads, so low is the roof of our cave. So then I lay my head towards the back of the cave and just lie there. As we’re high up here, when the weather’s bad, it’s very cold. Rain drips from the rocky eaves and seeps through the rock. Wind blows in from nooks and crannies.

Even so, there is nowhere as pleasant to be as this cave; it’s a tolerable place in both fine and rainy weather. We say what we want to say, eat what we want to eat, and climb to our heart’s content. From time to time, we toy with the idea of having a hut worthy of the name, but only in winter or spring. But we don’t need one in summer, if we can find a natural one like this more or less anywhere. Even in summer, though, our rock can be buried in snow if you come up here too early in the season.

Anyway, one of the pleasures of visiting Kamikōchi in the summer is to come up here with my companions, talk things through, and climb our hearts out. I write here, though, about one particular summer evening with my friends at the rock cave. My hope is in some way to record our companionship at that particular time.

(Continued)

References

This is a translation of Karesawa no iwagoya no aru yoru no koto (涸沢の岩小屋のある夜のこと), by Ōshima Ryōkichi, in Yama kikō to zuisō (山 紀行と随想) edited and introduced by Ohmori Hisao.

Ōshima Ryōkichi (1899-1928) was one of the student mountaineers mentored by Maki Yūkō when he returned from his first ascent of the Eiger’s Mittelegi Ridge in 1921. Ōshima took part in Maki’s ski ascent of Yarigatake the following winter, also a first. In this heady but dangerous epoch, the young climbers were rapt with enthusiasm for developments in European alpinism – hence the German terms embedded here and there in Ōshima’s essay above. At the same time, their ambitions too often ran ahead of their experience in the high mountains. The first victim was Itakura Katsunobu, son of a Meiji-era prime minister, who died in a snowstorm on Tateyama in January 1923. The essay translated here is a meditation on the death of Itakura, known as “One Day” to his friends, and what it meant for Japan’s pioneer alpinists.

The photo, showing the view from the rock cave bivvy in Karesawa is from this blog. According to the same blog, the rock cave no longer exists.

A mountain called Freedom (3)

Concluded: a disquisition (crux pitch) on liberty and climbing literature

The next pitch was mine. Easing up foot by foot, I strove to weld the rubber of my Scarpa rockshoes onto the smooth limestone; handholds weren’t much on offer. The negative energy left behind by our departed fellow-climbers was palpable: it dragged more heavily than the weight of our twin 9mm ropes.

Allan's lead: the crux pitch of Freiheit Südwand

Doubt festered: this must be the “smooth slab” mentioned in the topo, but signs of human passage were lacking – no friendly crampon scratches and, more to the point, few pitons or gear placements to stop a fall. I carried on until I found two old pitons in a corner. This had to be a stance. When Allan came up, we reviewed the topo. Now we understood why the Swiss crew had bailed; the cliff reared up in our face like a barrier.

Without barriers, of course, alpinism would be void of meaning. Still, one can have too much of a good thing. Few climbers have faced as many barriers as did those trapped within Poland’s post-war command economy. Even their path to mountaineering was enmeshed in bureaucratic restrictions. Aspirants received an official card stating where and when they could climb, almost like a driving license.

For expeditions, hindrances mounted to Himalayan proportions. First, climbers had to obtain a passport, ideally without agreeing to spy for the security services. Then they had to get hold of hard currency, to pay for the trip. In Katowice, home to one of the country’s most activist alpine clubs, they abseiled down factory chimneys for a living, paint-brush in hand. Others smuggled whisky into Pakistan.

These stories are recorded by Bernadette McDonald in Freedom Climbers. For once, a publication more than justifies the blurb on its cover: “One of the most important mountaineering books to be written for many years”. The paradox of the Polish climbers is that, the more obstacles they met with, the harder they climbed, and the better they became.

A line: West Face of Gasherbrum with the Kurtyka/Schauer route
(photo: Freedom Climbers)

For more than a decade, Polish climbers made a specialty of hard winter climbs on big Himalayan peaks. The lines they put up were awe-inspiring, as was the casualty rate. McDonald estimates that some eight out of ten of Poland’s top expedition climbers died in the mountains during that period.

Memorial plaque to Polish climbers below Lhotse
(Photo: Freedom Climbers)

When they summited Everest in February 1980, the first-ever ascent in winter, Pope John Paul II congratulated the expedition members, urging them to “Let this sport, which demands such a great strength of the spirit, become a great lesson of life, developing in all of you the human virtues and opening new horizons of human vocation.”

Hardly by coincidence, it was in the same year that the famous strike at the Lenin Shipyards broke out, the first step towards Poland’s liberation. But when, later in the decade, Poland did rejoin the free world, the effects on its alpinists were ambiguous. They shared in the generally increased prosperity, they could vote their governments in and out, and they could travel freely. They were free. Yet something went missing.

In her epilogue, McDonald quotes an article written by Voytek Kurtyka in 1993: “Almost physically I sense in Poland the subsiding of the great mountain inspiration. I believe it is being replaced by the onerous awareness of a new era and the necessity of meeting its demands.” The great age of winter alpinism in the Himalaya was over.

Climbing above the Fählensee (Altes Südplattli, top pitch)

“Climbing is not a symbol or poetic metaphor of life – it is life itself,” wrote J A Szczepański, a Polish climbing author. At times, Allan and I might have agreed with him. Right now, though, we just wanted this climb to end. Unfortunately, an awkward little wall, almost overhanging, blocked our upward progress. This, in a most unmetaphorical way, was clearly the crux of our climb.

“Would you mind leading the next pitch too?” Allan asked. Actually, I’d rather not, I replied – fighting the negative energies of the third pitch had sapped my resolve, or so it seemed. “OK,” said my partner, a man of few words, “then give me some gear.” And, for one last time, Allan got us out of a jam. Backing up an old peg with a chock, he scrabbled his feet upwards and onto a ledge. The key to the climb had been unlocked.

View from the Südwand

The first party to come this way had no sticky rock slippers to help them, or ingenious chocks. Climbing in the summer of 1928, they moved up the smooth slab and mastered the crux pitch in nailed boots, trusting their lives to a hawser-laid hemp rope. Walter Pause records their names as Ernst Holdenegger, Robert Hollenweger and companions. I’m unable to find anything more about them. But they were the first to win the freedom of this wall.

It seems that they didn't name it, though. A record from 1873 shows the master of the Fählenalp – we could see the roofs of its huts sprinkled like confetti on the meadow far below – explaining to a visitor, perhaps a local official, that they’d always known that beetling crag as the “Freiheit”. By this, they meant simply a summit that rises free of its neighbours, like a master cheese-maker among cowherds.

One afternoon in the Alpstein

So this Freiheit marks no victory or political démarche, still less a feat of alpinism. Instead, it was named by the men, to borrow the words of the alpine traveller James Forbes, “who live during all the finest and stirring part of the year in the fastnesses of their sublimest mountains, seeing scarcely any strange faces, and but few familiar ones … so accustomed to privation as to dream of no luxury, and utterly careless of the fate of empires or the change of dynasties.” This freedom is untainted.

Utterly careless as to how our crag got its name, Allan and I sprawled on a cramped belvedere of tussock grass. What mattered, on Freiheit's summit, was to free our feet from our sweaty climbing shoes, pull on hiking boots, and coil the ropes. And surely we’d earned a minute to take a swig of water and eat our neglected sandwiches. Only a minute, mind. Already, the slanting sunlight hinted that we should set about finding a way down.

Envoy

Auf den Bergen ist Freiheit! Der Hauch der Grüfte
Steigt nicht hinauf in die reinen Lüfte;
Die Welt ist vollkommen überall,
Wo der Mensch nicht hinkommt mit seiner Qual.

On the mountains is freedom; no clammy breath
Mounts there from the rotting caves of death!
Blest is the wide world every where
When man and his sorrows come not near.

Friedrich Schiller, The Bride of Messina (1804), Act IV, scene vii; translation by George Irvine (1837).

References

Freiheit Südwand in Walter Pause, Im schweren Fels: 100 Genussklettereien in den Alpen, 1967

Benjamin R Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton, Princeton University Press (reprint 2015)

Interview with Yvette Vaucher in Patricia Purtschert, Früh los: Im Gespräch mit Bergsteigerinnen über siebzig, Hier und Jetzt, 2011

Felice Benuzzi, No Picnic on Mount Kenya, originally published as Fuga sul Kenya, 1947

W H Murray, Mountaineering in Scotland and Undiscovered Scotland, Baton Wicks

W H Murray, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (autobiography), Baton Wicks, 2002

Robin Lloyd-Jones, The Sunlit Summit: The Life of W. H. Murray, 2014

Bernadette McDonald, Freedom Climbers, Heritage House, 2012

New York Times, Scaling the World’s Most Lethal Mountain in the Dead of Winter, May 2017

A mountain called Freedom (2)

Continued: a disquisition (alpine III/IV+) on liberty and climbing literature

The only way out is up, we decided. Quite a few mountaineers have felt the same way, and not only about the pitch in front of them. Yvette Vaucher, looking back on her career as one of Switzerland’s top alpinists, spoke for many when she said:

What attracted me is the freedom. There's so much freedom in the mountains. You choose where to go; there are no instructions. We're free. Nobody tells us you can't go here, can't go there. We trust the mountain. And it's only we ourselves who can decide whether we can get up something or not. That's freedom. And freedom is important for your whole life, whether you climb or not.

Yvette Vaucher: she chose to climb
(photo: courtesy of Schweizer Illustrierte)

In the Switzerland of the 1960s, women had to overcome a mountain of social barriers if they went climbing. None of these, in July 1966, could stop the husband-and-wife team of Michel and Yvette Vaucher putting up a breath-taking direct line on the Dent Blanche’s north face. Even so, some hindrances proved insurmountable. Women couldn’t become guides, for instance, because at that time only men serving in the Swiss army could qualify for the necessary training courses.

Camp on Mt Kenya: an illustration from No picnic on Mount Kenya

Some mountaineers have faced more literal constraints on their liberty. When the Italian alpinist, Felice Benuzzi, was interned by the British in a wartime camp in East Africa, with no hope of escape to a friendly country, the effects of imprisonment threatened his sanity:

Forced to endure the milieu we seemed almost afraid of losing our individuality. Sometimes one felt a childish urge to assert one's personality in almost any manner, shouting nonsense, banging an empty tin, showing by every act that one was still able to do something other than to wait passively. I have seen normally calm people suddenly rise from their bunks and climb the roof poles of the barrack, barking like monkeys. I felt I understood them, and they had my full sympathy.

The route and the mountain (from No Picnic on Mount Kenya)

Until, that is, he had the idea of climbing nearby Mt Kenya. Just to plan the feat was a release of sorts: “Life took on another rhythm; it had a purpose.” In January 1943, Benuzzi stole out of the camp at night with two companions. They were laden with two weeks of hoarded food, a home-made tent, and ice-axes improvised from two hammers purloined from the prison workshop. After climbing high enough to gaze down on the camp from above, the change of perspective went beyond a mere shifting of sightlines:

"Look there! Isn't that the railway line?"
"Must be. And there's the wood by the church of Nanyuki. And further on ... Yes, it's our camp!"
"Wrong! It is not our camp that you see. It is the camp where we were prisoners."
"I apologise," I answered studying the scene with the aid of the binoculars: "I can see the big black barracks of Compound E!" I added. "Would you mind pulling that branch towards you, so that I can see better? ... Thank you. It is Compound E!"
"I can hardly believe that we were ever there!"

A forest camp (from No Picnic on Mount Kenya)

After planting the Italian flag on a subsidiary summit, they returned to the internment camp. There was nowhere else to go; their rations had run out. They’d achieved what they wanted though, as the original title of Benuzzi’s subsequent book makes clear: Escape on Mt Kenya – 17 days of liberty!

Unlike the bold Italian trio, we hesitated to turn back – the descent path from the Freiheit’s south wall is known as the Mörderwegli, we’d heard, which about sums up its hiker-friendliness. Then again, the wall above us betrayed no hint of weakness. Walter Pause must have mis-stated; he gives the hardest pitch as IV minus.

Allan volunteered to take the first rope-length, a trivial 3c according to the topo. But the shattered limestone flakes, resembling a vertically arrayed bed of knives, did not reassure. Nor did the lack of protection. Yet our leader mounted the pitch as unperturbed as an aristocrat ascending the scaffold.

The epithet is borrowed from W H Murray, the very doyen of prisoner/alpinists. After taking part in a restoration of climbing standards in his native Scotland during the 1930s, Murray joined the Army, was commissioned as an officer, and shipped out to the Middle Eastern theatre, where he was captured in June 1942.

To relieve the tedium of an Italian prison camp, he started to write up his pre-war climbs, relying only on his memories – far better for the quality of writing, he later said, than recycling old climbing diaries. In these efforts – although he was much too modest to make the comparison himself – he joined a select band of incarcerated authors, Boethius and Cervantes among them, who have penned classics from a prison cell.

Much of the book was already written, partly on repurposed toilet paper so legend has it, when the prisoners were moved to a camp in German territory. There the Gestapo found Murray’s manuscript and confiscated it. Undaunted, Murray set to work again. The second version, he thought, was better than the first.

The book may also have absorbed elements of the mystical creed, based on meditation, that a fellow officer introduced to him at the second camp. Finally published in 1947, Mountaineering in Scotland has never been out of print since. And, although Murray went on to become a prolific author, his writing never again reached such heights as it did behind the barbed wire fences of Marisch Trubeau Oflag VIII-F.

Murray gives his years in captivity no more than two short chapters in his autobiography, and rarely spoke about them afterwards. Yet they left their imprint throughout his writing. Describing a stalker’s cottage in remote Glen Affric, he wrote in Undiscovered Scotland, his second mountain book:

A house standing alone in wild country always appeals profoundly to Mcintyre and me. It suggests to us peace, beauty, the perfect freedom from interruption that gives a chance of understanding the things we love. … My unaided imagination could conceive no more delightful home. However, such a picture of freedom from worldly concerns is a symbol, not to be mistaken for reality. I often meet people living amid scenes of peace and beauty whose hearts share neither attribute. At first I used to be puzzled, dismayed, and even made miserable at finding them not only dissatisfied with their lot and disgruntled with society, but worse still, given over to disparagement of their neighbours. The breeding of ill will had become a chosen task. But true peace, that blessed by-product of an integrated heart and mind and will, depends on no scenery. It can be had everywhere - when the means are known.

That’s an unusual reflection to find in a book of climbing reminiscences. One wonders if it could have been written by an author who hadn’t experienced what it means to lose your liberty. "Into the heart of mountain literature," says Robert Macfarlane, “Murray smuggled the spirit." And, one might add, some exceptional insights into the meaning of freedom.

Up on Freiheit, the second pitch brought us onto a small ledge. Suddenly we had company. Two Swiss climbers were just pulling their ropes down; evidently, they’d just rappelled in from above. “We couldn’t find the route,” they explained.

In hindsight, we might have asked them how this crag got its name. But too late: having rigged their next abseil, our interlocutors vanished down the cliff.

(Continued)

A mountain called Freedom (1)

Investigating the links between life, liberty and climbing literature

Preoccupied with the abseils, we took our crag’s name on trust. The last rappel slid us out of a stone-raked slot and away into free air. While the ropes untwisted and our boot-tips described a slow downward spiral, the corrugations of Switzerland’s Alpstein massif scrolled by, viewed as if from a well-sited revolving restaurant. Then the wide-screen panorama cut to a close-up of an ice-choked recess in the cliff we were descending. To my relief, I touched down on the rubble glacis below our wall before another rotation could start. “Ropes free,” I called up to Allan. And so we arrived at the foot of Freiheit Südwand.

Pendant: abseiling into the Freiheit Südwand

The crag’s name had leapt out at me from an old book. Surfing a second-hand shop in Tokyo’s Kanda district a few years before, I’d lit on a copy of Im schwerem Fels (On hard rock), a compendium of alpine climbs by Walter Pause. Opening it, I happened on a dramatic black-and-white photo of a limestone wall, somewhere in eastern Switzerland. Freiheit! The idea of a mountain called freedom somehow resonated.

The Freiheit and Hundstein cliffs (photo from Im schwerem Fels)

After I moved to Zurich, Allan dropped by on a world tour. We’d already climbed together in the Alps of Japan and New Zealand; now it was time to sample the grand originals. I showed my visitor the topo in Pause’s book – Grade III/IV, yep, we should be able to manage that – and without ado, we drove down Switzerland’s A3 autobahn and up a forest track. Leaving the weatherbeaten Subaru at the end of the road, we walked over a pass and down to a guesthouse at the end of a lake. The valley reminded us of a Norwegian fjord, its walls soaring up at an alarming pitch.

Fjordland: or the Fählensee one summer morning

When you think about it, this part of the Alps is where you’d expect to find a mountain called Freiheit. Mountains are the “house of freedom God hath built for us,” says William Tell in the play by Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805). Granted, Tell lived in another canton, if he ever existed, which the savants say he didn’t, and Schiller intended his play for a German audience. Still, the myth has taken root. Every year, at Interlaken, an extravagant open-air production of this play perpetuates Tell’s memory.

Montesquieu (Wikipedia)

As for the mountains, serious scholars have attributed Switzerland’s unique brand of democracy to them. Liberty, says Montesquieu (1689-1755), “reigns, therefore, more in mountainous and rugged countries than in those which nature seems to have most favoured”.

And this seems convincing until you look over the border at, say, Austria, whose political culture has developed quite differently. Take, for example, the late Jörg Haider, a controversial politician with a liking for Lederhosen. Worryingly, the right-wing party he used to lead bears exactly the same name as the mountain we now planned to climb.

Was it for some victory of the Swiss confederation, perhaps against those less democratic neighbours, that our Freiheit was named? This wasn’t the moment to speculate. The abseil had landed us on a slanting terrace of limestone fragments – and more of this stuff, it seemed, might come shattering down at any moment. Let’s admit it; we were impressed with our surroundings. Far below, as if seen from a BASE jumper’s perspective, the green waters of the Fählensee glittered; above beetled the cliff we’d come to climb. We edged carefully across the stony ramp to the start of our route.

One thing was clear; the only way out was up.

(Continued)

Dispelling the mountain gloom

A new look at how the Alps were appreciated in past centuries

It’s always refreshing to see a young scholar laying into received opinion. That kind of frisson comes from reading “Rethinking mountain gloom” by Dawn Hollis in the latest edition of Alpinist magazine. Hollis takes her axe to the idea that, before people started to climb in the high Alps late in the eighteenth century, most Europeans disliked and avoided the mountains.

Thomas Burnet

As her first witness, Hollis summons an English churchman by the name of Thomas Burnet (1635?– 1715), who crossed the Simplon Pass from Switzerland to Italy in August 1672 in the company of the Earl of Wiltshire. Almost a decade later, Burnet published his ruminations on the Alps in a book entitled The Sacred Theory of the Earth. He concluded that mountains were not part of God’s original design, but instead resulted from the chaos unleashed by Noah’s flood.

A controversy ensued, perhaps like the one that erupted in our own times when Luis and Walter Alvarez proposed that a giant meteorite had snuffed out the dinosaurs. But what surprised Hollis, when she read the responses to Burnet’s theory, was that most took issue with Burnet’s negative view of mountains. Mountains, these opponents argued, were useful as well as beautiful: they were the source of rivers, the habitat of wild animals, and served to keep warring nations apart.

Title page of the Sacred Theory

Taking the hint that at least some people thought well of mountains in pre-modern times, Hollis sought out additional accounts of alpine positivity. And she found plenty. One example she cites is by John Chardin, a jewel trader, who claimed to have ascended Mt Caucasus in December 1672 and was struck by the clouds that “roll’d under my feet, as far as I could see, so that I could not but think of myself i’ the Air, though … I trod upon the ground.”

Map (detail) by Johannes Schalbetter showing Mons Silvius (aka the Matterhorn), 1545.

It may be that one can take revisionism too far. For, surely, something must have changed at the end of the eighteenth century. Take the Matterhorn, for instance. A mountain of its description, although not necessarily under its modern name, was marked on maps from perhaps 1545. Yet the first full-on portrait of the mountain dates from as recently as August 14, 1806. The watercolour in question was painted by Hans Conrad Escher von der Linth (1767-1823), who was on a tour to elucidate the geological structure of the Alps.

August 14, 1806: the Matterhorn sits for its first portrait

So it seems that, even if Europeans didn’t actually dislike mountains before the nineteenth century, few actively bothered to seek them out. Even so, Hollis is surely right to insist that it is misleading to consign all pre-modern attitudes to a “mountain gloom” bucket  – she borrows “mountain gloom” and “mountain glory” from Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1894–1981), a pioneer in this strand of literary research, who used them as shorthand for the pre-modern and modern attitudes to mountains. She, in turn, borrowed the terms from John Ruskin, who meant something completely different by them.

Conrad Gesner

Few of the witnesses summoned up by Hollis could be less gloomy than Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), the learned doctor and botanist of Zurich. In a letter of 1541, to a fellow scholar of nearby Glarus, Gesner set out a remarkably modern list of reasons for climbing mountains:-

Most learned Avienus – I have resolved for the future, so long as God grants me life, to ascend divers mountains every year, or at least one, in the season when vegetation is at its height, partly for botanical observation, partly for the worthy exercise of the body and recreation of the mind. 

What must be the pleasure, think you, what the delight of a mind rightly touched to gaze upon the huge mountain masses for one’s show and, as it were, lift one’s head into the clouds? The soul is strangely rapt with these astonishing heights, and carried off to the contemplation of the Supreme Architect …. 

Philosophers will always feast the eyes of the body and mind on the goodly things of this earthly paradise; and by no means least among these are the abruptly soaring summits, the trackless steeps, the vast slopes rising to the sky, the rugged rocks, the shady woods.

Yet, when Hollis presented her thesis at the Alpine Club in London, she made out in the gloom of the lecture theatre an array of pursed lips and frowning faces, together with just one doubtful, bemused smile. Her audience was unconvinced. Among the critiques she received was that Gesner & Co amounted to no more than a few exceptions, “many of them already well known”.

Well, it depends what you mean by a few exceptions. For Gesner was not alone in appreciating the Alps. Scanning the relevant chapter in an old Badminton Library book on mountaineering – surely the Alpine Club has a copy – we find mention of one J. Müller, also of Zurich, who wrote up an ascent of the Stockhorn in 1536 in Latin hexameters.

Then, Josias Simmler (1530–1576) published the first part of his treatise on the Alps in 1574 – it describes the use of ropes to protect against crevasse falls on glaciers – and, finally, in 1605, yet another Zürcher, Hans Rudolph Rebmann (1566-1605) published a verse dialogue between two mountains.

Albrecht von Haller

This work is described by the Badminton author as plausibly “the most rambling and tedious poem ever published in Europe”. Still, it resonated enough to leave echoes in the works of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733), a natural philosopher of, yes, Zurich, and even in Schiller's play, William Tell (1804).

And readers remained avid for poetry on elevated subjects. When Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), a physician and botanist from Bern, obliged them with a verse paean to the Alps in 1742, it enjoyed an “immense reputation”, went through thirty editions in the author’s lifetime, and was translated into French, English, Italian and Latin. That must have been enough to keep popular interest in the Alps stoked until, a generation later, the philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) took up the baton of marketing them to the rest of Europe.

So, unless these Swiss authors were themselves no more than exceptions, there would seem to be ample material at hand to support Hollis’s case.  I look forward to the day when she converts her findings from a doctoral thesis into the kind of book that ordinary mountaineers can read. It should be refreshingly iconoclastic.

References

Dawn L. Hollis, "Rethinking mountain gloom", Alpinist 57, Spring 2017 edition.

C T Dent, Mountaineering, The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, Third edition, 1901.

Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, 1959.

Jon Mathieu, "Ein «Gespräch zweyer alter Bergen»", Neue Zürich Zeitung, 25 October 2015.

Climbers who wrote

"Its besetting sin is triviality. There is too much talk about the details of travel...."
Woodcut from Edward Whymper's Scrambles amongst the Alps in the years 1860-69

An appreciation of English alpine literature from the start of the last century

From 1840 onward this literature began to grow at an increasing pace. The early awe of the mountains gave way before achievement. Achievement gave birth to a new and more intimate knowledge or the Alps. Between 1840 and 1870 practically all the highest peaks of Switzerland were conquered. Region after region delivered up its secrets - first the Oberland, then the Engadine and finally the Dolomites. A whole body of Englishmen mastered the secrets of snow-craft, and on their heels came another and even more adventurous band who developed a new school in crag-climbing. 

The men who performed these feats began to describe them. The people who remained behind had an eager curiosity to know what these heights were like, and there was a continuous demand for the literature of Alpine adventure. Thus there grew up a new literature of the Alps, the literature of the Alpine Journal and its writers; the books of Whymper, Mummery, Forbes and Conway; and, perhaps most distinguished of all, the sketches of Tyndall and Leslie Stephen.

What is the value of this literature as a contribution to English prose? Like the mountains with which it deals, it is strangely unequal. It rises to great heights and sinks to great depths. Its besetting sin is triviality. There is too much talk about the details of travel; about the meals, about the discomforts, about beds, about blisters, and above all about fleas. If all the passages in Alpine literature written on these topics were collected together, they would easily fill a volume bigger than the present. 

But in spite of these grave defects, the English climbing literature of the last fifty years has given us some great passages. It can even be said, indeed, that mountain climbing has actually created writers. Men like Whymper and Mummery were not literary men. They were climbers who took to writing. But they had a great theme and a great experience. The mere greatness of the theme has made them conspicuous writers. They have been raised by the subject to a higher level. They have ascended with the mountains themselves to greater heights.

References

From the foreword to the anthology In praise of Switzerland: being the Alps in prose and verse (1912) by Harold Spender (1864-1926)

The accident in “And then”

How Japan’s most famous modern novelist borrowed from a real-life mountain disaster

Natsume Soseki

Few would argue that Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) was greatly into extreme sports. So it’s all the more surprising to happen on a reference to modern alpinism in his novel Sore kara (ably translated as And then by Norma Moore Field). This occurs in Chapter XV, when Daisuke, a typically perplexed and troubled Sōseki hero, is leafing through a “certain popular foreign magazine”:

In one number, he had come across an article entitled "Mountain Accidents" and had been alarmed. The article recounted the injuries and mishaps that befell those adventurers who crawled up high mountains. There was a story of a climber lost in an avalanche whose bones appeared forty years later on the tip of a glacier; another described the plight of four adventurers who, about to pass a flat, vertical rock that stood halfway up the side of a peak, had piled one on top of the other like monkeys; but just as the highest was about to reach for the tip of the rock, it had crumbled, the rope had broken, and the three, doubled one upon the other, had plunged headlong past the fourth into the abyss. In the midst of these accounts were inserted several illustrations of human beings glued like bats to a mountainside as sheer as a brick wall. Daisuke, imagining the wide sky and distant valleys that lay beyond the white space beside the precipitous cliffs, could not help re-experiencing the dizziness brought on by terror.

On reading this account, Daisuke reflects that “in the world of morality, he stood on the same ground as those climbers”. At the same time, he is unwilling or unable to break off the budding liaison with a friend’s wife that is leading him towards moral and social destruction. For the fate that Sōseki has in store for his hero will be every bit as annihilating as the accident that befell the “four adventurers” in the fictional magazine.

Or was that magazine really fictional? Except for the number of people involved, the accident it describes closely resembles the one in August 1899 that ended the career of the English rock-climbing pioneer Owen Glynne Jones (below) and three guides on the Ferpècle Arête of the Dent Blanche.

The original O G Jones in action (photo by George D Abraham)

In that notorious episode, the lead guide tried to surmount a rocky obstacle by standing on an ice-axe held firm by his colleagues. When he slipped, he pulled Jones and two other guides to their deaths. The fifth member of the party, a Mr F W Hill, survived only because the rope joining him to the others snapped under the strain. A detailed post on OG Jones’s life and death can be found on Summitpost.

Could Sōseki have heard of this accident? The dates seem to work. In 1901, only a few years after the Dent Blanche disaster, he was sent to England on a Japanese government scholarship to improve his knowledge of English literature. During his stay, Sōseki unquestionably fulfilled his mandate, spending most of his time closeted in libraries or his lodgings, reading voraciously. It seems possible that he also stumbled across a magazine – but which one? – containing an account of Dent Blanche accident.

The Dent Blanche, as featured in "And then"

Sōseki’s English sojourn was the making of his career. Returning to Japan, he took up an appointment at the First National College in Tokyo and later became the professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. Novels started to tumble out at a rate of one a year. Yet his memories of England were more bitter than sweet: ”The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant in my life. Among English gentlemen I lived in misery, like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves.”

A few of Sōseki’s English friends did their best to alleviate his misery. His last set of landladies, the Leale sisters of Clapham, “successfully urged him to get out more and take up cycling”, or so Wikipedia asserts. Had the sisters been a bit more successful, one could imagine a kind of alternative history in which Sōseki parlays his newfound cycling fitness into a general enthusiasm for the outdoors, returning to Japan just in time to join the nascent Japanese Alpine Club, as quite a few other contemporary writers would do.

You know, it might almost have happened – in Sōseki’s Kusamakura, published in 1906, the year after the Japanese Alpine Club was founded, the narrator opens his account walking down a spring mountainside towards a remote hot spring village. We learn that he is a painter on a hiking tour, not unlike the real-life artists Nakamura Seitarō and Ibaraki Inokichi, who both became keen Sangakukai men.

At least one caution is in order here. A novel's narrator is not necessarily the same sort of person as his author. Thus, although the protagonist of Kusamakura may have been a likely candidate for Japan's new alpine club, this doesn't mean that his creator ever considered joining. Come to think about it, it’s a mercy that Sōseki didn’t sign up as a pioneer alpinist. Japanese literature would in all probability be much the poorer for it.

A meizanologist's diary (12)

October 20: with only the afternoon to spare, we need a low mountain. Monju-san, a few kilometres south of Fukui, fits the bill. It has just one metre of altitude for each day in the year. Height, though, is not the same as stature, as Fukada Kyūya points out in the afterword to his most famous book. For this is a mountain that no meizanologist should miss.

Monju was “opened” by Monk Taichō himself, in the first year of Yōrō (717). Presumably, he was warming up for his pioneering excursion to Hakusan in the same year – the climb that Fukada somewhat adventurously identifies as Japan’s first high-mountain ascent. Actually, it is surprising that Taichō didn’t climb Monju sooner, since he was born in Asōzu, the village at its foot, more than three decades earlier.

Be that as it may, Monju’s Meizan status cannot be disputed. Like any self-respecting sacred mountain, it has three peaks, identified on the hiking map as Little Monju, Big Monju and the Inner Sanctuary (Oku-no-in). But the first and last ones are known additionally as Murodō and Ōnanji, names that also adorn the equivalent places on Hakusan and Tateyama. This suggests that people once saw Monju in the same terms as those two other sacred peaks.

Some centuries after Taichō, Monk Saigyō, the all-terrain poet of the Heian era, distinguished the mountain in a deft tanka:

越に来て富士とやいはん角原の文殊が岳の雪のあけぼの

                     In Koshi, over yonder
                     Is it Fuji there, I wonder?
                     So bright the daybreak glows
                     On Tsunohara-Monju’s snows
                   

Indeed, you can still climb Monju via a “Tsunohara course”. And it may be that the mountain really does look like Mt Fuji from that western aspect. Though, when we step out of the Sensei’s van at the foot of the normal route, it is a straggling ridge that rises above us rather than a shapely cone.

In the carpark, we brush up on Monju’s history from a signboard. On its battered paintwork, a tiny frog is contemplating a vertical direttissima. A few minutes into the woods, we encounter a sign warning that bears might leap out at us. The Sensei is unfazed, but I deploy her bear-bell all the same. It’s always best to err on the safe side when dealing with these ursine types.

In fact, the trail presents a greater hazard – it is broad but slippery, the mud polished to a mirror glaze by the passage of a millennium’s worth of feet. About half-way up our hill, the Sensei tires of it and launches into the woods on our right. Trust me, she says, there really is a path. So, chiming rhythmically, we start our own direttissima across the mountain’s north face. A strip of red tape marks the way for those who would brave this route in mid-winter.

In front of us, the leaf litter rustles as something leaps for cover. Fortunately, it is an order of magnitude or two smaller than a bear. Instead, we find a fat brown frog palpitating by the side of the track– pregnant with eggs, says the Sensei, who knows about country things. Perhaps it is taking the warm weather for the start of spring.

We come up on the ridge close to a pavilion that houses a Kannon, or so at least a gaudy banner suggests. Nearby is a tree wearing a sacred rope, suggesting that nobody ever tried very hard to disentwine Buddhism and Shintoism here, as they did on Ochi-san. Even today, the Sensei tells me, it is a temple at the foot of the mountain that looks after the shrines up here.

High on the ridge, we pass a lightning-scarred tree. Monju, one of the four great Bodhisattva (Bosatsu), is sometimes portrayed with a thunderbolt (vajra) in his hand. He seems to toss them down with considerable liberality on his namesake mountain.

A few minutes later, on the summit itself, we see a tree-stump that a lightning strike has completely burned out. Probably one should avoid Monju during thunderstorms.

Below the Oku-no-in, the path leads into a rift between the two halves of a gigantic boulder. You should only pass through if you have a clear conscience. No impure thoughts now, says the Sensei. Or the rocks will clap together and swallow you up.

I hesitate for a moment. I mean, suppose there were an earthquake. Then, surviving the passage unscathed, we circle back through the woods towards the middle peak.

Guarded by a row of jizō statues, the summit shrine is silvery with age. Its timbers must have looked fresher when Fukada Kyūya, then in his fourth year at Fukui Middle School, came up here with three companions on November 27, 1919. Another noticeboard gives us these details.

As fellow students had helped to clear the path a year or two before, Fukada and his friends might have felt a proprietary interest in Monju-san. At any rate, all four felt entitled to inscribe their names on the shrine.

Where the future Hyakumeizan author left his mark
(Photo: Fukui Shimbun)

Ninety-nine years later, I look here and there for the graffiti, without success – sorry, says the Sensei, they carved their names inside the shrine, and you can only see them when the doors are opened for the annual festival.

The view makes up for any disappointment. For its height, Monju must afford one of the best all-round vistas in the prefecture. Through gaps in the trees, we look westwards to Ochi-san and the coastal hills. In the opposite direction, Hakusan and all those other famous mountains of Hokuriku loom through the haze. Mountains, as any meizanologist will testify, are places that let you see further.

Tomorrow, we would have to head back to the Big Slope. There were friends to meet and a flight to catch. We’d take the view from Monju with us, though.