282 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



wives, or rather two mistresses, the mountains and his wife, and I 

 cannot venture to say to which he is the more devoted.' We 

 have also to remember that de Saussure had relatively little of the 

 spirit of an explorer. He was mainly bent on extending his 

 geological observations. Again, the troop with which he travelled 

 confined him to mule -passes, and did not allow of a steeplechase 

 ' over hill, over dale,' such as has been the delight of many simple 

 pedestrians in our times. 



Thus far we have confined ourselves to de Saussure's expeditions 

 below the snow-level. We have still to consider his record as a 

 mountaineer. His climbing qualifications would not count for 

 much, perhaps, in the Alpine Clubs of the twentieth century. But 

 it would be a gross injustice to appraise them by the standard of 

 modern peak-hunters. His only serious contemporary rival was 

 Placidus a Spescha, the worthy monk of Disentis, an enthusiast 

 who, with far less means at his disposal, made many first ascents in 

 the Orisons, climbed the Rheinwaldhorn, and almost conquered 

 the Todi. 



De Saussure in his youth was a stout walker according to the 

 standard of the day. When he was twenty, on his first visit to 

 the glaciers, he walked all the way from Geneva to Chamonix. 

 He took considerable pains to keep himself in training for his 

 expeditions. But in his later years he was always ready to avail 

 himself of mules to shorten the day's journey or the proposed 

 climb ; he took them even over the St. Th6odule, and though he 

 started from his bivouac on the top of the pass, he found the 

 Klein Matterhorn enough and gave up the Breithorn. It is only 

 fair to add, this was when he was fifty-two. 



De Saussure was obviously a fair rock-climber, as climbers 

 went in the days before Alpine climbing had become a branch 

 of gymnastics. He makes no great matter of the Aiguille du 

 Gouter cliffs, though in the condition that he found them, covered 

 with fresh snow, they can be unpleasant. Unlike Bourrit, he 

 thought nothing of the steep descent from the Col du Geant to 

 Mont Frety. In ice work he had to begin at the beginning, but 

 he began early. Of his first glacier expedition, the now hackneyed 

 crossing of the Mer de Glace, he gives a somewhat naive description: 



* I cannot recommend it to be attempted from the side of the 

 Montenvers, unless the guides know the actual state of the ice and 



