Clouds and Mountains

by Algernon Blackwood

There are natures of the mystical, contemplative order who seek instinctively to correlate their scenery with some mood or aspiration of their inner life⁠—who are not satisfied till they have linked it on somewhere intelligibly with their deepest being. Before a given landscape, that is, they find the explanation of their emotion by translating the colour, distance, conformation and so forth into definite spiritual sensations; passing thus, without too great confusion, from the finite to the infinite. Until this is successfully accomplished there is a sense of disquietude, almost of pain; the loveliness blinds. But, once that inner key is found, the result is peace; the beauty becomes comprehensible with a personal message as it were. They dramatise the View in the terms of soul: doors open; veils lift; there come⁠—wings.

The kind of scenery that best does this varies, of course, with individual temperament. For some, the changing sea; for others, the monotony of great plains, or the mystery of forests; for others, again⁠—the majority, perhaps⁠—the grandeur and terror of mountains. But to all who understand this process of the mind the world appears as the expression of something spiritual and alive, and common objects become a source of very vivid revelation. Such persons endow “common objects” with something of their own life; nothing seems quite the same once their transforming imagination has looked upon it. The things they see, as Lotze puts it, “float off visions,” imperceptible to most; “even the dead weights and supports of buildings become changed into so many limbs of a living body, whose inner tensions pass over into themselves.” The essence of which intuition Blake has still better expressed: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing standing in the way.”

To me, personally, however, it always seems that the kind of scenery which, more than any other, admits of this transformation, of this spiritual alchemy, is the scenery of cloud and sky. There is that about it which suffers the change without violence. It belongs, really, to the same category as the vast scenery of dreams⁠—to that which is phantasmal, protaean, infinitely fine; capable of interpreting the gentlest moods of the soul, as well as her great terrors. Cloud-scenery, especially when sketched against big mountains, has the two qualities of expressing immense power and exceeding delicacy: power, by means of sheer size, depth and grandeur of form; delicacy, by the silken tracery of the torn edges that float away into the viewless air. Cloud-scenery touches all notes in the scale, runs through the entire gamut of the soul’s emotions. The mind wanders delightlully beyond the confines of sense into the region of un-realities; but the solid background of the mountains brings it back again, and supports the substantial foundation from which such dreams may be indulged without foolishness. Fantasy, thus rooted in reality, is surely an exercise of the imagination that produces useful, not harmful, results. To be “in the clouds” among the mountains is an experience of value, but to be among the mountains, and above the clouds, comes to many as almost an entirely new revelation. The whole strange world of dreams slides across the frontier into waking life. The result is a kind of exquisite bewilderment.

The immensity of cloud-scenery has already been noticed. Let the eye on a June day travel up and down the blue lanes of sky between the masses; and with the eye send also the imagination. The gradual comprehension of the piled and heaped-up vapours holds in the end something that appals. There is a touch of genuine awe in the impression produced by those slow-moving chains of Mist Mountains, strewn through half the circle of the sky shedding islands and promontories as they go, furrowed, cleft and peaked, their towered bulk forever changing. The imagination comes back tired and panting; “lost, dizzy, shelterless,” Shelley puts it, or thinking, perhaps of the line in the Hebrew poem: “Knowest thou the balancing at the clouds?” Yet this is only to see them from below. To see them from above (as in our illustrations) slashed and pierced by the ribs and shoulders ot the mountains beyond, seething in an ocean whose waves are silent and whose foam no wind can scatter, is to know an aspect of Nature in which the chief ingredient, as it seems to me, is sheer bewilderment. From some high peak to look down upon the world, silent, still, wrapped in this garment of unwoven mist, all hushed beneath thick curtains of vapour which presently the wind shall tear aside to show green valley and the houses of men, is to surprise Nature, as it were, in the most secret chambers of her loveliness. And it is thus bewildering, I suppose, chiefly because there is nothing except the piece of solid rock on which the feet rest to recall the world of known values.

Even in the lower mountains the effect is one of singular charm, and from the summits of the Jura, for instance, especially in the winter months, it may frequently be witnessed with striking success. From the rocky ledges of La Tourne, which rises only some 5,000ft. above the sea (where the Paris railway runs between Pontarlier and Neuchâtel), it is no uncommon thing in December or January to stand with the mist level to one’s feet, and the entire surface of the lower world blotted out beneath a sea of cloud that has no single break. Overhead the sky is speckless; below it, uniform as a giant counterpane, spreads in every direction the surface of this continent of cloud. The towns and villages that cluster along the Lake of Neuchâtel lie obliterated, the forests hidden, bells muffled; the roar of trains and waterfalls curiously hushed; and nothing visible but this sea of motionless vapour, ribbed like sand, or slightly waved, perhaps, like the ocean, stretching over lake and land as far as the skirts of the high Alps, a hundred kilomètres away. Here and there one sees the tips of Jura peaks⁠—Boudry, Chasseral, Tête de Rang⁠—clustered with ragged pines, like islands floating on the surface of a dream-sea in dazzling sunshine. But, with the exception of these, and of the great buzzards that occasionally plunge up out of the soft foamy mist into momentary sunlight, to disappear a few seconds later below the surface, there is nothing to remind one of the known world that lies hidden below the thick fleece that looks soft as cotton-wool, and of incredible depth. There is nothing to rest the eye on till it finds the distant snowfields of the chain of high Alps, stretching from Säntis to Mont Blanc; and even these look so dreamlike that one thinks of them almost as huge sails waiting a wind that shall blow them below the rim of the great silent sea.

In the high Alps, however, the scene is of another kind. The wind currents that forever suck through the deep valleys marshal the details with even more bewildering effects; the black depths, suddenly revealed and as suddenly closed again, the awful chasms, opened and shut so swiftly, throw the imagination into a state of disorder that adds enormously to the confusing grandeur of the spectacle. Only a few days ago, while climbing across the middle slopes of the Blümlisalp, I was fortunate enough to see the pageant in all its splendour. The hot spring sunshine joined forces with the snow-cooled air to produce a vast chaos of cloudland. Far below, the huge trough of the Oschinen See was filled with seething vapour, that rose and fell as the winds directed it, allowing occasional glimpses into the green glacier water through profound tunnels of mist, yet, as a whole, climbing gradually upwards to where we stood. Overhead, the summits rose clear in a sky of summer blue, with the single exception of the great Doldenhorn, where an immense cloud, forever shifting, and shedding whole precipices on its way, moved off laboriously till it was caught by the air-draughts from the Gastern Thal, and mysteriously spirited out of sight altogether.

But, meanwhile, the sea of vapour at our feet had risen till it spread in a single plain of white that somehow made one think of Shelley’s “platforms of the wind” become visible. This sea was without a break. Apparently, too, it was motionless; yet on looking closer through field-glasses, it showed itself really alive with movement: the rising and falling of waves, rifts with fringed and jagged edges shooting in all directions, though never high enough to destroy the general effect of calm surface. There were swift draughts and whirlwinds astir through the entire mass. It was the glasses, of course, that betrayed the colossal scale of the thing. One thought somehow of a time of chaos when the earth was without form and void and darkness filled the face of the deep. It all weighed so little yet had so vastly ponderous an air. The sun blazed down upon it. Here, surely, were the suds that formed the raw material of the worlds suddenly arrested in mid boiling⁠—frozen. Yet where we stood no wind reached us. Behind and about us rose the great still summits of the Blümlisalp and the Doldenhorn, with black pyramids of rock pushing their giant heads beyond all reach of turmoil. And it was while we stood there, forcing the imagination to reduce the wonder and beauty of it all to some comprehensible scale, that a further detail, not properly in the picture, came to add to the grandeur of the scene. Far below us, from some steep slope hidden beneath the sea of mist, there rose a curious long-drawn sound that at first suggested nothing we could recognise. It was only a few minutes later when the thunder followed that we realised an avalanche had plunged into the gulf. First we heard the hissing of the sheet of sliding snow⁠—that awful hissing that more than anything else strikes terror to the heart of the climber: It rose up to us through the mist as the sound of an explosion might through the depths of the sea. Then, as the mass fell from ledge to ledge and finally dropped over the last dizzy cliff into the Oschmen See, we heard the thundering roar that echoed below, behind and overhead, and later felt the icy wind that followed the displacement of the air. Yet no signs were otherwise visible, The surface of the mist-sea remain untroubled. Nothing stirred: only the mighty sounds and the message of the loosed wind. And, far overhead, the iron battlements of rock stood serene and terrible, their foundations rising out of the vast platform of vapour that wrapped them about like an ocean, their summits of shining ice inhabited by the flames of the sunshine…

Yet, several hours later, when we watched the same mountains from the safety of the comfortable Gemmi Hotel and listened to the warnings of Herr Dettlebach, the proprietor, about spring avalanches, it all seemed somehow unreal⁠—the scenery all incredible and phantasmal as with the colouring of a splendid dream. The clouds had risen; like fragments of flying fire they floated far overhead now in the sunset. It became impossible to see again that ocean of mist. What we had seen was no scenery of the known world. It belonged, surely, to the scenery of such dreams as carry the imagination into the Beyond⁠—into infinite distances above the clouds.