In some ways, the man who can worship a mountain without wishing to climb it has a certain advantage. He sees a vision, where the climber too often sees nothing but a variation route. The popular historian has often a more vivid picture of a period than the expert, whose comprehensive knowledge of obscure charters sometimes blinds him to the broad issues of history. Technical knowledge does not always make for understanding. The first great revelation of the mountains has a power that is all its own. To the man who has yet to climb, every mountain is virgin, every snow-field a mystery, undefiled by traffic with man. The first vision passes, and the love that is based on understanding supplants it. The vision of unattainable snows translates itself into terms of memory--that white gleam that once belonged to dreamland into an ice-wall with which you have wrestled through the scorching hours of a July afternoon. You have learned to spell the writing on the wall of the mountains. The magic of first love, with its worship of the unattainable, is too often transformed into the soberer affection founded, like domestic love, on knowledge and sympathy; and the danger would be greater if the fickle hills had not to be wooed afresh every season. Beyond the mountain that we climb and seem to know, lurks ever the visionary peak that we shall never conquer; and this unattainable ideal gives an eternal youth to the hills, and a never-failing vitality to our Alpine adventure. Yet when we begin to set down our memories of the mountains, it seems far easier to recall those objective facts, which are the same for all comers, the meticulous details of route, the conditions of snow and ice, and to omit from our epic that subjective vision of the mountain, that individual impression which alone lends something more than a technical interest to the story of our days among the snow. And so it is not altogether surprising that the man who has never climbed can write more freely and more fully of the mountains, since he has no expert knowledge to confuse the issue, no technical details to obscure the first fine careless rapture.