“On the glacier, the light of a day still to be born put out our candles.... We halted to watch the procession of the sun. He came out of the uttermost parts of the earth, very slowly, lighting peak after peak in the long southward array, dwelling for a moment, and then passing on. Opposite, and first to catch the glow, were the great mountains of the Saasgrat and the Weisshorn. _But more beautiful, like the loom of some white-sailed ship far out at sea, each unnamed and unnumbered peak of the east took and reflected the radiance of the morning._ The light mists which came before the sun faded.”... Like the other passage this brief description starts a train of memories; but, whereas the first passage would convey little to a non-climber, Sir Claud Schuster has really thought out the sequence of the dawn, and has caught one of its finer and subtler effects by the use of a very happy analogy. The phrase which we have ventured to italicise defines in a few words a brief scene in the drama of the dawn, an impression that could not be conveyed by piling adjective on adjective. There are many writers who have captured the romance of mountaineering, far fewer who have the gift for that happy choice of words that gives the essence of a particular Alpine view. Pick up any Alpine classic at a venture, and you will find that not one writer in fifty can hold your attention through a long passage of descriptive writing. The average writer piles on his adjectives. From the Alpine summit you can see a long way. The horizon seems infinitely far off. The valleys sink below into profound shadows. The eye is carried from the dark firs upward to the glittering snowfields. “The majestic mass of the ... rises to the north, and blots out the lesser ranges of the.... The awful heights of the ... soar upwards from the valley of.... In the east, we could just catch a glimpse of the ... and our guides assured us that in the west we could veritably see the distant snows of our old friend the....” And so on, and so forth. Fill in the gaps, and this skeleton description can be made to fit the required panorama. It roughly represents nine out of ten word pictures of Alpine views. Examine Whymper’s famous description of the view from the Matterhorn. It is little more than a catalogue of mountains. There is hardly a phrase in it that would convey the essential atmosphere of such a view to a man who had not seen it.