Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in great condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> THE Alps: what a vast compass for a few pages what a study for a lifetime! A wider study even than the Himalaya for to the history of rock and flower and beast man has added his own story and left his own marks: pre-Roman and Roman Carthaginian and Christian monk and monastery king and confeder- ation. And when all that is done with another great host compels our attention: in their thousands and leaving their records for all the world to see come the artists writers geographers and geologists and naturalists the engineers and builders and h?teliers the travellers the skiers and the mountaineers. I am not sure that it was wise to ask one of these last to introduce and caption a book of general Alpine pictures. To the climber ‘the Alps’ usually mean the two or three weeks each summer when he packs his bags and speeds out to collect as many peaks walls couloirs or ar?tes as he decently can. From one hut to the other he flings himself or from one bivouac to the next. If the weather turns bad he growls and grumps below and waits for it to clear up. If it is good he is so exhausted by the climbs he has done and so full of plans for those he has not that he can spare neither the time nor the desire to go and look at that little church round the corner to explore that charming wooded valley (‘Well there’s no climbing there actually so perhaps it’s not worth it’) or to spend say a few days in the Lower Alps on the way home. (MP)