Essays of Travel Tale 15 - The Stimulation of the Alps

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Section 15 of Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

Chapter 12, The Stimulation of the Alps.

To anyone who should come from a southern sanitarium to the Alps, the row of sunburned faces round the table would present the first surprise. He would begin by looking for the invalids, and he would lose his pains, for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears the mark of sickness on his face. The plump sunshine from above, and its strong reverberation from below, color the skin like an Indian climate. The treatment, which consists mainly of the open air, exposes even the sickliest to tan, and a table full of invalids comes in a month or two to resemble a table full of hunters. But although he may be thus surprised at the first glance, his astonishment will grow greater, as he experiences the effects of the climate on himself.

In many ways, it is a trying business to reside upon the Alps. The stomach is exercised, the appetite often languishes. The liver may at times rebel, and because you have come so far from metropolitan advantages, it does not follow that you shall recover. But one thing is undeniable, that in the rare air, clear, cold, and blinding light of alpine winters, a man takes a certain troubled delight in his existence, which can nowhere else be paralleled. He is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive. It does not perhaps come out of him in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthusiasm of the blood, unknown in more temperate climates. It may not be health, but it is fun.

There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this baseless ardor, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence. The valleys are but a stride to you. You cast your shoe over the hilltops. Your ears and your heart sing. In the words of an unverified quotation from the Scotch Psalms, you feel yourself fit on the wings of all the winds to come flying all abroad. Europe and your mind are too narrow for that flood of energy. Yet it is notable that you are hard to root out of your bed, that you start forth singing, indeed on your walk, yet are unusually ready to turn home again, that the best of you is volatile, and that although the restlessness remains till night, the strength is early at an end. With all these heady jollities, you are half conscious of an underlined languor in the body. You prove not to be so well as you had fancied. You weary before you have well begun, and though you mount at morning with a lark, that is not precisely a songbird's heart that you bring back with you when you return with aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn. It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of alpine winters is its own reward. Baseless in a sense, it is more than worth more permanent improvements. The dream of health is perfect while it lasts, and if, in trying to realize it, you speedily wear out the dear hallucination, still every day and many times a day, you are conscious of a strength you scarce possess, and a delight in living as merry as it proves to be transient.

The brightness, heaven and earth conspiring to be bright, the levity and quiet of the air, the odd stirring silence, more stirring than a tumult, the snow, the frost, the enchanted landscape, all have their part in the effect and on the memory.

Tout vous tapin sur la tête.

And yet, when you have enumerated all, you have gone no nearer to explain, or even to qualify, the delicate exhilaration that you feel. Delicate, you may say, and yet excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost greater than an indolent can bear. There is a certain wine of France known in England, in some gaseous disguise, but when drunk in the land of its nativity, still as a pool, clean as river water, and as heady as verse, it is more than probable that in its noble natural condition, this was the very wine of Aijoux, so beloved by Athos in The Musketeers.

Now, if the reader has ever washed down a liberal second breakfast with the wine in question, and gone forth on the back of these dilutions into a sultry, sparkling noontide, he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although strangely grosser than this very titillation of the nerves among the snow and sunshine of the Alps. That also is a mode, we need not say of intoxication, but of insobriety. Thus also a man walks in a strong sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling insubstantial meditations. And whether he be really so clever, or so strong as he supposes, in either case, he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts. The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary ways. A certain sort of labored pleasantry has already been recognized, and may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as a sort peculiar to that climate. People utter their judgments with a canonade of syllables. A big word is as good as a meal to them, and the turn of a phrase goes further than humor or wisdom.