Neither Here Nor There: The Alps
Adolf Muschg muses on the presence of mountains in the London Tube

When Sir Edmund Hillary was asked why he had to climb Mount Everest, his answer was: because it's there. But what is it there for? Let me start with a confession: you may have asked the wrong person. I never climb, I am not even particularly fond of the Alps. They obstruct the view.

Oh, but it is not precisely for the view that you climb mountains? But you wouldn't have to, if they weren't there. And you have a view only if you go to the top. This is not the most natural thing to do. My ancestors, in so far as they were Swiss, did not even dream of climbing mountains, let alone of getting to the top. It was enough of a nuisance that they were there, a source of infinite hazards and mishaps to cabin and cattle. In fact, the authorities actually forbade their subjects to stay in the mountains - for fear of waking their evil spirits. For instance the ghost of Pilate, or Pilatus, the Roman judge who condemned Christ, was supposed to lurk in the depths of a dark little lake on the very mountain which has since been called after him. And is now, of course, famous for its view.

Once upon a time, to call a view breath-taking was no easy figure of speech. Take Petrarch, the early humanist and pioneer of mountain-climbing. He undertook it strictly as a spiritual exercise, remembering only too well that it was on a high mountain that Christ had been tempted by the Devil: all this I shall give unto thee if thou fallest down and adorest me. When Petrarch, shivering with cold and fright, had finally reached the top of Mont Ventoux, did he enjoy the view? Far from it: he immediately turned to the Real Thing: The Book, to find strength and comfort in the middle of the desert.

Because desert it was to the pious mind - and to meet the devil was not the only hazard. You might also encounter his opposite number, so to speak, and His presence was even more fearful and certainly had graver consequences - think of the Ten Commandments. They could not have been dug up in flat land. In short: mountains were sacred places - in the good old double meaning of 'holy' and 'damned'. They were there for our pagan ancestors to celebrate their gods; they were there for you to feel humble when looking up and down, high up to listen to your father's voice stopping you from peering deep into your mother's womb. Because this was the abyss of sin and temptation, the secret spot where the witches held their sabbath.

It was some centuries before the mountains were transfigured into a state of wonderful worldliness, re-shaped into the mighty and glorious bosom of Nature. A meeting-place of opposites - such was Goethe's experience of the Great Mother. He made it first on the wintry Brocken or rather, it made him. To touch his favourite stone again, granite, he travelled three times to the St. Gotthard, into the heart of Switzerland, which, just like the granite (or like most of us, for that matter) is composed of disparate elements holding firmly together - if not quite as indivisibly as Goethe's philosopher's stone, the cornerstone of his universe.

By now you can tell that, when it comes to mountains, I rather belong to the Petrarch faction: I turn to the book. But so did the English when, in their eighteenth-century cult of Nature, they discovered the Alps - they practically invented them, they made them visible even for the Swiss themselves, as objects of veneration. I am glad the English did it for us. If the Alps had been of our making, they would probably look more like a compromise, flatter, unobtrusive like our banking operations; we don't like to show what we have. Thank heavens, the British for once did the overstating for us. But make no mistake: they, too, went by the book. They leaned on the Holy Writ, of course, but they also had Shakespeare's towering Nature to go by; they had philosophers specialising in the Sublime, and they had Alice in Wonderland and the Red Queen: 'When you say "hill", I could show you hills, in comparison with which you'd call that a valley'.

That's how the Alps ended up high, wild, looking just the teenagers they are, geologically speaking. Now we sell them with everything included, views, postcards, sunglasses, ski-lifts, high pipes, high prices - I mean exclusivity - and an occasional avalanche; just to remind everybody that the taming of the Alps is far from complete. They are still a sacred place. When all is told, and due credit given to the British side of our Alps, they still may have been created by God, just as he created Coca-Cola, Rolls Royce and the dinosaurs. And, like them, they will vanish one day; a day not many of us will live to see.

So come and see them while they are still there. And don't ask why: the best things on earth have no good reason; that's their way of making sense. Don't believe me when I say: the further away you look at the Alps, the more beautiful they become. But you must believe me when I add: seen from the London underground, they do look beautiful. Let me tell you why.

In the Second World War my godfather, Henry O. Ernst - O. for Otto, but he preferred to shrink his German-sounding birth-name to a petty initial - was Director of the Swiss National Tourist Office here, in the Strand, between Charing Cross Station and Trafalgar Square. During the blitz, he used to treat Londoners seeking shelter in the underground to a slide lecture on the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn. He took advantage of their finest hour, they could not escape. But after the war, many of them visited Switzerland to see whether the real thing was as good as the pictures. The British may have more to be proud of during those years, but I can't help being a little proud of my godfather, who succeeded, singlehandedly, in taking so many English men and women hostage to the Swiss Alps. This was a patriot for you; and, for his sake, I beg your pardon of I fell a little short on that score.