THE CALL OF THE HEIGHTS

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 1, 23 March 1927, Page 10

THE CALL OF THE HEIGHTS

Remote and lofty though the mountains are, they have always seemed man’s friends. In the framework of those everlasting hills is something abiding and secure. To the mountain lover the outline of every crest is a joy. It draws the eye again and again. Each vast uplift has a separate character. It tells a story, and sends out an invitation to come. You read its face beforehand, and mark its possible paths from afar. The lovo of mountains is born in men, hut some of them do not know of it. They have never seen a mounts in or felt its influence. But take them into the midst of the mountains and you will see. Somewhere in the far-off past they have had mountaineering ancestors, and a call of the blood is reawakened. They thrill with a romance they had never missed. Without mountains there could scarcely be any appreciable rivers, and certainly no lively waterways. Rains would be deposited on a dull plain that must be artificially drained. There would be none of the constant tapping of the well-filled clouds such as we see in the condensation caused by the colder air of lofty heights. The earliest of mankind, seeing their peaks reach upward to the skies, peopled them with the gods who ruled over them and who sent out of them rain and sunshine and (if they were vexed with man’s shortcomings) the tempest and the lightning flash.