Usor:Ceylon/Mountaineering

Fons Anglica

What is it that makes mountaineering the noblest pastime in the world? Of course it is too much to expect that every one should share this view, but each one of us can ride his own hobby-horse without wanting any one else to get up behind. The reasons are not far to seek.

In the first place we are out for a long holiday, and are escaping for a time from the strife and turmoil of life. We go out wearied with ten months of toil and labour, and begin to understand what freedom means when we catch our first views of the Alps. After all we are the products of an over-civilization, and it is a protest to broil our own trout in some mountain hut, and consume them with a pocket-knife on a sheet of the Journal de Genève.

Again, the friends we meet seem in more than one sense to be always on a higher level than when at home. The woman is in a holiday humour and the man is at his unpremeditated best. The troubles of life seem to fall away in the presence of the everlasting hills, like the burden of sin which fell from Christian's back in the famous allegory.

We get 'far from the madding crowd' and 'The cares that infest the day / Fold their tents like the Arabs and silently steal away'.

Versio Latina a JG Barrington-Ward confecta

Quid tandem est, mi Lucili, cur spretis ceteris oblectamentis plurimi in montibus vagentur? Sane ab omnibus ut idem sentiant neque exspectandum neque postulandum. Sua cuique licet in harundine equitare, ita tamen ut ceteros ad ludum non vocet. Ceterum cur in montibus summam animi delectationem plerique assequuntur? Mihi quidem in promptu causae videntur.

Primum ad longum otium egressi, fessi tot mensium labore ac negotiis, pulvere ac strepitu parumper vacantes, libertatem quae sit tum demum sentimus postquam Alpes conspeximus. Nempe si rem reputaveris, nimia vitae cultusque mollitie educti, si pisciculos quos ipsi cepimus, ipsi torruimus, tum nullo structore, nullo apparatu, sed vili charta pro mensis usi in montano aliquo tugurio comedimus, a prisca consuetudine tanquam abhorrere videmur.

Dein amici quos foris offendimus duplici sensu videntur inter sublimiora versari. Femina ut feriata festivior; vir quoque a se otiatus nativa quadam hilaritate exuberat. Porro apud montium aeternitates ea quae nos domi premunt onera excuti solent; sollicitudines, metus dissipantur; sicut scaenicus ille Orestes 'non iam voltibus Eumenidum terremur et igni'.

Tum vero 'arcetur profanum volgus', et, ut ait Rabirius noster, 'curae, tormenta diei / quales lecta movent Arabes tentoria noctu, / discedunt tacitae'.

(Promptum ex: Some Oxford Compositions, Oxford 1949, p. 78 sq.)