THE next week was devoted to introducing the Mother to her new surroundings. Our trips were limited by her tendency to get asthma when climbing and her inability to go anywhere near the edge of a precipice. Even when the path was several feet wide, as on the way to the Bäregg, the consciousness of a down-drop made her “dizzy in the knees.” But there were plenty of beautiful walks to take within these limits. And her enthusiasm over the life and the land would have inspired the rest of us if we had not been already profoundly convinced of the blessedness of our lot.
We did one thing during this interval which I don’t doubt would brand us as proper inmates for a lunatic asylum in the esteem of all the good respectable conventional people in the world. We spent a night on the Männlichen rolled up in steamer rugs watching the moon! Frater proposed it first to me. He and I have a fondness for the Voices of the Night and have roughed it enough together to know we can sleep on the ground now and then without catching cold or feeling cross next morning. Belle Soeur and Antonio decided that they wanted to come too, and the noble spirit in which they bore the hardships of the occasion proved that they were qualified for admission to the Inner Circle.
We left in the afternoon, a little later than we should have done, for we were rather heavily loaded down with jackets and rugs and our prospective supper, and we were going all the way on foot this time by the direct Männlichen path, which we had only come down before, and it takes longer to go up than to come down! However, by pressing our steps to a slightly uncomfortable degree, we got to the summit just in time for sunset.
The scene of the next few minutes before the blood red had faded from the west, is one of the pictures indelibly burned into my memory. We stood there silently drinking it in, the boys for the first time, Belle Soeur and I loving it the more for having known it before. For a while we watched the details blurring under the on-stealing twilight. Then hunger asserted itself, and we found a place below the summit, somewhat sheltered from the biting winds, where we perched ourselves on a ridge like crows and did ample justice to the contents of the paper parcels that the boys drew from their knapsacks.
Then it occurred to us that we had better use the small remaining aftermath of daylight to find some spots sheltered from the wind and level enough to sleep on. It seems absurd to say that on the whole mountain-side there was no place level enough to lie down on without slipping off. Yet it was very nearly true. The summit was swept by a blast of icy wind. The snow-drifts had disappeared since we were there a month before, but it was still very cold after the warming sun had retired for the night. On the Lauterbrunnen side there was just plain precipice, on the Grindelwald side a very steep descent divided between stones and grass. After much searching we established ourselves on a little shelf, barely wide enough for a person to lie on and sloping down just enough for one to feel as if one was about to roll off. There was nothing to hold on to, so we dug our feet into the ground in a more or less futile attempt to secure what Frater described as a “toe-grip.” There was a low growth of thistles in our neighborhood, too, which drove their prickles through our steamer rugs in a rather unpleasant fashion.
Soon the weather began to behave badly. Great banks of clouds came up out of the depths and covered the region where the moon was due to rise. The stars twinkled brightly overhead, but, barring a sudden change in cloud conditions, it was evident that no moon would be visible before the middle of the night. We hoped against hope so long as we could, keeping up a desultory talk and a little soft-pedal singing. Then each rolled up in his or her steamer rug, sought six feet of shelf room, and—eventually—fell asleep.
I was awakened by a very penetrating chill in the marrow of my spinal column, and opening my eyes, saw that there was a dim pale radiance over the universe that had been lacking when I went to sleep. I spoke very low. Frater answered. We crawled out of our rugs and clambered up to the Männlichen summit.
I wonder if human eyes ever rested on a scene of more eerie loveliness? The moon struggled through and upward at last into the open sky, and the clouds broke away enough so that great masses of the Eiger-Mönch-Jungfrau group came into sight, looking even more stupendously huge from being partly hidden. The valleys seemed bottomless abysses—their floors four thousand feet below being utterly lost in blackness. And on the other side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley the billowy snow peaks, quite free from clouds, rolled away, all silver in the moonlight.
What a scene for some stupendous cosmic drama with spirits of the earth and air for actors! How did we dare to intrude on their vigils—mere prying interlopers that we were?
Every once in a while we had to stamp around violently and swing our arms to get warm. Otherwise we sat quite still and almost silent, feeling the way one ought to feel in church, but mostly doesn’t.
At last the clouds caught up with the moon and hid it, and we stumbled sleepily down and found our rugs and sections of ledge again.
Just before sunrise it was Antonio who was awake and ready to accompany me to the summit. The others were sleeping the sleep of the just and declined to be aroused. It was wonderfully beautiful again—the rebirth of the hidden world, the mountains thrusting up their mighty shoulders above the foamy cloud-sea that filled the valleys into the faint pink glow which was gone almost as soon as seen. As soon as the glamour of the sunrise had faded we knew that we were ravenously hungry, and shaking the sleepers into a similar conviction, we started for the Männlichen Inn and hot coffee and rolls and honey.
I do not know where the people at the Inn supposed we had dropped from at that hour. No questions were asked and no information volunteered. The breakfast was excellent and we set out for home much refreshed. Little by little, as we walked, our cramped muscles limbered and our chilled blood warmed—warmed too much, in fact, before we reached the Châlet at midday with those ton-a-piece steamer rugs over our shoulders.
Mönch and Jungfrau from the Männlichen
The moon had not done all we had expected of it. But we felt it was proved that the quartette was of the “right stuff” and could safely venture on a fortnight’s pedestrian trip.