OUR second day’s tramp was perhaps the severest test we met of temper and endurance. We had purposely planned for an easy day—about fourteen miles by excellent highroad (a diligence route) to the Grimsel Hospice. We had four thousand feet to climb, but distributed over fourteen miles of carefully graded road, this was not very terrifying. It was a test only because we had not yet shaken down into the habit of continuous tramping. At Grindelwald, after an all-day’s walk, we always rested the next day. So we got up feeling loggy and lazy, muscles still tired and feet a bit sore. And the situation was made worse by the weather. We had a series of showers to contend against with clouds between whiles.
The rain is the worst thing about Switzerland. Of course if there was not so much of it, the valleys and lower slopes would not be so beautifully green. And sometimes there are several weeks of unbroken sunshine when one feels promoted to Heaven ahead of time. But, on the other hand, one has sometimes a straight fortnight of rain, unspeakably depressing, roads afloat with mud and all the mountains shut out from view. Even the on-and-off showers are trying and apt to trail a skyful of clouds before and after them.
On leaving Imhof we invested in bread, cheese, and chocolate for luncheon (the only articles of food the village store afforded) and started lazily up the Hasli valley. Everybody passed us, but we didn’t care. We were not making records and had plenty of time. It is a narrow valley, pretty rather than imposing, with the Infant Aar running down the bottom of it and the road occupying a ledge just above. Baedeker calls it the Infant Aar. It is so seldom that matter-of-fact condenser of useful information indulges in descriptive epithets that his occasional poetic flights always filled us with joy, and none of us, I am sure, will ever think of the tempestuous mountain torrent we followed all that day upwards towards its cradle, except as the Infant Aar.
We took refuge during one shower under a ledge of rock and were lucky enough to strike a roadside refreshment house for another, where we regaled ourselves with hot milk—a surprisingly restful and thirst-quenching beverage when one is “on the road,” and, in Switzerland, almost invariably good.
We discovered a lovely bosky spot for our luncheon, where the valley floor spread out a bit and the Infant split itself into streamlets, forming little wooded, ferny, rocky islets. A profusion of huckleberries were growing in this sequestered region, and we found they made an excellent dessert (though somewhat soured by the rain) after our dry and not too substantial luncheon.
It was here that we lost Antonio. He wandered off with his camera while we were resting after luncheon and did not come back. We called him and hunted for him till Frater said he must have gone on ahead and would doubtless be waiting for us at the next turn of the road. He knew Antonio better than the rest of us did, and claimed that this would be a highly characteristic procedure—that it would never occur to him we did not know where he was. So we went on with rather forced cheerfulness. I confess to feeling uneasy. The Aar was a lusty and distinctly rapid Infant, and if, in jumping across to one of those islets to take a picture, he had lost his footing?——Frater jeered at my forebodings and brazenly took a photograph of our late picnic grounds, labeling it “last place where Antonio was seen alive” and saying I could send it to his mother. But Antonio was not at the first turn of the road nor the next, nor the next, and we sat down to take counsel.
We were engaged in a mournfully jocular manner in composing a letter to his family to announce his mysterious disappearance, when we heard a delightfully unghostlike halloa from the road behind us, and presently the strayed lamb came into sight. He had actually fallen asleep among the huckleberry bushes which had concealed him from our view, and had not heard us call him, but having found the note we left among the cheese rinds (we always left notes for each other when separated) he had started along at a rapid gait to overtake us—and he would never have dreamed of such a thing as going ahead without telling us.... It’s all well that ends well, and the reunited family proceeded happily.
The Handegg Falls were the chief incident of the afternoon. A person familiar with Niagara and Yosemite is not going to burst his heart with rapture over any of the Swiss waterfalls. Some are beautiful, some are wild, but all are on a small scale.
The Handegg, though, is among the most satisfactory. The Infant Aar furnishes a respectable volume of water and takes a plunge here of two hundred and forty feet. Moreover, there is an admirable place to view it from, an overhanging ledge on a level with the top of the falls. And the rainbow in the spray is charming.
Along about sunset, after we had risen above timber line, we came upon a tiny road-house kept by an old man and his daughter. Here, on a little table just outside the door we decided to take our supper of what the house afforded—hot milk, bread and soft-boiled eggs. We absorbed large quantities of this simple but nourishing fare, moved our chairs inside when the rain began, and tried to persuade our hosts to put us up for the night. They had absolutely no sleeping accommodations, however, except for themselves, so perforce, when the rain let up, we continued along the chilly, desolate and rapidly darkening road to the Grimsel Hospice.
That is surely one of the barrenest spots on God’s earth. There is a bowl-shaped hollow full of stones. There is a lake at the bottom, when we first saw it, inky black. There is a one-story building whose stone walls, some three feet thick, were built to withstand winter storms. This used to be a hospice kept for travelers by monks like the famous one of St. Bernard, but now it its a hotel run for profit and patronized by Alpinists and passing tourists. The snow peaks rise up all around the bowl, and Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain of the Oberland, dwarfed from Grindelwald by nearer giants, here shows up more nearly in its true proportions. But Finsteraarhorn is really a climber’s peak, and we were not to know it intimately till much later.
Our three-franc-apiece sleeping accommodations seemed quite sophisticated after the one-fifty lodgings of the night before, and the reading-room in which we gathered to discuss maps and plans for the morrow, quite a model of luxury. We wrote some letters, too, not knowing when we should have so good a chance again. It was quite a cosmopolitan bunch of envelopes we put into the mail-box—one for the Mother in Grindelwald, of course, one to the Husband in the Philippines, two or three addressed to the United States, and one to Antonio’s parents in Brazil.
Have I mentioned that Antonio is a Brazilian? He is not, however, the undiluted article. He had an English grandfather who transmitted to his descendant quite a number of easily recognizable Anglo-Saxon traits.
In case he should take exception to my manner of stating this, let me tell him a little parable. One summer when I was in Korea I met a native woman at the home of a missionary. We were not able to talk with each other except through our interpreter, but we had quite a friendly time smiling, and after she had left, the missionary said to me, “She thinks you are perfectly charming. She says if it wasn’t for the clothes, you would look exactly like a Korean.” Now, I had never been conscious of any special yearning to look like a Korean, but I considered the source of the remark and decided it was one of the most thoroughgoing compliments I had ever received!
The gods were good to us next day. There was not a cloud in the sky and the air was like champagne. Our muscles had become disciplined, our languor was shaken off. After an excellent breakfast of coffee, rolls and honey, we started out gayly from the grim stone hospice that had lodged us, past the twin lakes, blue as sapphires in the bottom of a cold gray cup, and up the steep footpath that cuts off the long loops of the diligence road.
The summit of the pass, just a little over seven thousand feet high, was soon reached, and we paused to get our bearings and enjoy the view. We were on the boundary between Canton Berne and the Valais, between Protestant and Catholic Switzerland. But the difference between the two is more than theological. Berne, founded by a prince to stand for freedom, proud and prosperous from the start, one of the first to join the Forest Cantons in their Confederation, typifies all that is sturdy and successful in Switzerland. Poor Valais, on the other hand, crushed under the heel of Savoie and harassed by petty local lordlings, passed through centuries of civil war and uprisings in the struggle for liberty, and when at last snatched from her oppressors and joined to the Swiss Bund, it was in the poor-relation capacity of “subject canton.” It is only in recent years that this humiliation has been removed. The effects still show. All we saw of Valais seemed poorer, dirtier, less intelligent and enterprising than the canton we had left.
These peculiarities were not, however, visible from the top of the pass. We gazed first of all at the huge Rhone glacier, from which the river takes its rise—vast, dirty, ungainly, not to be compared in picturesqueness with our Grindelwald glaciers. We saw the river meandering away down the valley, the chains of snow mountains on the other side, and the zigzag road from the opposite bank of the glacier over the Furka Pass, which we were to travel later in the season. Near at hand was the somber little Lake of the Dead, so called from the number of bodies thrown into it after the fight between the Austrians and French in 1799.
With an affectionate backward glance at Finsteraarhorn and all the other Bernese snow peaks we were leaving, we plunged down the steep incline into the Rhone valley. The hotel is at the juncture of three great diligence routes—those of the Furka, the Grimsel, and the Rhone valley. We found ourselves in a whirl of arriving and departing tourists and had a sophisticated lunch in their midst, then shook the dust of Philistia from our feet and resumed our staffs and knapsacks. We had been up to the foot of the glacier before luncheon, scorned its bareness and dirt and haughtily declined the invitations of the ice-grotto man, and we were now free to continue our way down the valley.
A few turns of the road restored us to our lost Arcadia. The first few miles of the road led through a wild and picturesque region, with woods and ravines, and the Infant Rhone brawling as loudly at the Infant Aar had done the day before. But this infant was pursuing a steep-grade downward path, and before long we found ourselves in a flat open valley, full of cultivated fields and villages, distinctly warm in the mid-afternoon sunshine and growing more so. The infant had become quiet to the verge of placidity. It might almost have been a canal. The mountain ridges along each side of the valley were, comparatively speaking, tame. We had intended keeping on down the valley to Brieg, where the railroad begins, but we began to chafe at the thought of thirty-one miles of this.
The village of Oberwald impressed itself on my memory for several things. First, for the turnip-shaped, almost Mohammedan-looking spire on its church, which we found to be typical of this end of the valley. Next for the extreme difficulty with which we purchased the simple substance of our supper, which we intended to take al fresco an hour or so later. There seemed to be no provision stores at all. After looking all around we made inquiries and were directed to a house which seemed to be merely a dwelling. No one was in sight, nor was there anything to indicate mercantile pursuits. We opened the door and found ourselves in an ill-lighted, ill-kept hallway. The nearest door, on investigation, proved to open into an almost dark room, where a deaf old woman rather unwillingly sold us some hard bread and a big slice of cheese.
The third thing for which, not only I, but all of us, remember Oberwald was the liter of white wine purchased there. We were very, very thirsty by now, and of course one cannot drink water in any of these places without serious risk. The little diligence refreshment place had no mineral waters, and we had left the region of milk. So we took white wine—just a liter—one franc’s worth—between four of us. It doesn’t sound very desperate. It was thin and sour and cool and thirst-quenching. We each drank our glass down rapidly and continued our walk.
Soon I began to feel strange sensations—a sort of lightness in the head and far-awayness of the landscape, a severing of connections with my feet and uncertainty as to whether they would continue to walk or in what direction. We compared notes. The others were feeling similar symptoms—some more, some less. It was rather absurd and distinctly mortifying. We wondered if we “showed it.” Fortunately we were not likely to meet anyone who would be interested. We adjured each other to “keep going” and “walk it off.” I shall never forget the agonized tone of Antonio’s voice as he begged, “Give me a hunk of that cheese—quick!—Don’t stop—keep moving. Maybe it won’t be so bad when my stomach isn’t empty.” Even at the time, though, we were aware of the humorous aspect presented by four individuals of irreproachable antecedents, some of whom were feeling the effects of alcohol for the first time in their lives, tearing at a mad pace down the Rhone valley, in constant terror of their own legs, and convinced that if they paused for a moment they would fall into a stupor by the wayside!
The treatment (whether usual or not, I don’t pretend to know) proved efficacious, and we gradually returned to our normal condition. The highroad presenting no attractive site for supper, we cut across a field or so to the river and sat down under a fringe of trees on its bank. Here, as soon as the bread and cheese were disposed of, we got out Baedeker and the maps and held a council. It was soon decided to abandon the uninteresting Rhone valley, take a dip into Italy, and arrive at Brieg by two sides of the triangle instead of one. It would require two extra days, but we were no slaves to a schedule. We would go over the little-traveled Gries Pass, see the Tosa falls, travel down the Val Formazza to its joining with the Simplon road, then back by that famous pass into Switzerland.
I don’t know that I ever experienced the gypsy feeling more deliciously than during that half-hour while, stretched out on the grass by the babbling Infant Rhone, we discussed this impromptu excursion into another country which no one but the Chronicler had ever visited before! What light-hearted, irresponsible vagabonds we were!
The lengthening shadows warned us to be up and moving toward Ulrichen, which was at once the first village where we could obtain shelter for the night and the nearest to the Gries Pass.
Here it seemed as if our good luck was about to desert us, for the solitary inn was full to overflowing, and we were told we must go on to the next village. The landlady looked amiable, though, and we tried the effect of persuasion. We were tired—very tired. We had been walking since early morning. And it was already dark. Perhaps we would find no room at Geschenen and would have to go all the way to Münster. We were going over the Gries the following day—a long day’s walk at best, and the added distance back from Münster, or even Geschenen, would be a real hardship. Surely there was some way? We would be content with the simplest accommodations. Wasn’t there someone in the village who would rent us two rooms for the night, if they absolutely could make no place for us at the hotel? Finally, the good woman weakened. We could come in and sit down and she would find us something, somewhere. In the meantime did we wish any refreshments? Bent on abstemiousness, we ordered hot milk—but plenty of it!
Along about half-past nine, when the other guests had all been tucked away out of sight, and we were nearly dropping asleep in our chairs, the landlady and two maid servants bearing candles came to conduct us to our lodgings. I should hate to have to find that place again. It seemed miles away and through impenetrable shadows. We found the man and woman of the house sitting up with a candle to greet us and apologize for the poorness of the accommodations. Then we picked our way up a rickety outside staircase and were ushered into the two rooms which were to be ours. We had been told there was only one bed in each room, but that they were large ones, very large, and we had visions of four-posters. We found just the ordinary single bed. However, it was quite too late to go elsewhere, and we were quite too tired. We said we’d manage somehow, and our guides withdrew.
The boys politely took the smaller room, and I understand they tossed pennies to see who should sleep on the floor. The apartment assigned to Belle Soeur and me was quite spacious and immaculately clean. Sleepy as we were, we took time to look at the numerous family photographs on the wall and to puzzle over a square soap-stone structure built into the side of the room, carved with names, dates and symbols. In size and shape it looked painfully like a sarcophagus. The names and dates and crosses on it added to the sepulchral effect. Could it be the custom of the Valais to keep departed relatives right on in the house where they had lived? The idea was so novel that we almost hoped it was so. In the morning, however, it proved to be nothing more exciting than a stove. Our landlady showed us the opening in the hall through which fuel was introduced into its interior. I don’t know what became of the smoke.
Our only other discovery before we lost ourselves in sleep was the date when the house was built, 1787, carved in a great rafter over our heads.
Belle Soeur and I tried to reduce our bulk by half and share the single bed, but before long she slipped off the edge without waking me and betook herself with the crocheted coverlet to the sofa.
