WE were called in the gray dawn, and I remember the chill of the bathing water. This proved to be the most economical lodging any of us had ever had, for the charge was a franc and a half for each bed, so each individual share was fifteen cents!
We took breakfast at the hotel and had them put up a lunch for us, but nearly broke their hearts by declining to take a guide or even a porter. The faithful Baedeker had said “guide unnecessary in fine weather” (which it was), and we had no notion of putting ourselves in bondage to an attendant unless it was absolutely unavoidable.
After we turned aside from the Rhone valley, laid out like a patchwork quilt in cultivated fields, we saw no human being or habitation or trace of man’s labor, save an empty cow-hut or so and the path we were following, till late in the afternoon. The Eginenbach, whose course we were following, drained as wild and desolate a valley as could be imagined. It seemed to have been a great place for landslides, and every once in a while we had to pick our way over masses of fallen rock and débris. We felt like discoverers and rejoiced accordingly.
After some hours’ walking we found ourselves at the end of the valley and simultaneously lost every trace of our path. Now this was too much of a good thing, and our rejoicing was suspended.
The end of the valley was closed by a wall of rock about fifteen hundred feet high, which it was our business to surmount. On top of it was the Gries Glacier, which we were to cross, and which spilled over into our valley in an ice-fall from the base of which issued the Eginenbach. Somewhere there was a path, which at need a pack-horse could follow. But where on earth did it start from?
The land between us and the foot of the rock wall was a steep meadow covered with bowlders and broken cliff-fragments. It had been subjected to some sort of seismic disturbance, leaving fissures here and there, some of them of great depth and quite too wide to jump. We lost a lot of time retracing our steps and hunting for a way around, when we found one of these things in front of us. We understood now why Baedeker considered a guide advisable in foggy weather.
At last we all agreed that we had located the path about half-way up the wall where it crossed some snow. But how to get to it? Antonio announced his intention of making a bee-line scramble for that point, and, if necessary, following the path down to show us the beginning of it. The rest of us made a detour to the left (having already pretty well canvassed the possibilities to the right as far as the ice-fall), and were rewarded by finding the end of a really, truly, unmistakable bridle-path, hacked out of the rock in ledges and built up with masonry, which we followed steeply upward. Belle Soeur got a touch of the mountain sickness and had to lie down for a while. And I nearly slid into perdition when we crossed the hard-frozen snow gully, because I had trodden my heels over and the nails had worn smooth and my alpenstock had no iron point! Antonio was waiting for us on the other bank, and we continued upward together.
Finally we reached the top and saw before us the flat Eis-Meer which we were to cross. We beheld it with interest not untinged with emotion. For although we had been living in daily association with glaciers at Grindelwald, we had never set foot on one, and this was not only to be our maiden glacier-crossing, but we were to do it quite, quite alone!
In the meantime we sat down in a row on the path, our backs against the rock and our feet protruding out into space and ate the hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches that had been put up for us at Ulrichen. We were not as hardened to precipices then as we later became, and I remember the shiver with which I tossed egg-shells over the edge and felt as if I needed to hold on to keep from going with them.
Some rising clouds warned us to finish our meal and start on, for we could not afford to risk being caught by a fog on the Eis-Meer. The route was indicated by poles stuck up in the ice, but some were fallen, and even when standing they were not near enough together to be visible in thick weather.
It was very thrilling when we had clambered over the pile of débris at the edge and found ourselves on the flat, frozen slush of the Eis-Meer. We did not know what unfamiliar dangers might be lying in wait for us, but if they were there, we did not encounter them. There was no special beauty or grandeur in this view of a glacier. The ice had a yellowish, muddy look, and was perfectly flat. The midday sun was melting its surface, and countless little streamlets of water were running in all directions among the corrugations left by last night’s freeze. Here and there a stream would disappear suddenly into a fissure or an air-hole. These seemed to be of indefinite depth, but none which we saw that day were large enough to be a menace to life.
The threat of the clouds was not fulfilled, and we reached the other side of the glacier in half an hour or less without accident. Just beyond was the boundary between Switzerland and Italy, but there was not even a stone to mark it. Strange to say, we encountered no custom house on this route either here or later.
Presently we began to descend a path so steep that it was hard to keep one’s balance. Vegetation gradually reappeared, then some signs of humanity, an empty cow-hut or so, and finally, on a slope below us, we saw a group of men and women cutting and binding grass. And oh, the joyful Italianness of it! All the women had bright-colored kerchiefs on their heads and one wore a brilliant red skirt.
It was almost sunset when we reached the first village, Morasco, where, to our surprise, we found the inhabitants still speaking German. We asked for milk, and a statuesque girl brought us big bowls of it, warm from the cows, which we drank with great gusto, sitting flat on the little grass-plot around which were grouped the dirty stone huts which formed the village. In the next village they spoke Italian only. My question as to the road, put first in German, was not understood until turned into Italian. Think of the isolation of that handful of villagers in Morasco, shut off by the mountains from the people of Valais, whose descendants they doubtless are, and by the even more impassable language barrier from their neighbors in the valley!
We quickened our steps and reached the hotel at the Tosa Falls just before dark. Baedeker allows six and a half hours’ walk from Ulrichen to the Falls, but we had consumed nearly double the time. Of course he allows for no stops, and we had stopped for luncheon and for milk, for Belle Soeur’s mountain sickness, and for a number of photographs and five-minute rests, and we had lost about an hour hunting for our path at the head of the Eginen valley; but these things or others like them have always to be counted on, and we found it well, as a general rule, to allow from one and a half to twice the time given by Baedeker.
The Tosa Falls were disappointing. Baedeker’s double star and phrase “perhaps the grandest among the Alps” had raised our hopes too high. I doubt if any European waterfalls can look really impressive to an American who has seen his own country. They were at their best that evening after dinner when we wandered down the path a little way below the hotel and looked across and partly up at them, magnified in the dim light. There is a drop of four hundred and seventy feet, over a broad, bare, unpicturesque rock ledge.
The volume of water is respectable, but nothing more. I imagine we must have seen the river unusually full, for the upper valley was flooded to the extent of making walking difficult when we passed down.
We had our little growl about the hotel here, too, which charged more than its tariff given in Baedeker and showed a disposition, encountered for the first time on our trip, to run in extras on the bill. This might be considered a necessary accompaniment, however, of being in Italy. It was part of the “local color.”
The extent to which we had grown young through the simplicity of our life may be inferred from the character of our amusements. I can hardly realize now that I was one of four who found entertainment in the infantile game of mystifying our fellow-boarders across the dinner-table that evening by linguistic gymnastics! They were a row of unprepossessing Italians of the small-commercial-traveler type. We spoke French mostly, German a good deal, Spanish some and English a very little, while Antonio occasionally burst into Portuguese. Italian was the one thing we kept clear of, so they discussed us freely in it. They placed all our languages except the Portuguese, but what we were they could not make out. It especially worried the nervous little old man who subsequently created some excitement by squeezing the waitress’ hand as she passed him. Finally the silent fat man, who had taken no part in the discussion, stopped guzzling his food long enough to emit, above his tucked-in napkin, the following oracular statement, “They are North Americans.” Evidently the others accepted this as settling the matter, and we could not but admire his perspicacity, although he had missed on Antonio.