NEXT morning, after dipping large hunks of dry bread into big steaming bowls of coffee and milk, along with the rest of the beneficiaries, we took a cordial farewell of our good hosts, and set out on our way. We soon reached the highest point of the pass (six thousand five hundred and ninety feet) and began the down grade with long swinging steps. This day, indeed, we could not afford to loiter very much, for we had a two o’clock train to catch at Brieg, fifteen miles away, and we must get our luncheon somewhere along the road in the meantime.
The scenery was pretty, even beautiful, but nowhere approaching grandeur on this day’s walk.
We caught that train—just, having run the last two blocks of the way, bought our tickets on the fly, and clambered aboard breathless and warm at the very last permissible moment. We felt quite pleased at the Americanness of our proceeding.
It was a very short ride to Visp, where we had to wait some time for the train to Zermatt. Here we were back in the Rhone valley, twenty odd miles below where we had left it at Ulrichen three days before! It was fairly palpitating with the heat that particular afternoon. In fact it seemed to be doing so whenever we met it.
I thought we would be less uncomfortable if we did something, so I pointed out the towers and spires of what appeared to be a very picturesque castle on a hill in the center of the town and dragged off the reluctant family to visit it. It turned out to be an optical illusion produced by two churches in line, neither of which was in the least interesting, but our united temperature had been raised several degrees in learning this. I must say that the family took the matter very amiably.
Finally the Zermatt train got ready to start. I wouldn’t like to say how many hours it took us to travel the twenty-two and a half miles of this road, but we spent the remainder of the afternoon on it. It is true that we ascended more than three thousand feet on the way, but the speed of our train was certainly not excessive.
Zermatt is the highest of the big tourist resorts, its altitude being five thousand three hundred and fifteen feet. Its season is short, but very crowded. The town in itself is exceedingly ugly—all hotels and tourist shops and the mushroom air of an American boom-town born over-night. But the surrounding mountains are glorious. The Matterhorn, which is close at hand, we were all gazing at, spellbound, for the first time. We had never before quite believed its pictures. Nobody ever does. I don’t suppose there is such another peak in the world—bizarre, incredible, rankly impossible, like the acute-angled mountains children draw on their slates. It made one shiver to think of human beings climbing up those all-but-vertical smooth rock sides to the needle peak nine thousand feet above us, and it was hardly surprising to hear that the local graveyard is filled with the bodies of tourists from many lands who have attempted it unsuccessfully.
The climbers’ tragedies, repeated each summer, are tragic enough, the more so for their utter uselessness. But the poetry which these have inspired, having missed the sublime, has fallen into the ridiculous.
One choice bit, taken from one of the local guides obligingly gotten up by the Swiss government in all languages and distributed free at the Bureaus of Information in the principal cities, filled us with especial glee:
“No dread crevasse, no rugged steep,
No crag on the dizzy height,
But knows the crash of a human heap
Thudding into the night.
* * * * *
Ask not the dead, who slumber now
In the village grave hard by
How they rolled from the mountain brow
And toppled down from the sky.”
The Matterhorn from the outskirts of Zermatt
Isn’t the “crash of a human heap” an altogether delightful expression? And will you please imagine anyone’s so violating meter and manners as to make that foolish inquiry of “the dead in the village grave”? As for us, we rejoiced over these gems and others like them all the way up from Visp (when we weren’t looking out of the windows), and “toppling down from the sky” became part of our daily vocabulary.
The swarms of tourists in Zermatt oppressed us, and we looked with dread at the caravansaries which housed them. As usual, there seemed to be just one long street, and we followed it to the other end, hoping for a sequestered spot where we could be at peace with the mountains. At the very outskirts of the village we came upon a quiet, clean little house called the Pension des Gorges du Trift, and here we straightway resolved to hang up our hats and knapsacks.
This was the end of our first week’s tramping, and we all voted it a grand success as we sat on a damp bench after dinner watching the red lights on the cascades of the Trift, which was the special property of our small hostelry. I don’t care much, as a rule, for artificially lighted waterfalls, but this seemed to be so entirely our own private personal illumination of an otherwise untouched wilderness, and the porter was so beautifully proud of it that we couldn’t have found it in our hearts to object.
Bright and early next morning we went to the post-office and got the first mail we had had since leaving home. Very delightful it was to hear that the Babes and the Mother were flourishing, the household machinery running smoothly and that we were to stay away as long as we liked!
The next thing I did, while other members of the party were renewing kodak supplies, was to buy a pair of shoes and have the soles well studded with nails. And what a heavenly relief it was to get proper footgear again on my poor feet!
These preliminary errands attended to, we took the mountain railroad to the Riffelberg and walked from there to the summit of the Gornergrat. The railroad goes within a fifteen-minute walk of the top, but both economy and pleasure counseled us to get out at the earlier station.
I recall the fellow-citizen from Keokuk or Kokomo, I forget which, who sat opposite to us in the open car going up. He thirsted for some statistical information, which Antonio, who is the soul of courtesy, supplied. Whereupon he fastened like a leech on the poor boy and began plying him with questions till the rest of us had to plunge in to rescue him and keep a few tattered shreds of our personal history from that relentless cross-examiner! We were glad to leave him at the Riffelberg.
The view from the Gornergrat is certainly one of the grandest on God’s earth. Here, as nowhere else, can the average person, without danger or fatigue, get into the very heart of the glacier world. One stands on a rocky ledge, the Gornergrat, and all around and below sweep and swirl the great frozen rivers. From their far brink rise the bare jagged peak of the Matterhorn and the round snow-clad shoulders of the Breithorn and Monta Rosa. Way down below lies the green valley with Zermatt in its hollow, and away as far as the eye can reach are ranges upon ranges of snow mountains.
If we could have had it all to ourselves without the tourists! But then we should have had to work very much harder for it. It is better to take the gifts which the gods provide and be thankful.
It did not seem to me as if I could ever come to love the Valais mountains as I did those of the Oberland, but they were magnificent.
We had reached our maximum altitude thus far for the summer, 10,290 feet. The air was very thin, and we watched Belle Soeur carefully for signs of the mountain sickness. But thanks, I suppose, to our having made all but eighteen hundred feet of the ascent by rail and the careful slowness with which we had climbed the remainder, she escaped this time entirely.
We ate our lunch on a rock overlooking the great Gorner glacier, just as far from the tourists and the summit restaurant as we could get. Then, when we had looked our fill and tried to store our minds with enough glacier pictures to last the rest of our lives, we began the long but delightful descent afoot to Zermatt. All the way down we kept getting beautiful views, and I think the Matterhorn never looked finer than seen between the fir trees of the lower slopes in the pink glow of sunset.
Who would have guessed that our harmonious little party was going to be disrupted on the morrow—and by me, its shepherd and chaperon!