ACCORDING to what we had said in our Zermatt letter, if the boys had not rejoined us by the morning of August 11th, we would continue over the Gemmi Pass and back to Grindelwald by ourselves.
We talked over the pros and cons, but could see no reason for changing this. We could not figure out any explanation for their not having caught up with us, if they had made an effort to do so. The thirty-two or three miles down grade on a good road, was a long day’s walk, especially in view of the heat of the last part, but it was by no means prohibitive. We had walked almost as far several times ourselves, and the young men always gave us to understand that they had plenty of reserve strength which our style of walking made no drafts on. The only inference seemed to be that they had stayed quietly in Zermatt and sent home for money. We therefore felt that we had been abandoned, so we cast the ungrateful wretches from our minds and started forth.
Strange to say, although deprived of the stimulus of masculine walking, we kept nearer to the Baedeker time schedule this day than we had ever done before. He allows three and a half hours for the walk from Leuk to Leuk Baden, which we made in four.
It was rather warm all the way, for our rise in altitude was just about balanced by the advance towards midday. For a long time we were looking down into the Rhone valley and across to the mountains on the other side, then we struck north towards the divide, and the foothills closed up behind us.
We reached Leuk Baden about half-past eleven, got our lunch in a restaurant that offered us a little table on a second-story balcony overhanging the main street, visited the baths, which were at that hour deserted, and continued on our way. We felt a mild curiosity to see the patrons of the baths disporting themselves in the pools, but not enough to keep us until the afternoon bathing hour.
The thermal establishments are large, though rather dingy. Besides many corridors of private baths, there is the great common pool, where everybody taking the cure is supposed to disport himself or herself for several hours morning and afternoon standing up to the chin in water, while the public gazes from a balcony. These rendezvous are said to be very animated, with plenty of talking and singing. There are also little trays floating around on which tea or other refreshments can be served, or books, or writing materials placed. Why, in such prolonged promiscuous soaking, the afflicted do not interchange microbes and emerge with three or four diseases instead of one, I do not pretend to say.
There is something peculiarly unattractive about skin diseases (which is what the Leuk springs are used for) even if you call them cutaneous disorders, and Belle Soeur and I gathered our garments particularly close around us all the time we were there and avoided touching things. It was partly because of this creepy, crawly feeling that we did not wait for the bathing hour, and partly because we did not know how long it might take us to climb the three-thousand-foot rock wall between us and the pass. Baedeker says two and a half hours, and if it took us twice that time, we would need the whole afternoon. It did not look like a place where one would care to be caught after dark.
I do not suppose there is anything quite like the Gemmi Pass anywhere. The cliff is absolutely vertical. It looks as if you could let down a bucket by a rope from the top and pull it up full of water without spilling. The Cantons of Berne and Valais built the path up it way back in 1736-41, and a very excellent path it is, all hewn out of the solid rock and winding back and forth in steep zigzags or round and round like a spiral staircase. Baedeker says the path is five feet wide. I should have put it at nearer three. But certainly it is wide enough for entire safety, though a person inclined to dizziness would not enjoy the look downward. The grade was so steep that our feet were bent upwards in an acute angle to the axis of the leg, and the little-used muscles involved ached for days afterwards.
It is possible to go up on horseback (though I think it much pleasanter to trust to one’s own feet), but the authorities have not allowed the descent to be made on horseback, since some fatal accidents occurred. These incidents are commemorated by little tablets and monuments whose inscriptions we read in passing.
It was a very interesting climb, and to our intense surprise, though we did not hurry at all, and gave ourselves frequent brief rests, we made it virtually in the Baedeker time. The ever-expanding view as we mounted upward led us to expect a great treat when we reached the summit, but as ill luck would have it, clouds closed in around us just before we got there and we had to make a run for the hotel to avoid a drenching.
We ordered tea, for it was cold up there, 7640 feet in the air, and wrote letters and waited for it to clear off. We had intended to spend the night at this hotel, but a restless spirit was upon us, the hotel struck us as dreary, and it was still only the middle of the afternoon. So when it stopped raining we pushed on.
Our route lay over an almost level plateau, very slightly down grade, through a desolate region of bare rock with snow peaks on either hand, past a bleak Alpine lake. We came in about an hour to another inn, which we knew was the last shelter we should find till we reached Kandersteg on the other side of the pass. But it was still early, and we were in the mood for walking, so we kept on.
We passed through what Baedeker aptly calls “a stony chaos,” thence to a “pasture strewn with stones and débris, which was entirely devastated in September, 1895, by a burst of the glacier covering the slopes of the Attels (11,930’) to the left. A tablet commemorates the six persons who lost their lives on this occasion.”
Many glaciers were hanging above us here, all presumably liable to do the same sort of thing at any moment. I do not imagine this was any likelier to happen because of the absence of the boys, but I think Belle Soeur and I felt the somber and menacing character of the scenery more keenly than if we had been in their enlivening company.
When we reached tree level, all this desolation vanished. The path ran through a forest along a ledge cut in the side of a gorge, and through the foliage we had very lovely views of the leafy ravine and the mountain slopes on the other side. The colors were especially beautiful in the sunset glow, and we regretted that we could not linger to enjoy it; but we had no very clear idea how much farther we had to walk, and there was evidently not much daylight left.
We quickened our pace, and it was well we did so. The down grade was now very steep and we could keep up a tremendous gait, though at some risk of “toppling down from the sky.” At last we came to a place where the gorge we had been following opened out into the Kander valley, and we could see the village we were aiming for still a thousand feet at least below us.
We thought we had been walking as fast as we could before. But we now began a race with the oncoming darkness, under the stimulus of our strong objection to spending the night in the very chilly atmosphere of this high Alpine mountain-side, which quite outdid our previous performances.
This path was not quite so steep as the one by which we had climbed from Leuk Baden to the summit, nor was the rock wall as absolutely perpendicular, but they were close seconds. We used our alpenstocks practically as vaulting poles and came down in long kangaroo-like leaps. We had still a remnant of twilight, as indeed was absolutely essential to walking on this path. Darkness and the safe road at the bottom arrived simultaneously, and we fairly groped our way the last half mile to the first hotel, guided only by its lights.
To our great disgust we found the hotel full. We were just wound up to last that far, and the few hundred yards to the next hotel seemed an almost impossible exertion. Besides, the painful thought occurred to us that maybe it was contrary to Swiss etiquette to take in unescorted women after dark, and we would find all the hotels “full.” However, this dreadful fear did not prove to be well founded, for at the next hotel they had a room for us, and we retired to it joyously. It was a sophisticated place with brass beds and electric bells and liveried attendants, and we felt eminently safe and well cared for.
We had intended taking the diligence from Kandersteg to Frutigen, but as we found it involved either starting at 5 A. M. or waiting till afternoon, we resolved to walk the eight miles involved at our leisure next morning.
This we did, interrupted only by a shower, which led us to call on a peasant woman in her châlet. Our road was adorned by a ruined castle or so, pertaining to extinct robber barons who used to lord it over the valley. I remember the intense interest manifested by the postmaster of an infinitesimal village post-office we passed, over a letter I mailed there addressed to my husband in the Philippines. I had to give him an epitome of our family history before I could get away. But somehow his questions were only amusing, not annoying like those of the man from Kokomo. In the one instance one instinctively felt the questions an impertinence, in the other they were merely childlike. What is it makes the difference?
Frutigen is a railway terminus. We took the train from here to Spiez on Lake Thun, thence another to Interlaken, caught the afternoon express to Grindelwald, and walked safe and sound into the Châlet Edelweiss.