THERE was nothing very scenically interesting about the trip from Geneva to Chamonix. So far as I remember, we played cards all the way. A certain thrill of emotion was experienced as we passed over the French border. The boys felt it because it was the first time, Belle Soeur and I because we were back again! The baggy red trousers of the soldiers of the line loafing about the station—Heavens, how natural they looked! Frater called them bloomers, but that was irreverent of him.
Chamonix reminded us of Zermatt for being big and full of tourists, and, as at Zermatt, we yearned to get out of the village. We went to a hotel mentioned by Baedeker well up on the hillside, which must have a fine view of Mont Blanc and the neighboring peaks when the weather permitted. Just then, low-lying clouds shut them all out.
It was an attractive place, surrounded by a garden, rather more sophisticated than the hotels we generally frequented. But being late in the season, they gave us beautiful front rooms at very moderate pension rates.
We laid our plans for an all-day’s excursion on the morrow and were very much disgusted when we woke up to find it raining. We loafed around the house rather disconsolately all the morning, writing letters and playing cards.
After lunch it had stopped raining, though the sky was still overcast. So we curtailed our intended expedition and started out. We betook ourselves to a spot called Montanvert overhanging the Mer de Glace, adorned, of course, by a restaurant, where we had tea and Belle Soeur bought a pair of woolen socks. She was weak on nails in her soles, and the socks, put on over her shoes, were to take their place while crossing the glacier.
Mont Blanc, Glacier des Bossons
There were streams of tourists here coming and going and quantities of guides anxious to take us across, but we assured them that we had had large experience in glaciers and needed no assistance. A timid-looking bearded German overheard us thus assuring the last offering guide and decided to combine safety and economy by following us. He said no word of thanks, explanation or apology, but constituted himself our shadow. Also, by the grace of God, he came through alive.
The crossing of the Mer de Glace is hummocky and requires climbing. It is also slippery. But there is no danger involved of anything worse than sitting down hard. The continuous procession of tourists passing over makes losing one’s way quite out of the question, and the function of the guide is only to lend a steadying hand to the aged and infirm or to persons unsuitably dressed for scrambling. There is nothing at all about the Mer de Glace to justify its reputation. It is simply an average characteristic sort of glacier, very accessible to the general tourist, and safe and easy to walk across.
The path on the other side, after running along the ridge of the lateral moraine for a little distance, takes one down the famous “Mauvais Pas.” It may have been “bad” at some prehistoric time, though the vertical distance involved is so small (perhaps a hundred and fifty feet to the surface of the glacier) that it can never have been very desperate. But now there are nice steps cut out in the rock and an iron hand-rail let into the cliff to hold on by, and really no one but a cripple, an old lady or a young child could find it dangerous. Nevertheless, the French dramatic instinct has not failed to take advantage of its traditional terrors. Two little boxes for the poor are attached to the rock at the beginning and end of the “Pas” with a request that the traveler express his gratitude to God for his preservation by alms-giving. The whole thing was so delightfully Latin and characteristic that we stopped and contributed.
It was a long way down through the woods and home, and we quickened our steps till we were almost running the last mile or two, for we had a strong interest in dinner and we knew that we were late.
The next morning it was raining again! This was disgusting. We decided, however, that as it had stopped about noon the day before, perhaps it would do so this time. So we ordered our luncheon put up and started out on the Mont Blanc trail. Besides, I wanted to try the exercise and fresh air cure on a cold I was catching. The microbe had established itself in my throat the morning previous, when I was sitting on the balcony outside my window, waiting for it to stop raining. An old gentleman sitting on his balcony directly overhead was sneezing and sneezing with great violence. In the midst of so much fresh air, it did not occur to me to think of infection, till all at once I felt a raw scratchiness in the mucous membrane of my throat, and I knew that the “invasion” had taken place. I tried to drive the beast out with listerine, but unfortunately there was only a spoonful left in the bottle. So then I tried the mountain air. It was my misfortune that it could be had just then only in combination with rain.
It is only just to say that this explanation of the origin of my cold was not accepted by my companions, who preferred to lay it on the weather. But they were all able to bear witness later to the highly contagious nature of the malady. Personally, I was and am convinced that my three months of out-door life in all weathers had seasoned me beyond any peradventure of catching cold because my shoes were damp.
It was only drizzly, for the most part. When a hard downpour came, we stopped and took shelter under a shed or dense-leafed tree. Some distance up the mountain-side, but still within the tree belt, we came upon a lonely little refreshment hut, where we stopped and ordered coffee and hot milk to go with our cold lunch from the hotel. It was raining pretty hard just then, and we spread out our lunch hour as long as possible, keeping up each other’s spirits by a very conscious, but reasonably successful effort. Evidently it looked all right from the outside at least, for when we came to go, the proprietress of the châlet, a sad-eyed little Frenchwoman, begged us almost with tears to stay longer,—not to feel that we must order anything more either, but just to stay and not go out in the rain. She would love to have us stay, we were young and had le cœur gai, and it did her good to look at us and listen to us, although she could not understand what we were saying!
However, though thanking her for her tribute to our gay hearts and not ungrateful (I at least) for that incidental tribute to our extreme youth, we decided it was time to move and pushed on up the mountain-side. After half an hour or more we passed the more elaborate Pavilion de la Pierre Pointue, and then all at once found ourselves on the brink of the Glacier des Bossons.
I do not know whether on a clear day it would have seemed so enormous, so awe-inspiring. The rain had turned into snow drifting lazily down on us. The clouds were all around, above, below. Out of the clouds above flowed that huge ice-mass,—vast, measureless, tossed like waves of the sea suddenly frozen. Down below us the clouds swallowed it again. What we saw was gigantic. Who could tell how much more there might be hidden in the clouds? The Pavilion was lost behind a corner of rocks. It might have been a thousand miles away, and any other trace of humanity as well, for aught that we could see. We seemed to be in the very heart of Nature—huge, untrammeled, primordial.
The cold and the increasing thickness of the snow-storm drove us down, but it was glorious while it lasted.
The next morning at breakfast we observed for the last time the amiable manners of the young Frenchman with the downy moustache who always kissed his father, mother and two sisters on the forehead before sitting down to his coffee, and admired once more the embroidered napkin-covers of the English family. Then we asked for our bill. The sun was really out that morning and the clouds looked as if they might lift, but we did not feel that we could stay longer in Chamonix. Antonio’s time in Switzerland was growing very limited, and we must give him a few days to rest at the Châlet Edelweiss before starting on the homeward journey.
The amiable French proprietress blandly presented us with a bill about twice the size agreed upon. Then followed heavy weather. If there is anything under heaven I hate, it is an altercation over a bill, but my three companions stood expectantly beside me, and I can be voluble in French when I have to be. So I girded up my loins and did my duty. Back and forth we hurled the language, up and down we shrugged our shoulders, using hands and eye-brows to intensify our effects. She was much bigger than I, and her voice was louder. Also she had doubtless had more practice. But the Three stood firm behind me to block retreat, and the consciousness of being in the right presumably buoyed me up.
All at once, without the slightest warning of an approaching change of front, the proprietress dropped her blustering voice, yielded the point at issue with an incredible gracefulness, made out the bill anew in the way it ought to be, and devoted the last few minutes of our stay to making an agreeable impression. The clouds were lifting. Ah, we should have a view of Mont Blanc before we left! Quick, François, bring the big telescope and have it all ready. Ah—ah—joy! There go the clouds! There at last is Mont Blanc!
There it was, and we were very glad we did not have to leave Chamonix without seeing it. But aside from this academic satisfaction, Mont Blanc is very disappointing,—a wide, rounded excrescence on a long mountain range, hardly any higher apparently than the surrounding peaks, some of which are infinitely more picturesque in form. In fact, the dominating feature of the Chamonix scenery is not that broad lumpy saddle-back of Mont Blanc, but the serrated rows of needle peaks called Aiguilles rising black above the snow, uptilted rock-strata worn away by erosion, the most spectacular objects, except the Matterhorn, in all the Alps.
A party who had ascended Mont Blanc the day of our arrival, before the rain came on, and had been imprisoned at the summit ever since, were taking advantage of this first clearing to get down. Through the telescope we could see them plainly—little moving black specks on the snow field, descending towards the Grands Mulets.
We left them presently, Madame and François and the rest of the hotel staff in a perfect ferment of amiability and politeness, and walked up the valley to Argentière, then, sharply turning to the left, followed the diligence road over the Tête Noire.