ruined castle walls contain in their dark, cool depths a picturesque
tangle of woodland paths and romantic walks, thickets of fragrant
flowers, a shattered arch half cloaked with ivy, and many a pleasant
wayside café opened to the sky and gay with its little German band.
For those who emerge from the shadows and come up like Undines into
the moonlight that streams in a silver mist on terrace and garden, as
fair a picture reveals itself as can be seen in any part of our world.
Here are lakes and grottoes and fountains and statues, all flecked with
the heavy shadows of lindens and beeches. Here are crumbling towers
and vine-mantled turrets and shattered, moss-grown arch and cornice.
Even lovelier to-day are these gardens and scarcely less celebrated
than three hundred years ago when old Solomon de Caus, architect and
engineer of the Counts Palatine and first prophet of the power of
steam, “leveled the mountain-tops and filled up the valleys” (as he
has recorded in a Latin inscription in one of the older grottoes),
and built these “plantations” and made them the haunts of singing
birds, and filled them with orange-trees and rare exotic plants, and
ornamented them with statues and with fountains that made music as they
played. The ruined castle is embraced and enfolded in these beautiful
gardens as an ailing child by its mother’s arms. The ravages of fire
and war have scarred and wrecked it beyond man’s redemption, but the
sturdy walls still oppose their twenty-foot masonry to the attacks of
Time as stubbornly as did the great Wrent Tower when it defied the
powder blasts of the detested Count Mélac and his devastating Frenchmen.
As the hour of ten draws near, we return through the vaulted passage
from the Great Balcony and enter the grass-grown central courtyard.
Outside the façades were grim and bleak and built to meet an enemy’s
blows, but toward the courtyard the castle turned faces of ornament
and beauty. One feels at once the force of the saying that this is not
the ruin of a castle, but of an epoch. It slowly flowered through the
five hundred years that Heidelberg was the capital of the Palatinate,
and all the development of those intervening times is expressed in its
varying architecture. Pomp and circumstance are written big across
it, for its masters and builders were counts and princes, kings and
emperors. One feels the love and pride they took in these deserted
palaces, now masterless. In the pale moonlight whole rows of effigies
of the illustrious dead stand boldly forth in niches of the hollow,
staring walls, and medallion heads peer curiously out of pediment
recesses, and history and allegory find expression in lifelike statue
and carven bust. Delicate arabesques and fanciful conceits wreathe
themselves in stones of portal and cornice, and the armorial chequers
of Bavaria and the Lion of the Palatinate oppose the lordly Eagle of
the Empire. Time has modulated the discordant keys of architecture of
divergent periods into a common and mellow harmony, so that the first
rude stones laid by old Rudolph seem a consistent part of an assemblage
that includes that finest example of Renaissance architecture in all
Germany—Otto-Heinrich’s wonderful ruddy palace set with its yellow
statues. One thinks of Prague and the battle of the White Hill as he
sees the ill-starred Frederick’s massive contribution, and wonders
why this beautiful realm could not have enticed him from playing that
tragic rôle of “Winter King.” Frederick’s palace looms impressively by
night; in its varied architecture and majestic effigies of the House
of Wittelsbach one feels the propriety of having here a comprehensive
levy upon the building-knowledge of all previous time as an adequate
and appropriate expression of the catholic culture of the lords of the
Palatinate.
And, indeed, one reflects, there was need for both strength and beauty
to a fortress that was to play so momentous a rôle in the fierce
dissensions of its time. In that dungeon a pope once lay a prisoner; in
this chamber Huss found refuge; in yonder chapel Luther has preached,
and all the foremost spiritual lords of the hour. This courtyard has
echoed with shouts for the Emperor Sigismund when he tarried here _en
route_ to play that perfidious part at the Council of Constance, and
has rocked with wild applause as “Wicked Fritz,” returning in triumph
from the battlefield of Seckenheim, marched in his captive princes.
These staring walls have blazed with royal fêtes—in the hush and
desolation of to-night one feels a deep sadness in contrasting the
ominous silence that pervades them now with the splendor and uproar
that vitalized them when a princess was wedded in this crumbling
chapel; when Emperor Maximilian came up from his coronation at
Frankfort; when the foremost figure of his era, Emperor Charles V, and
his sallow little son who was later Phillip II, feasted and reveled
here for days at a time.
We look up at the Gothic balconies, and it seems as though we could
almost see some early lord of this stronghold peering down through
painted windows at the athletic sports of his hardy sons; and a certain
unreality takes phantom form and substance, and the sentinel figures
descend solemnly from their niches as a train of valorous knights
and pages issues from Otto-Heinrich’s broad portal with music and
laughter; there is the scrape and tread of mailed feet and the shouts
of a gallant company as fair-haired women in shimmering silks and
high-peaked headdresses award prizes of the tourney to kneeling men
in glittering armor; and the trumpets sound and the torches flare and
the noble retinue sweeps into the great banquet hall, while the “merry
councilor” who brings up the rear makes us a profound and mocking
bow as the door is closed—and we are alone with the statues in the
moonlight.
The empty, silent courtyard is spectral and sad; it is an hour for
reverie, for apprehension. The pale silver of the moon whitens into
phantom-life two sides and a corner; the rest is a deep, hushed shadow.
A cushion of ivy stirs in the faint night air; a bat flashes over a
shattered cornice; a stone detaches itself exhaustedly and falls with a
tinkle of sand, waking a protest of little echoes.
One steals away silently, resigning ward of all this senile decay to
faithful Perkeo, who, in wooden effigy, still companions his huge empty
tuns in the darkness of the cellars—the little, red-haired, faithful
jester who alone remains constant to his master, of all the army of
attendants that thronged these palaces for half a thousand years.
We pass the old stone-canopied well whose columns once were
Charlemagne’s, pass the ponderous clock tower and the moat bridge, and
enter the fragrant gardens as the valley bells sound ten and the purple
mists are rising from the Neckar.
It is impossible to escape a feeling of profound melancholy. Where now
are the powerful princes whose rusted swords may not strike back were I
to raise a hand of destruction against the halls they reared and loved
and guarded with such might? “The fate of every man,” said the Koran,
“have We bound about his neck.”
It is depressing to think that such glory, power, and beauty as once
were here should have flourished so wonderfully and come to so little.
Was all this magnificence created merely for destruction? Could nothing
less suffice grim Time to build him an eyrie for bats and swallows?
Was Von Matthisson right in the judgment he expressed in the sad and
sympathetic “Elegie” he penned in these ruins, and must we conclude
with him that temporal glory is but ashes and that the darkness of
the grave adorns impartially the proud brow of the world ruler and the
trembling head that shakes above the pilgrim’s staff?
“Hoheit, Ehre, Macht und Ruhm sind eitel!
Eines weltgebieters stolze Scheitel
Und ein zitternd Haupt am Pilgerstab
Deckt mit einer Dunkelheit das Grab!”
[Illustration]
INTERLAKEN
10 P.M. TO 11 P.M.
THE top of the evening at brisk and bracing Interlaken is certainly ten
o’clock. Vigorous, vitalizing air breathes down on the lush meadows
from towering Alpine snowfields, and languor and ennui fall away from
her dispirited summer idlers and a refreshing life interest reasserts
itself. It is then one may see the deep, flowered lawns that front the
great hotels of the broad Höheweg pleasantly thronged with animated
guests, modishly and immaculately groomed; and each little street and
quiet lane has its quota of vivacious strollers who prefer the keen
night air and the inspiring mountain-prospect to the conventional
attractions of the brilliant Kursaal or the round of mild social
diversions that is in progress in the hotel apartments. Then, too,
there is a certain subdued note of expectancy in the air, for this is
the little village’s fête hour; and almost as the valley clocks are
striking the hour the celebration is heralded with a burst of rockets
from the open field of the Höhenmatte, in the centre of the town, and
there is a general rush of chattering guests to see the display and to
exhibit prodigious approval. All are aware of the fact that this is
merely an expression, in terms of Swiss thrift, of the appreciation
the seventy-five hundred villagers feel for the lucrative presence of
thousands of guests, and yet it admirably serves as a mid-break in the
evening’s diversions. There is little enough to the celebration, to be
sure, excepting the exaggerated importance such an event always assumes
to isolated summer people, but you would think it was a pyrotechnic
marvel, to judge by the enthusiasm.
To see Interlaken then is to behold her at her gayest. Bridge-parties
forsake their cards, late diners their ices, and billiardists their
cues. Each little balcony on the hotel fronts is promptly crowded,
orchestras strike up lively Strauss waltzes, troops of delighted guests
hurry across the Höheweg and pour into the meadow, until one might
fairly conclude there was a carnival on, from the overflow of laughter
and merrymaking. It is always a great moment at the Kursaal. There the
excitement seekers have been wandering from parlors to lounging-rooms
and ending up in the cheery gaming-hall, where a toy train on a long
green table darts around a little track, laden with the francs and
merry hopes of modest challengers of fortune, and comes to an exciting
and leisurely stop before some station with the name of a European
capital. Just then, like as not, as the _croupier_ begins raking in
the scattered piles of silver and the losers are being gleefully
accosted by their friends, somebody suddenly shouts “Fireworks!” and
forthwith all run hurrahing into the gardens and cry out like summer
children in vast delight over the rockets that go hurtling skyward
from the Höhenmatte. It is all quite of the nature of a very elegant
international fête to which the Old World and the New have accredited
their most _recherché_ representatives.
There is seldom a lack of keen activity at Interlaken, but at this
hour it is most abounding; nor will the new arrival fail to note the
contrast between the sharp alertness of this company and the lethargic
listlessness that depresses, for instance, the bored idlers who bask
in the dusty olive gardens of the Riviera. In the intermittent glow
of the fireworks, cottages and distant hotels spring out of the
surrounding darkness. The top of a hillside sanatorium appears of
a sudden white against the dark pines, the packsaddle roof of the
church tower discovers itself, a turret shows with the red field and
white Greek cross of the Swiss flag lazily unfolding above it, and
one looks anxiously for just one glimpse of the old cloister’s round
towers and cone-shaped roofs that reminded Longfellow of “tall tapers
with extinguishers.” Music drifts down from remote cafés and pavilions
nestling in wooded nooks. The air is heady and buoyant with the scent
of pine and fir. Life seems at high tide; and then just as suddenly it
is all over, and the gay company resumes its interrupted activities
with infinite laughter and handclapping.
There is a positive spell to all this Alpine comedy. No new arrival
will feel inclined to return at once to hotel conventionalities, with
a soft purple mist shrouding the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and the distant
Jungfrau lying pallid and wan in the moonlight. He will gaze about him
in wonder at the snow-crowned peaks that hem in the little Bödeli plain
where Interlaken snuggles, and will feel how wonderful it is that the
boisterous Lütschine and its fellow torrents could ever have filled in
this alluvial barrier between the deep lakes that fought them inch by
inch. He will think of the enchanted regions of the Bernese Oberland
that lie just before him, and of the contrasting beauty of the inland
seas that stretch away on either hand: Lake Brienz, mysterious and
austere, scowling at its precipitous mountain shores, roaring welcomes
to its thundering waterfalls, and begrudging standing-room for the
tiniest of hamlets; Lake Thun, “the Riviera of Switzerland,” with
lovely vistas of green meadows, châteaux-dotted hillsides and distant
snowy summits, all breathing such mildness and serenity as befitted
the former abode of the holy hermit of St. Beatenberg. And doubtless
he will seek out some tree-embowered path that winds along the Aare,
and there indulge in contemplative thought of this glittering blue link
between the lakes. Nor could he do better, for this arrogant stream is
an illustrious instance of a reformed rake. Of evil repute for riotous
cascade and brawling torrent all the way up to its home by the Grimsel
Pass, it responds to the touch of civilization at Interlaken and
meekly accepts the bondage of steam for the remainder of its career.
What a gratifying example of reform it presents as it proceeds demurely
along from this scene of moral crisis, laving thankful little towns,
reporting conscientiously to the proper authorities at Bern, and, after
an exhibition review-sweep around the capital, flowing sweetly on to
Waldshut and modestly laying down its burden on the broad bosom of the
Rhine. The stranger will perceive that virtue has its rewards, with
rivers as with humans, when he takes note of the extravagant petting
and eulogy that has followed the repentance of the Aare at Interlaken,
its adornment with promenades, gardens, and artistic bridges, and the
choice of much excellent society, particularly at night, on the part of
ruminating savants and romantic lovers of all ages.
Strolling along the river paths carpeted with sweet-scented pine
needles, the delighted new arrival has only to lift his eyes to
discover how picturesquely the little city lies in its bed of lush
and fertile meadows. It will seem to him like a great stage set for a
mammoth spectacle. For background there is the black and flinty Harder,
set with the grim rock face of the scowling Hardermannli, rugged in
boulders and sheer cliffs and hiding its base in treacherous, grassy
slopes; the Aare skirts it fearfully, and the pretty little cottages
of Unterseen shrink close to Lake Thun on its farther side. Prostrate
Interlaken lies supine before it, gazing appealingly through its
innumerable windows across the open Höhenmatte, over the beeches and
firs of the protruding shoulder of the Rugen, and on up the dodging,
narrow Lütschine Valley to the remote and sympathetic Jungfrau. The
scene is ready for the curtain when you have dotted the mountain slopes
with châlets.
Or perhaps, if the stranger is fanciful, he will conceive the
Alpine ravens thinking it some enormous eagle swooping toward the
Lauterbrunnen Valley, with clustered houses for an attenuated body and
two lakes for powerful blue wings beating out and back. Or, again, he
may be reminded by this group of huge hotels of some fleet of old-time
ships-of-the-line that started down the valley to bombard the Jungfrau.
Early in the action formation was lost and the great hulks drifted
about in hopeless confusion. Several, apparently, went promptly aground
on the banks of the Aare right under the precipices of the Harder; all
of the big ones foundered in a row along the Höheweg; a number became
desperately entangled in the square before the Spielmatten Island;
some trailed southward in what we call Jungfraustrasse, and others
in Alpenstrasse; here and there one lies at anchor along the farther
meadows, waiting for signals from the flagship on the Höheweg; and at
least one, in the guise of an ugly white church, was caught in some
violent cross-current and tossed up high and dry on the brow of the
fir-smothered Gsteig.
The evening guest who does not fancy reveries along a mountain stream,
nor yet the quiet pacing of the neat lanes that are so characteristic
of this immaculate republic of “spotless towns,” whose very flag
appropriately suggests the Red Cross Society’s familiar emblem of
sanitation, will find it amusing to loiter among the little shops
of the village and see the curious wooden trifles of Brienz, the
delicately tinted majolica ware of Thun, exquisite ivory carvings, and
rare _bijouterie_ of filigree silver wrought with infinite patience and
skill. Tiring of these, he may ramble under the fine old walnut-trees
of the Höheweg and congratulate himself that he is not under the
horse-chestnuts of Lucerne to look out on inferior mountain prospects
and breathe a less intoxicating air.
The most approved form of evening entertainment is a round of calls
among friends scattered over the broad lawns of the hotels, when
one may divert himself with summer orchestras or itinerant bands of
Italian singers in crimson sashes, or revel in a rare profusion of
beautiful flowers; and, from time to time, look gladly up at a crisp
sky splendid with great luminous stars whose tremulous ardor, in Walter
Pater’s famous phrase, “burns like a gem.” It is a capital place to
gather impressions of what life at Interlaken means and what goes
forward each day among its votaries. It is perfectly plain that this
must be a great place; everybody is so bubblingly cheerful and so
devoutly grateful for being just here and no possible spot else. You
will hear them insisting that Interlaken, being halfway between, is
an admirable combination of the complacent “prettiness” of Geneva and
the austere solemnity of the vaunted Engadine Valley. Or there will
be fragments of conversation reaching you about tennis matches on the
Höhenmatte, lake bathing in Brienz, motor-bus runs from the golf links
of Bönigen, where the residents plant a fruit tree whenever a baby is
born, or of desperate scrambles up the zigzag trails of the Harder
beloved of Weber, Mendelssohn, and Wagner, with rapturous accounts
of the inspiring view from the _Kulm_. Some, you will gather, have
passed the day uneventfully among the park walks of the Rugen, gazing
down on Lake Brienz from the Trinkhalle Café, or on Lake Thun from the
Scheffel Pavilion, or on both from farther up on the belvedere of the
Heimwehfluh. Others again, it seems, have actually crossed the mild
Wagner Ravine and ascended the lofty Abendberg of the Grosser Rugen;
and for this pitiful adventure you hear them pose as veteran mountain
conquerors who will carry their alpenstocks home with them and forever
after speak familiarly of edelweiss and the flora of the summits.
There even appear to have been romantic souls, familiar with Madame de
Staël’s accounts of St. Berchtold festivals, who have spent the hours
in dreams of Byron’s “Manfred” down by the old round tower of the
dilapidated wreckage of Unspunnen Castle—in truth, the most abject
of ruins, and quite as forlorn as Mariana’s Moated Grange. Not a few
will have the courage to confess that they have done nothing more
heroic than stroll by the shaded Goldei promenades along the Aare until
they came to Unterseen, where they deliberately sat down and gazed to
satiety at the curious toy houses with the long carved balconies and
amazing roofs that project beyond all belief.
[Illustration: INTERLAKEN, ON THE HOTEL LAWN]
Thus, by merely catching flying ends of talk, a stranger may imbibe the
proper amount of enthusiasm and gather some rambling notion of the fine
things Interlaken has in store for him.
But the real evening-heroes must be looked for at the Kursaal. That is
where you hear the great champion talkers of the world! What was the
amiable Tartarin to such as these? Or Baron Munchausen? Or Sir John
Mandeville? On such deaf ears fell the warning ignored of “Excelsior”:—
“Beware the pine-tree’s withered branch!
Beware the awful avalanche!”
Behold them at their ease in wicker chairs in the lounging-room,
stretching the weary limbs that have borne them in safety through a
hundred Alpine perils. For all who will listen, what tales may be heard
of desperate daring amid the imminent deadly breach of crevasse and
avalanche! Under the vivid hand of the actual participant one fairly
sees the progress of the proud mountain-queller—follows with bated
breath the slow and tedious early stages, the hazardous upward advance,
the surmounting of final barriers by dint of ice-axe and life-rope,
and so enters into the joy of the ultimate conquest of the wild, bleak,
wind-swept summit. Who would have the hardihood in such a presence to
speak a word of such contemptible contrivances as mountain tramways and
funicular railroads! It is enough that the uninitiated should realize
in the shuddering depths of his soul that there still remains _terra
incognita_ to the listless, the fat, and the asthmatic. Later on, of
course, we come to view these hardy characters in a somewhat truer
perspective; but that will be after we have talked with their guides,
or ourselves turned heroes and bluffed at like hazards.
All the same, there is no denying the satisfaction a newcomer has,
in the beginning, in attending the impressive conversation of these
desperate and intrepid Kursaal adventurers. He certainly feels that
he has at last reached a region of hardy men and genuine mountain
hand-to-hand struggles. He hears, with popping eyes, of the lofty
little hamlet of Mürren, away up in cloudland, whose tiny cottages
stagger under broad, stone-freighted roofs and where vast, sublime
Titans scowl awfully from inaccessible heights. They tell him it is a
region of eternal dazzling whiteness, with patches of black here and
there that are really forests half buried in snow, and where the air is
stifling with the constant odor of ice and frost. A truly shuddering
place, they say, where men cannot hear themselves talk for the
incessant thundering of plunging avalanches, and where the herdsman
seldom ventures and the sunrise is never heralded by the alphorn of
the hardy _Senn_. Later on, to be sure, we journey luxuriously to this
same Mürren in a comfortable mountain railway and with considerably
less of peril than attends going to office by elevator in a sky-scraper
at home; and we find it a green and peaceful retreat, well supplied
with hotels and gratefully affected by delicate old ladies with weak
lungs. Just the same, we would not have missed the thrills of that
first Kursaal account. Alas for all disillusionment, anyway! Most of
the beautiful white, velvety edelweiss these rocking-chair climbers
produce from their pockets in proof of their presence in frightful and
remote ravines has really been bought for a franc on the Höheweg, and
the chamois they stalked in summit passes generally dwindle down to the
little ivory ones you find in the shops of Jungfraustrasse.
The truth of the Kursaal, when you get it, is stranger than its
fiction; as when the talk turns to the progress of the construction
work on the Jungfrau Railway, that imperishable monument to the genius
and patience of the late Adolf Guyer-Zeller, of Zurich. It is then
you hear of the loftiest tunnels in the world, eight and ten miles
long, through icy mountain shoulders ten thousand feet above the sea;
of gradients of one in four; of squirrel locomotives so ingeniously
contrived that if the electric power were suddenly to fail they could
generate enough by their own weight to clap on brakes and come down
in safety; of searchlights in the stations on the peaks so strong
that a man can read by them away over at Thun; of powerful telescopes,
free to patrons, through which you may observe the occupations of the
crowds on the Rigi and Mount Pilatus at remote Lucerne; of roomy and
luxurious stations blasted out of the depths of the mountains, whose
floors are parquetry and whose light and heat are electricity, with
twenty-foot windows piercing the rock and appearing, even from across
the neighboring abyss, like tiny pin-pricks in the perpendicular cliff;
of the highest post-office on earth, from whose windows you look out
on twenty glaciers. Of the truth of all this you are to learn later
on when you make the unforgettable run to Eismeer—“sea of ice”—the
farthest point so far attained in the steady progress of this marvelous
railway toward the summit of the Jungfrau, now only a mile or two
beyond, and which had been the despair of mountain climbers of all time
until the Meyer brothers conquered it, one hundred years ago.