fascinating when they focus their talents on nearer regions; for
“distant meadows” are not always “the greenest.” Agreeable things are
to be heard of Schynige Platte, whither, it appears, you journey by
cogwheel railway up steep gradients in an observation car behind a
violently puffing locomotive, past pretty toy stations, around dizzy
corners, through the startling blackness of unexpected tunnels, and
so on out and up to the giddy plateau and an overpowering prospect
of snowfields, misty valleys, gorges, and cataracts upon which
you gaze in spellbound astonishment from the comfortable terrace
of the “Alpenrose.” From no other viewpoint, they tell you, does
the stupendous Mönch (Monk) seem to stand out so squarely in the
middle distance in his cowl of snow, playing his traditional rôle of
discouraging duenna between the coveted Jungfrau and the eager Eiger
whom he repels with an eternal arm of glittering, blue ridge-ice.
When the conversation takes up Grindelwald, it becomes so attractive
that you make a mental note to go there the first thing in the morning.
It seems you are to take one of those droll little coaches of the
Bernese Oberland Road marked “B.O.B.,” and proceed delightedly up the
green valley of the Lütschine. Very soon will loom before you the
bleak shoulders of the Wetterhorn, seared and precipitous, capped and
pocketed with snow; the overwhelming pyramid of the Eiger, fearful with
gorge and chasm; the regal Jungfrau, immaculate and stupendous; and,
most uncommon spectacle of all, the awe-inspiring glacier—a frozen
tumble of scarred boulders and grimy icebergs, pierced by glittering
ice grottoes and ridged with terraced ways from which you stare down
into yawning black gulfs that are fringed with giant icicles pendent
from the frozen ledges. What was it Coleridge said of glaciers?
“Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!”
But many there will be at the Kursaal to tell you such tales of the
enchanted Lauterbrunnen Valley as to incline you to reconsider any
resolution about going first to Grindelwald. There, it is clear, we
are to find quality rather than quantity: a narrow ravine through the
mountains, carpeted with the greenest of turf and hung with glorious
waterfalls that come tumbling down from lofty limestone precipices.
We are to drive beside a turbulent stream set with occasional châlets
whose projecting roofs will suggest broad-brimmed hats jammed down
over their eyes, and here and there we shall come across a white stone
church. Shortly there will be raging, leaping torrents all about us,
vaulting down great cliffs of strange and startling appearance, and
a vista of wonderland will open before us with the stately Steinberg
enthroned in the midst. Next, climax on climax, the incomparable
Staubbach! Before this queen of cataracts every other “hanging thread”
is instantly and hopelessly dwarfed, as it launches its “wreaths of
dangling water-smoke” from a thousand feet above. We will think this
“dust brook” a mere feathery spray fluttered in a capricious breeze,
so astonishing is the evidence of the resistance of the air and the
friction of the rocks back of it; but once we have gone behind it and
observed the “perpetual iris” made by the sun in shining through, it
will appear a wonder beyond classification. Byron fancied it “the tail
of the White Horse”; Wordsworth called it “the sky-born waterfall”; and
Goethe’s dripping song of it runs:—
“In clouds of spray,
Like silver dust,
It veils the rock
In rainbow hues;
And dancing down
With music soft,
Is lost in air.”
Lesser lights are to be found among the Kursaal heroes who will confess
to nothing more unusual in the way of activity than salmon-fishing in
the neighboring lakes or bagging red partridge and hazel hens in the
upper meadows. But these, by contrast, appear sportsmen of so mean an
order that the stranger who has fed fat on the succulent yarns of the
Munchausens receives with impatience information for which, in fact, he
should be grateful. For instance: that in the winter the thermometers
of the higher settlements get down to fifty-four below freezing and
yet the dry air keeps people warmer than in the valleys, and that the
snow falls in such incredible quantities that artificial lights have
to be used in the lower stories of the houses all day and trenches cut
for exit; that up there when the terrific Föhn blows from the south
no man can make headway against it, but must lie flat on his face and
hang on and then jump up and dart forward a few yards between gusts;
that those people can foretell the weather by changes in the color of
the ice—blue meaning fine, green for snow, and white for fog; that
the Alpine crows of the summits are dark blue, with yellow beaks and
red feet, and the “wall-creepers” are gray as mice, with white and
red spots on their wings and with beaks shaped like awls. At some
such point as this the stranger will rise with a yawn and go away
in disgust, annoyed at being taken for a credulous fool. The seed,
however, has been sown and it flourishes like the fabled mustard. The
new arrival becomes a confirmed zealot and burns with all the ardor
of a convert; albeit his brain is a confused and bewildered muddle of
harsh-sounding mountain names, all, apparently, ending in _horn_.
When he comes out on the lawns he finds the guests still thronging the
verandas, although it is nearly eleven and prodigies of mountaineering
are slated for the morrow, and he hears the bands still engaged with
Puccini and the latest Vienna successes. In the fragrant, dewy gardens
fountains are playing, and lovers are discreetly screening behind
clumps of flowering shrubs. Returning excursionists are excitedly
vocal over the illumination of the Giessbach, whence they have just
arrived in one of those pompous lake steamers whose sure and cautious
pace reminded the satirical Victor Tissot of “the dignified motion of
a canalboat.” To hear these enthusiasts, this appears to have been
one more of those exceptionable occasions that the absent are always
missing, and that the renowned waterfall never before roared and
tumbled and foamed half so extravagantly in making its long, mad plunge
through the dusky, dark-green firs. Out on the Höheweg a walking-party
in knickerbockers and hobnailed shoes, and with edelweiss stuck in
green felt hats, are flourishing their alpenstocks and driving bargains
with sunburned guides whose names, undoubtedly, are either Melchior or
Mathias; these latter, we are to learn, are of a fearless but canny and
laconic nature, “economical as gypsies and punctual as executioners.”
How keenly people take their pleasures in the sparkling evenings of
Interlaken. How sharp and distinct are sounds and sights, and how
varied the night life. Each little street is as gayly illuminated as
though for some special celebration, and so hearty with good cheer that
one looks for some band of Bernese wrestlers, returning in triumph
from a festival, to round the next corner and strike up that clarion
anthem “Stehe fest, O Vaterland.” It would seem as though the “Fête du
Mi-Été” must actually be in full swing right here, instead of afar in
the upland pastures. Even at this hour a joyful multitude still streams
along under the Höheweg’s century-old walnuts, hatless, radiant, and
babbling in every European tongue. They flock about the confectioners’
stands and in and out of the curiosity-châlets, greeting acquaintances
with eager pleasure and proposing jolly plans for to-morrow. Each
little shop seems selling to capacity. Occasionally a peasant girl
passes, brusque and stolid, in short skirt and bright bodice, with
V-shaped rows of edelweiss buttons. Out on the green Höhenmatte lively
groups loiter about aimlessly, and somewhere in the vague distance
some one is singing the ever-popular “Trittst im Morgenrot daher.” The
thickly-wooded Rugen seems a colossal black mastiff asleep with his
head between his paws. Away up the misty valley, whose vital air is so
sweet with refreshing odors and so soothing with soft music, the regal
Jungfrau looms in dim and spectral outline, as ghostly and deceptive as
any faint feathering of cumulus clouds.
A distant _Jödel_ or the lilt of a plaintive _Ranz des Vaches_ excites
cordial thoughts of this fair Helvetia and her strong and devoted
people. “I wonder,” a friend once said to me at Interlaken, “if
these men and women really appreciate how lovely their country is.”
Perhaps the best answer is to be found in the desperate resolution
with which they have held it for six hundred years. Hard necessity has
taught these brawny mountaineers, whom Mr. Ruskin ungenerously called
“ungenerous and unchivalrous,” that to be “painfully economical” is
wiser than to chance privation. One thinks with wonder of the hardships
endured by the herdsman away up in the mountain pastures, eating his
sweet-bread and draining his milk-filled wooden bowl in a rude pine
hut, with goats and kine for comrades, and, for his sole diversion,
an occasional glimpse of a leaping chamois, a sly mountain fox, a
white hare, or the whistling, rat-like, shadowy marmot. With his long
alphorn he calls the cattle home or sounds the vesper hour, until the
loud echoes shout back from snowfield and ice gorge and the great
ravens swerve in their swimming flight. In summer, fluttering clouds of
butterflies will drift above the pansies and Alpine roses and gentians
on his meadow; but in winter the pallid, velvety edelweiss is all the
huntsman will find on those frozen ledges. What a wild and tragic
region it must be when the last _Senn_ has driven his herd down into
the valleys and old Winter is in undisturbed possession of his “dear
domestic cave.” The herdsman may rejoice that he is not there then; for
it becomes a world of black and white, of illimitable snow and blotches
of black forests, of death and waste and the frightful stillness of
stupendous heights. Then it is a deserted realm of ice and snow set
with pitfalls of treacherous crevasses and dreadful perils from hidden
gulfs and pitiless avalanches; a shuddering space of cloud banks and
waving vapor-scarfs; a haunted borderland of sinister shapes in the
writhing mists like wraiths of Alpine legends.
Even so, hundreds of failing foreigners go a long way up in those
forbidding regions in winter for an “enthusiasm of the blood” and a
“fairy titillation of the nerves.” And when the days are bright and of
their peculiar crystal clearness, and the skies are a cloudless blue
and the sunshine a deluge, these invalids revel in skating and curling
and the hockey they call “bandy”; and will even try appalling flights
by ski and toboggan through the “nipping and eager air,” over smooth
trails of glistening snow, rivaling the records of the “blue-ribbon”
Schatzalp course at Davos, where they do the two-mile run in something
under four minutes. There is a chance observation in “Silas Marner”
that “youth is not exclusively the period of folly!”
Of a summer evening, however, it might not be altogether unpleasant in
some parts of that cloudland. Could we return with the happy little
mule-boy who has just now come “jödeling” down from the passes,
doubtless we should find the sound of goat bells both romantic and
soothing up there, and might even in time muster a respectable show of
excitement over the passage of the four-horse diligences as they rattle
by in storms of dust. Certainly we should come across many a charming
little wayside inn far up those winding roads that climb to solitude,
and they would have overhanging eaves and carved wooden balconies and
boxes of rich orange nasturtiums before the tiny windows with the
lozenge panes; and when we pushed open the door and walked in, there
would be a great stone stove in a bar parlor and the face of William
Tell on an old clock behind the door.
One reads in “Hyperion” of a stolid Englishman so far forgetting his
cherished reserve as to exclaim: “This Interlaken! This Interlaken! It
is the loveliest spot on the face of the earth!” It is a nice question
as to whether any one might not easily be guilty of like enthusiasm,
provided the time were evening, and that he were capable of responding
to something of such passionate sympathy for mountain and valley as
breathes through Schiller’s “Wilhelm Tell.” It is impossible not to
be moved by such unusual beauty or uplifted by such sublimity. Here
jangled nerves recover rhythm and dulled interests vitality. Boredom
and ennui fall away, and work and responsibility acquire new value and
lustre. In the still of these pine-scented evenings, luminous with
enormous stars, a keen and sobering joy of life takes full and welcome
possession. Here, if anywhere, the sun of youth will have its afterglow.
There is something like benediction in a night-vision of the magic
Jungfrau—peerless “bride of quietness.” With such an appealing
spectacle in view, what wonder that the houses have so many windows,
or the night “a thousand eyes.” It is the master touch to Interlaken,
completing and glorifying the picture as it banks the far end of
the valley with towering clouds of snow. Neither Mont Blanc nor the
Matterhorn may rival this queen of the Alps, so charming in outline,
vast in bulk, and ravishing in purity. It could not fail to dominate
any region of earth, and Interlaken acknowledges its supremacy with a
completeness that is not without a certain flavor of proprietorship.
Each hillside has its view-pavilion, belvedere, or simple clearing,
like so many chapels for devotion. We come each morning for our
sunrise view, pass the day in adoration, marvel at sunset and the
afterglow, and close the evening with a wonderwist contemplation of
the phantom peak in moonlight. Of these “stations” of the mount, the
afterglow is the climax. Nor is the reason far to seek, once you have
stood among the awed and reverent throng that crowds the Höhenmatte
each late afternoon, and have seen black night about you in the valley,
while, for an hour or more after, the snowfields of the Jungfrau’s
summits still continued to blaze brilliantly in full sunshine. And
then, as we watched, there came the color-miracle of glittering white
merging into every hue of the rose, into scarlet stains and a deluge of
crimson, into deepening tints and sombre shades of blue, and finally
fading gradually to a misty, grayish, cloudy shadow as the last fires
burned out and the great mountain paled to a phantom of the night.
“When daylight dies,
The azure skies
Seem sparkling with a thousand eyes,
That watch with grace
From depths of space
The sleeping Jungfrau’s lovely face.”
How spirit-like, how faint and fair the magic mountain swims at night
among its silver cloud veils! What serenity and majesty invest it! Did
God here plan another flood, and stay His hand when He had heaped an
angry ocean into this dread tidal wave and left it piled in suspended
motion, with giant frozen seas, furious with foam, mounting to that
appalling crest that seems to dash its icy spray against the very
skies? No man may look with undaunted heart upon the chaos of its
glittering snowy plains, vast, chaste, and spectral in the moonlight.
How base and contemptible appear the petty pursuits of man in the
presence of such thrilling sublimity! It reconciles him to his lot in
life, where his “much” is really so very little; and inspires courage,
and shames the heart from low, ignoble ends.
There is reverent awe in thoughts of the breathless hush of the far,
white vales no man has trod; the remote and shuddering abysses into
which the very birds of the air look down with affright. There is
magic of inspiration in its sublime aloofness—as with those “unheard
melodies that are sweetest,” those supremest joys that lie beyond
attainment. Through the hidden, echoing caverns of this fair, pallid
mount wan spirits of Snowland may even now be dancing; along its
lonely, lovely glades are “horns of elfland faintly blowing.” Of its
profoundest and most secret mysteries not even the friendly moon may
have too curious knowledge—mysteries unknown of man since first the
morning stars sang together.
[Illustration]
VENICE
11 P.M. TO MIDNIGHT
A July moon over, a gondola under, a tenor lilting a _barcarolle_,
thousands with you on the Grand Canal—Venice _a festa_! From a near-by
belfry, a clock booms eleven. Eleven! and we are only to the Foscari
Palace. An hour ago we started at the Rialto, a thousand gay gondolas
with bunting, lanterns, and greens, everybody jostling, singing, and
shouting, and in the centre, like the queen-jewel of a tiara, the
brilliant _barca_ filled with orchestra and singers and ablaze in a
myriad of colored lights. This is a great occasion, the _serenata
ufficiale_. The _festa_ of the Redentore is near its close. Church
portals hang with mulberry branches begged by the monks of St. Francis,
and the people have feasted royally on the luscious black fruit bought
at the little stands on the Giudecca quays. Last Sunday the priestly
procession in full canonicals crossed the bridge of boats to the
Giudecca on its annual pilgrimage to the church of the Redentore.
Venice thus sustains her reputation as a reverencer of traditions;
they are burning lamps still in San Marco Cathedral for an innocent
man who was put to death hundreds of years ago. And so the church of
the Redentore is packed to suffocation at least one day of the year,
and after that, with the religious rites off her mind, Venice suddenly
gives up trying to look solemn and bursts out into the joy and tumult
of the “Official Serenade.”
This year it is splendid. Every moment belated gondolas are arriving
like flocks of black swans, with fresh quotas of enthusiasm and an
increase of gayety and confusion. What laughter and fun! The Canal is
a hopeless jam. Dancing lanterns play light and shade on thousands
of bright faces, and the gondoliers, in fresh white blouses and blue
sailor collars, look like shadows as they lean silently on their long
oars. In the intervals of the music there is something weird and
frantic to both their labor and their language as they agonize to
protect their beloved boats from scratches and smashes and at the same
time retain positions of vantage in this ice-floe of a tangle as the
_barca_ struggles forward a few difficult yards to its next point of
serenade. There are ten or a dozen of these serenade-points, and at
each the writhing flotilla pauses, and singers and orchestra provide
the entertainment. It is finest to be afloat, but, oh, the land!
Red-and-green fire throws into enormous relief fairylike towers and
turrets that have figured in song and story for a thousand years; and
in windows, terraces, balconies, and tops there throngs a multitude
that none of us may number. Every face is turned toward the _barca_;
every handkerchief waves our way. An occasional searchlight darts
impartially over them and us, picks out a spot in sudden brilliance and
as suddenly drops it back into blacker obscurity. But in that brief
flashing, scattered friends have discovered friends, and gondolas are
started inching toward each other, and presently parties are joined and
ice boxes uncovered. After covertly studying the apparently aimless
movements of our own gondola I finally unearthed a dark conspiracy
in the reunion line that interested only Paolo, our gondolier, and
an occasional crony at a neighboring oar. Paolo’s face and manners
are innocence itself, but his guile is fathoms deep. We could not
understand why he did not get us nearer to the _barca_, the universal
objective, until we saw the bottle pass between him and a raven-haired,
flashing-toothed athlete at the nearest oar and surprised the quick
greeting and low, musical laugh of congratulation and content. But who
minds, with Venice _a festa_! And Venice is Paolo’s—not ours, alas!
Night on the Grand Canal! What a realm of witchery! “The horns of
elfland faintly blowing.” What lullaby could soothe more sweetly
than the dip of the oar or the soft plash of the dark water under
the gondola’s prow! The charm of unreality invests the shadowy,
spiritualized palaces rising like silver wraiths from the quivering
stream. The summer moon touches each carven arch and column, each
stone-lace balcony, each fretted embrasure, each delicate ogive window
and sculptured capital, and lo, a magician’s wand has reared a
dream-land of unearthly beauty!
In the soft and odorous darkness the birds that love this Venice are
securely nesting—the gulls, that in winter whirl up the canals with
harsh clamors of the coming storms, are now at rest along the beaches
of their blue Adriatic; the swallows and pigeons are sleeping among
the red tiles of the crooked gables; the sparrows are aloft among the
mulberry-trees of the Giudecca and the sycamores of the Public Gardens;
the canaries are dim spots in fragrant magnolia-trees or in spreading
beds of purple oleander; and the ortolans, robins, and blackbirds
nestle among azaleas and the heavy festoons of banksias. All their
music now is hushed, and they are as mute and soundless to-night as
were their awe-struck sires, long centuries since, when gentle St.
Francis read them his offices under the cypresses of Del Deserto.
The night is fragrant with the breath of roses, carnations, and
camellias from palace gardens and with spicy honeysuckle from the
neighboring Zattere. Visions of stirring romance and adventure crowd in
on the mind. Down the pebbly paths of yonder garden surely some lover
has just passed, brave in velvet doublet and silken hose, from laying
his roses at the satin-slippered feet of his lady! Presently he will
drift this way in his cushioned gondola and the soft night winds will
bear her the mellow throb of his guitar and many a plaintive sigh
of love and Venice. But hush! from out that old black watergate, in
bravo’s cloak and with muffled oar, who bears the helpless lady away
through the deep shadows under the garden wall? Hard with your oar,
my gondolier! A purse of golden ducats if you speed me to San Marco!
I shall slip this scribbled note into the Lion’s Mouth! Ho, for the
vengeance of The Ten!
[Illustration: VENICE, GRAND CANAL FROM THE PIAZZETTA]
If it were day, what a different scene we should have on this twisting
sea-serpent of a Grand Canal. Venice would then be a sparkling vision
resplendent with every sea charm, tinted with pinks and opals and
pearls, and as changeful and full of caprice as any other coquette.
Instead of this spangle of stars above, we should have a vast expanse
of pale-blue sky, cloudless and glittering, and the misty reflections
that now sink faintly deep down into these dark waters would vanish
before a stream so azure and brilliant that it would seem as if a
portion of the sky above had been cut and fitted between the palace
fronts below. And how these mellow old churches and houses would glow
and their wavering shadows shake in the stream! The exquisite traceries
on balcony, arch, and column would seem carven of ivory, and from
under the red-tiled eaves grim heads of stone would stare down over
sculptured cornices and peep out through delicate quatrefoils and
creamy foliations. And into these wonder-palaces the eager sun would
peer to see the lofty ceilings all frescoed and gilded, the floors of
colored marbles, the carven furniture and faded rich hangings, and the
deep and arched recesses that overlook the gardens in the rear. And
what gardens! Mellow brick walls festooned in pale-blue wistaria and
lined with hedges of white thorn, a solemn cypress in either corner,
clumps of fig-trees and mulberry and golden magnolia, airy grapevine
pergolas of slender, osier-bound willow, little paths snugly bordered
with box, trellises of gorgeous roses, and here and there some antique
statue or rude stone urn half hidden in color masses of scarlet
pomegranates and snowy lilies.