PICTURES IN SWITZERLAND.[1]
Waterfalls--Constance--Zurich--William Tell--Glaciers--the Monarch.
The waterfalls of Switzerland are among its crowning glories; and of
these the falls of Schaffhausen are altogether the most imposing. The
European, who has never worshiped at the foot of our own great cataract,
looks down from the base of the Castle of Lauffen, after paying a franc
for the privilege of getting to a standing-place; or he looks up from
the opposite shore, where is reared the Castle of Worth, and he
pronounces it magnificent. Mrs. Bull does not hesitate to declare it
charming! Mr. Murray, in that everlasting Red book, without which no
Englishman could _do_ Europe--as this is the authority on which alone he
ventures to admire any thing in art or nature, just as he swears only by
the _Times_--Mr. Murray, in his never-to-be-dispensed-with Hand-book,
informs him that this is "the finest cataract in Europe," and, of
course, in his opinion, it is the finest in the world. He leads the
trembling traveller to the verge of the awful precipice, where, covered
with spray, he may enjoy the full grandeur of this "hell of waters," and
then he adds, "It is only by this close proximity, amidst the tremendous
roar and the uninterrupted rush of the river, that a true notion can be
formed of the stupendous nature of this cataract!" The Rhine here leaps
over the rocks into an abyss of fifty feet. The river is cloven in twain
by a tower of rock in the centre of the stream, and the spray rises from
its base in an eternal cloud. Picturesque and beautiful the falls
certainly are, but grandeur can hardly be affirmed of them.
It was my first day of travel in Switzerland when I reached them--a warm
day in the summer of last year. A month of hot weather in Dresden and
Munich had been too much for the restoring powers of the waters of
Baden-Baden, and it was like waking up in a new world of beauty, with a
new soul to love it, to find myself in the midst of this Swiss
scenery--the breezes of its snow hills and glaciers fanning me, and its
peaks pointing skyward, where there are temples and palaces whose every
dome is a sun and every pinnacle a star. But I could not be satisfied
till, with the aid of two stout fellows, I made my way through the
boiling waters nearly to the foot of the central tower, and there, in
the toppling skiff which threatened to tip over on very gentle
occasions, I looked up at the mass of waters tumbling from above. The
rocks were partially covered with green shrubbery, and a scraggy tree
stretched its frightful arms into the spray; but I was not disposed to
climb, as some have done, to the top of the cliff, for the sake of
enjoying the scene.
A curious old town is Schaffhausen, so named from the boat-houses, or
skiff-houses, which were here erected, for the falls made this the great
terminus of navigation on the Rhine. We had come by diligence from
Basle, and after passing a night in Weber's excellent hotel at the
falls, we came on in the morning, and spent an hour or two looking at
the ancient architecture of the town, whose buildings are adorned with
such fanciful and extravagant carvings as would hardly be deemed
ornamental in the Fifth Avenue.
A very small specimen of a steamer received us now, and bore us up
against a strong current. The banks on either side were green with
vineyards, now loaded with unripe fruit, and in the midst of the vines
the dressers were at their work. On the sloping hillsides the neat
cottages of the Swiss peasantry were scattered, making a picture of
constant beauty through which we were passing. Among our passengers were
a dozen German students, with their knapsacks on their backs, making a
tour of Switzerland, the most of which they would perform on foot,
gathering health and strength as they trudged on through the mountain
passes, and studied the glacier theories on the spot.
It was noon when we arrived at Constance, on the lake of the same name,
and a city to be forever associated with the trial and martyrdom of John
Huss and Jerome of Prague--a city on which the curse of shedding
innocent blood seems resting to this day. In the loft of a long
building, now standing near the water's edge, was gathered a Council, in
the year of our Lord 1414, over which the Emperor Sigismund presided,
and attended by some five hundred princes, cardinals, bishops,
archbishops and professors, who deposed two popes and set up another,
and crowned their four years' labor of love by condemning to the flames
those martyr men of God, whose names are this day fragrant in the
churches of a land that was not known when Huss was burning. In the
midst of a cabbage garden outside the gate, yet called the Huss Gate, we
were led to the spot where he suffered; and returning, we called at the
house in which he was lodged before he was brought to trial. But the
streets of the city had grass growing in them; for of the forty thousand
inhabitants who once filled these houses but seven thousand remain!
Tenements are now tenantless that once were thronged with life. It was
sad to wander by daylight through the streets without meeting a living
being; and this was my experience here, and afterward in the island city
of Rhodes. A chain stretched across the street sustained a lantern in
the centre--a very convenient substitute for lamp-posts, if there are no
carriages to pass, but a very awkward arrangement for a city infested
with omnibuses.
Another day and the diligence brought us to Zurich, on the lake of the
same name--the most thriving town in Switzerland. Here the lion-hearted
reformer, Zwingle--the soldier of the cross, who perished on the field
of battle--preached in the Cathedral, and dwelt in a house which is
still standing and known as his. Here Lavater, the physiognomist, had a
home and found a grave, over which the flowers are blooming. His was a
lovely and loving spirit. Switzerland, strange to say, has not given
birth to poets, but she is the mother of many noble sons, and her
scenery has inspired the souls of the sons of song from other climes,
who have wandered here and meditated among her lakes and hills.
Coming into Zurich, as we descended into the vale that holds the city
and the lake, I had been charmed with the view; and now at the close of
the next day, we were led to the height of one of the old ramparts, to
behold a Swiss sunset, and certified to be "one of the finest scenes in
Switzerland." The elevation, no longer needed for purposes of defence,
has been tastefully transformed into a flower-garden. Enormous shade
trees are crowning the summit, and on rude benches the
romantically-disposed people, citizens and strangers, are seated. As we
came to the top of the hill, the god of day was coming down from the
midst of a dense cloud, like a mass of molten gold distilled into a
transparent globe. His liquid face was trembling; but the world below
sent back a smile of gladness as the king in his glory looked down upon
it. The nearer summits seemed to catch the brightness first, and then in
the distance others, invisible before, stood forth in their majesty, as
if called into being by his quickening beams. At our feet was the lake,
like a sea of glass. The spires of the city and the sloping hills were
reflected from the mirror; and all over the country side, as far as the
eye could reach, were thousands of white cottages and villas, the abode
of wealth and peace and love--sweet Swiss homes, rejoicing in the
sunshine as they send up their evening psalm of praise. It was a scene
to make its impress on the memory, and to come up again and again in the
far-off dreams of other lands and years.
To climb the Rigi, to spend the night on the top, to see the sun go down
and get up in the morning, these are among the things to be done in a
tour of Switzerland, and all these we set off to do, taking the steamer
at Zurich and touching at Horgen, crossing over to Zug, and by steamer
again to the little village of Arth, which lies at the foot of the hill
we are to ascend. As we were approaching the shore, the reflection of
the Rigi from the lake was so vivid and perfect that we could study the
mountain in the water with as much satisfaction as a good-looking man
contemplates his own person in a glass. Every particular cliff and crag,
individual trees, and winding paths, and torrent beds, which we could
see above, were defined with marvelous precision below. On landing, we
dispatched a fleet mountain-boy ahead of us to engage beds at the house
on the summit; for so many were with us on board the steamer, and so
many more were doubtless climbing from the other side at the same time,
that we were likely to have a bed on the floor unless we stole a march
on our fellow-travellers. Most of them pushed upward from Arth, while we
kept upon the plain for a mile or more to the village of Goldau, once
the scene of a terrible catastrophe, the gloom of which still seems to
be hanging over the ill-fated spot. The Rossberg Mountain is on the east
of it, five thousand feet high, and in the year 1806 a mighty mass of
it, some three miles long and a thousand feet thick, came sliding down
into the valley, burying four hundred and fifty human beings in one
untimely, dreadful grave. Travellers, like ourselves, who were making
their way among these romantic regions, were suddenly overwhelmed in the
deluge of earth and stones, and the places of their burial are unknown
to this day. This event happened fifty years ago; but the broad, bare
strip on the mountain side, which no verdure has since clad, is an
ever-present record of the awful fall; and the great rocks that are
lying on the opposite side of the valley, and away up the Rigi, are
present witnesses of the messengers of death that came down in their
wrath on that memorable day. The village church was then buried with the
people who had been wont to frequent its courts, and nothing of it was
ever found but the bell, which was carried a mile or more and now hangs
in the steeple of another little temple filled with memorials of the
ancient calamity.
Here we began the ascent of the Rigi. Some on horses, some on mules,
more on foot, two or three ladies in sedan chairs, each borne by four
stout men--a very lazy way of getting up hill, where health as well as
pleasure is sought in travel; but every one choosing his own mode of
ascent, and none having wings, we set off, as motley a party of
mountain-climbers as ever undertook to scale a fortress. Four hours'
steady travel, pausing only to look in occasionally at the chapels in
which the Catholic pilgrims perform their prayers as they ascend to the
church of "Mary in the Snow," which is about half-way up, brought us to
the top where as yet the sun was half an hour high. And now, for the
first time, did we know that we were in Switzerland. Not because we are
on a very lofty mountain top--for the Rigi is not quite six thousand
feet high--but we are on a mountain which stands so isolated that it
affords us a better view than any other point, however elevated, of the
mountains, the lakes, valleys, and villages, that make this land so
peculiar for its beauty and grandeur. On the west, where we gazed with
the deepest emotion as soon as we planted our feet on the summit, we saw
the hoary Mount Pilatus, and at its base the Lake Lucerne, the most
romantic of the Swiss lakes, and not exceeded by the scenery of any lake
in the world. The city of Lucerne sends up its towers and battlements,
and the whole canton of that name is spread out, with the River Reuss
flowing over its bosom. At our feet, nestling under the Rigi and on the
borders of the lake, is the village of Kussnacht, and the chapel of
William Tell, marking the spot where the intrepid patriot pierced the
tyrant's heart with his unerring arrow. And now the descending sun is
pouring a flood of golden glory over all this broad expanse of lake and
forest, plain and towering hills, whose peaks are touching the blue
skies, gilded with last rays of declining day. Far southward we look
away upon the mountains of Unterwalden, of Berne, and of Uri, whose
snow-clad summits and blue glaciers are in full view, the beautiful
Jungfrau rising, queen-like, in the midst of the magnificent group of
sisters in white raiment. The eastern horizon is supported by the snowy
peaks of the Sentis, the Glarnisch, and the Dodi; and the two Mitres
start up from the midst of that region where Tell and his compatriots
conspired to give liberty to their native land. All around us are lakes,
so strangely nestled among the mountains that they seem to be
innumerable, peeping from behind the hills and forests. And now the
sound of the village bells, and the Alpine horn, and the evening psalm,
comes stealing up the rugged sides of the Rigi, and we are assured that,
in this world of ice, and snow, and eternal rocks, there are human
hearts all warm and musical with the love of Him whose is the strength
of the hills.
We had a short night's sleep, for what with a late supper and a crowd of
people who had no beds, our rest was broken; and just as the dawn began,
a monster, with a long wooden horn, marched through the halls, startling
the sleepers with its blast, and forbidding sleep to come again. We had
been warned over night that, at this signal, we must wrap up and run if
we would see the sun rise; and as a posted notice in French forbade the
use of the bed-blankets, we hurried on our clothes, and in a few moments
stood, with a hundred others, like the Persian fire-worshippers, gazing
eastward to catch the first glimpse of the coming king! Not long had we
to wait. Another blast of the wooden trump gave notice of his approach,
and presently a coal of fire seemed to be glowing in the crown of the
mountain directly in front of us. It grew till the whole peak was ruddy
with the glow, and then the great globe rose and rested on the summit!
From this, as from a fount of light new-created and rejoicing in the
first morning of its being, the streams of glory were poured out upon
the world below and around us. Peak after peak, and long mountain ranges
and ridges, domes and sky-piercing needles, and fields of fresh snow,
and forests of living green, began to smile in the sunlight. In the
space of a brief half hour the world was lighted up for the business of
another day, and when we had had a cup of wretched coffee and a bit of
sour bread, we "marched down again."
The steamer from Lucerne, on its daily trip from that city, touches at
Weggis, where we awaited its coming, and were soon in the midst of the
most romantic scenery in Europe. From the water's edge the mountains
rise perpendicularly. Broken into ridges, clothed with green forests or
smooth pastures, and now and then sheltering a hamlet in the openings,
the mountains stand around this lake with a majesty too impressive for
words. We have come into the heart of a land of heroes. The waters of
this lake are like the life-blood of martyrs. This little village of
Gersau, on a sloping hillside, shut out from the rest of the world by
these mountain ramparts, was an independent democracy of four hundred
years, though its domains were only three miles by two! Here, at
Brunnen, are painted, on the outer walls of a building on the waterside,
the effigies of the three great men who, with William Tell, achieved the
independence of Switzerland in 1815. Across the lake, away up among the
ledges of the rocks, there lies a little plain, an _oasis_ in the
wilderness, where, in the dead of night, the three confederates met and
laid their plans for the deliverance of their country from the yoke of a
foreign oppressor. That spot is Grutli. It is a holy place, for liberty
was there conceived, and every patriot, from whatever land he comes, is
thrilled when his eye looks on it. Yet not so sacred is Grutli as the
land upon the opposite side of the lake, where the steamer slackens its
speed as we are passing a little chapel that is built upon the margin of
the lake. This chapel marks the spot where William Tell escaped from the
boat in which he was a prisoner on his way to Gessler's prison at
Kussnacht. It does savage violence to one's better feelings to be told
that no such man as Tell was ever living in this land we are now
exploring. He has been our ideal of a patriot chieftain from childhood,
and we are not to be cheated out of him without a struggle. Skeptical
critics may tell us, as they do, that Tell is a myth; but we have
history for our faith to lean upon, and tradition tells us that this
chapel was built in 1388, thirty-one years after the hero's death, and
in presence of one hundred and fourteen persons who had known him when
he was living. Such is our faith, and as we are passing by the chapel,
to which, even unto this day, the Swiss make an annual pilgrimage and
have a solemn mass performed within its narrow walls, and a sermon
preached, we will tell the story of Tell.
When the year 1300 was coming in, Albert of Austria was ruling with a
rod of iron over the dwellers in these mountains. He sent magistrates
among them who exacted heavy taxes which they were unable to pay, and
imposed arbitrary and cruel punishments upon them on slight occasions.
Arnold, a peasant of Uterwalden, was condemned for some insignificant
offence to give up a yoke of fine oxen, and the servant of the bailiff
seized them while Arnold was plowing with them, and said, as he drove
them off, "Peasants may draw the plow themselves." Arnold smote the
servant, breaking two of his fingers, and fled. The tyrant seized the
father of Arnold and put out both his eyes! Such cruelties became too
many and too grievous to be borne. Even the women--brave souls!--refused
to submit, and the wife of Werner Stauffacher said to her husband:
"Shall foreigners be masters of this soil and of our property? What are
the men of the mountain good for? Must we mothers nurse beggars at our
breasts, and bring up our daughters to be maid-servants to foreign
lords? We must put an end to this!" Her husband was roused, and went to
Arnold, whose father's eyes had been put out, and Walter Furst. These
three held their meetings for counsel at Grutli. Afterward each of them
brought ten men there, who bound themselves by a great oath to deliver
their land from the oppressor. This oath was taken in the night of
November 17, 1307. Not long afterward the bailiff, Herman Gessler, when
he saw the people more restless and bold, resolved to humble them. He
placed the ducal hat of Austria upon a pole, and ordered every one who
passed by to bow down in reverence before it. William Tell, one of the
men who had taken the oath at Grutli, held his head proudly erect as he
passed, and when warned of the danger of such disobedience stoutly
refused to bow. He was seized and carried before the bailiff, who was
told that Tell, the most skillful archer of Uri, had refused to pay
homage to the emblem of Austrian power. Enraged at Tell's audacity,
Gessler exclaimed,
"Presumptuous archer, I will humble thee by the display of thine own
skill. I will put an apple on the top of the head of thy little son;
shoot it off, and you shall be pardoned!"
In vain did the wretched father plead against such cruelty. He could
pierce the eagle on the wing, and bring down the fleet chamois from the
lofty rocks, but his arm would tremble and his eyesight fail him when he
took aim at the head of his noble boy. But his remonstrances were all in
vain. The boy was bound to a tree, and the apple set upon his head. The
strong-hearted father took leave of his son, scarce hoping that he could
spare him, and rather believing that his arrow would in another moment
be rushing through his brain. With a prayer for help from Him who holds
the stars in his hand, and without whose providence not a sparrow falls,
the wretched father drew his bow. The unerring arrow pierced the apple,
and the child was saved. Another arrow fell from underneath the garment
of the archer as the shout of the people proclaimed the father's
triumph.
"What means this?" demanded the tyrant.
"To pierce thy heart," replied Tell, "if the other had slain my son!"
Gessler ordered the man to be seized and bound, and hurried off to the
dungeon he had built at Kussnacht. Fearing to trust the guards with
their prisoner--for he knew not how far the spirit of rebellion might
have spread--Gessler embarked in the boat with them, and hastened off
lest the people should rise to the rescue of their countryman. The lake
was subject then, as it is now, to sudden and fearful tempests. The wind
rose and swept the waves over the boat, defying the skill of the
boatmen, and threatening their speedy destruction. Tell was known for
his skill with a boat as well as with a bow. Tyrants are always cowards,
and when the tyrant saw that his own men were not able to manage the
craft, he ordered Tell's bonds to be removed that he might take the helm
in his hand. Steering the boat as near to the projecting rock of
Axenberg as she could run, he suddenly leaped from it to the ledge, and
the force of his leap sent the boat backward upon the lake. The prisoner
was free. Pursuit was hopeless. He was at home among the mountains.
Every path was familiar to him. But vengeance would be taken on those
dearer than his own life. He resolved to preserve them by the death of
the monster who had sought to make him slay his own son. With the speed
of the chamois he sped his way across the mountains to the very place
where he was to have been carried in chains, and there awaited the
coming of Gessler. The tyrant came but to die. The arrow of the patriot
drank his heart's blood. Then the inhabitants of the mountain fastnesses
flew to arms. The minions of Austria were seized, and with a wonderful
forbearance were not slain, but sent out of the country under an oath
never to return. The King Albert came to subdue the rebels. On his way
he was murdered by his nephew and a band of conspirators, whom he had
thought his friends. He expired at the wayside, his head being supported
by a peasant woman who found him lying in his blood. The children of the
murdered man and his widow, and Agnes the Queen of Hungary, took
terrible vengeance on the murderers, and, confounding the innocent with
the guilty, shed blood like water. Agnes was a woman-fiend. As the blood
of sixty-three guiltless knights was flowing at her feet, she said:
"See, now I am bathing in May-dew!" One of the most distinguished of the
enemies of the King, the Knight Rudolf, was, at her orders, broken on
the rack, and while yet living was exposed to the birds of prey. While
dying, he consoled his faithful wife, who alone knelt near him, and had
in vain prostrated herself in the dust at the feet of Agnes, imploring
her husband's pardon. But the war of oppression went on. An army marched
into Switzerland, and to the many thousands of their invaders the men of
Grutli could oppose only thirteen thousand. But they were all true men,
and at Morgarten, on a rosy morning in 1315, they met the enemy and
routed them utterly, after such deeds of valor as history scarcely
elsewhere has recorded. This gave freedom to Switzerland. Of that
struggle the first blow was struck by William Tell when he smote Gessler
to the earth.
At the head of the Lake of Lucerne, and a few miles above the chapel of
Tell, is the village of Fluelen, at which we rest only long enough to
get away, for the low grounds, where the River Reuss comes down into the
lake, breeds pestilence, and the inhabitants give proofs of the
unhealthiness of the place by the number of cretins and goitred cases
that are found among them. Two miles beyond is the old town of Altorf.
Lapped in the midst of rugged mountains, which shut down closely on
every side, it is secluded from the world that is familiar with its
name. Here, on this village green, in front of the old tower, a
fountain, surmounted by a statue, marks the spot where William Tell shot
the apple from the head of his son. The tree on which the ducal hat was
hung by Gessler, and the same to which the boy was bound, is said to
have remained there three hundred years after the event. The _tower_
dates back of that time, as records still in existence prove it to be
more than five hundred and fifty years old. To this day the hunters of
Uri come down to Altorf to try their skill with the rifle, which has now
taken the place of the bow and arrow.
A few miles further on we came to the River Reuss, in which William Tell
was drowned while attempting to save the life of a boy. There was
something sublime in the thought that a man whose name is now identified
with the patriots and heroes of the world should finally lose his life
in the performance of a deed that requires more of the self-sacrificing
spirit than to scale the walls of a fortress and perish in the midst of
a nation's praise.
The men of this region are spoken of as the finest race in Switzerland.
We had no reason to think them remarkable; but the women, who were
making hay in the meadows while the men were off hunting, were certainly
very good-looking for women who work in the fields in all weathers,
braving the storms of rain and snow, tending the sheep and cattle on the
hillsides, and carrying the hay on their backs to the barns.
As we pressed our way up the great Saint Gothard road, frowning
precipices rise a thousand feet high, black, jagged rocks, almost bare
of vegetation, shutting out the sunlight, and making a solitude fearful
and solemn, its silence rarely disturbed but by the passing traveller
and the ceaseless dashing of the river, which, instead of flowing,
tumbles from ledge to ledge. In the spring of the year the avalanches
make the passage still more fearful.
Twenty or thirty thousand persons travel over this pass every year; and
to keep the current in this direction, the cantons of Uri and Tessin
built this splendid carriage-path, as smooth as a floor, and so firm in
its substructures as to resist the violence of the storms and the
swollen torrents that so often rush frightfully down these gorges. Twice
was the work swept away before this road was completed, which, it is
believed, will stand while the mountains stand. So rapid is the ascent,
that the road often doubles upon itself, and we are going half the time
backward on our route. Sometimes the road is hewn out of the solid rock
in the side of the precipice, which hangs over it as a roof, and again
it is carried over the roaring stream that is boiling in a gulf four
hundred feet below. Toiling up the gorge, with the savage wildness of
the scenery becoming every moment more savage still, we reach the
Devil's Bridge. More than five hundred years ago, an old abbot of
Einsiedeln built a bridge over an awful chasm here; but such is the fury
of the descending stream, the whole mass of waters being beaten into
foam among the rocks that lift their heads through the cataracts--such
is the horrid ruggedness of the surrounding scenery, and so unlikely
does it appear that human power could ever have reared a bridge over
such a fearful chasm, it has been called, from time immemorial, the
Devil's Bridge. A Christian traveller would much prefer to ascribe its
origin to a better source; for whatever miracle it required, we might
refer it to the skill and goodness of Him who hung the earth upon
nothing, and holds the stars in his hand. We were quite cold when we
reached the bridge, and, quitting the carriage, walked over it to study
its structure, and enjoy the grandeur of a scene that has hardly an
equal even in this land of the sublime and terrible. At this spot the
River Reuss makes a tremendous plunge at the very moment that it bends
nearly in a semicircle, and a world of rocks has been hurled and heaped
in the midst of the torrent, to increase the rage and roar of the
waters, arrested for a moment only to gather strength for a more
terrific rush into the abysses below. We approach the parapet, and look
calmly over, and there, far below us, is another bridge, which, becoming
useless by age and the violence of the elements, was superseded by this
new and costly structure.
We crossed the bridge and soon entered the long _Gallery of Uri_--a
tunnel cut through the solid rock--a hard but the only passage, as the
torrent usurps the whole of the gorge, and the precipice above admits no
possible path overhead. A hundred and fifty years ago this hole was
bored, and before that time the only passage was made on a shelf
supported by chains let down from above, on which a single traveller
could creep, if he had the nerve, in the midst of the roar and the spray
of the torrent in the yawning gulf below him. To add to the gloom and
terror of the scene about us, a storm, with thunder and lightning broke
upon us as we emerged from this den, and right speedily set in while as
yet we had no shelter. We had come into an upper valley, a vale five
thousand feet above the level of the sea, where no corn grows, though
the land flows with milk and honey. The cows and goats find pasture at
the foot of the glaciers, and the bees, who find flowers even in these
realms of eternal snow, make their nests in the stunted trees and the
holes in the rocks. At Andermatt, a village among the mountains, we come
upon an inn whose many lighted windows invited us to seek refuge from
the increasing storm, and we entered a room already thronged with
travellers who had reached it before us, many of them coming down, and
they were now rejoicing over a smoking supper. They made us welcome, and
in the good cheer we soon forgot the fatigues and the perils of the most
exciting and exhausting day we had had in Switzerland.
"Blessed be he who first invented sleep," the weary traveller says, with
Sancho, whenever night comes, and wherever, if he is so happy as to have
a place wherein and on to lay his head. Sleep, that will not come for
wooing to him who wastes his hours in idleness at home, now folds her
soft arms lovingly about him, kisses his eyelids, whispers gentle
memories in his soul, and dreams of the loved and the distant are his as
the swift night-hours steal away. The nights are not long enough; for
when the first nap is past the sun of another day is struggling to get
over the hill-top and look down into the vale of Andermatt!
We might pursue this St. Gothard highway over into Italy, but we have
not yet seen Switzerland.--Hitherto we have been traversing only the
great roads of travel. Now we will strike off into the regions where
wheel carriages have never yet been seen. The Furca Pass leads off from
the St. Gothard road, and with a guide to pilot us, we struck into a
narrow defile. Away above us the blue glacier of St. Anne was shining in
the morning sun, and now we are at the foot of a beautiful waterfall
that leaps from its bosom into the vale below. Here are the remains of
an awful avalanche of rocks and earth that came down a few years since,
on a little hamlet clustering on the hillside. The inhabitants fled as
they heard it coming, but a maiden, tending a babe, refused to leave her
precious charge, and could not fly with it as rapidly as the rest. She
perished with it in her arms. Soon we came to a mountain stream which
crossed our path, and the bridge had been swept away by an avalanche
only the very night before. There were no signs of danger now, and we
could scarcely believe the stories that were told us of the sudden
destruction wrought by these thunderbolts of snow, and ice, and earth,
which are the terror of these regions. The village we slept in last
night is protected by a forest of trees so arranged as to receive and
ward off the slides; but they come at times with such force as to cut
off the trees, and bury everything in undistinguished ruin.
This _pedestrianism_ is very well to boast of at home, and for those who
are used to it and fond of it, it may be a very agreeable mode of
travel; I confess I was tired of it the first day, and took to the horse
as decidedly a better, as it certainly is an easier method of transit.
It was just about as much as I could do to _walk_, and think of the
number of miles we had gone, and had yet to go, with scarcely any spirit
to enjoy the romance of the scenery, the glaciers and waterfalls, the
precipices and snowy summits that were around me; and groaning all the
while with the burden of locomotion. It was another thing altogether to
sit on a horse, and folding one's arms, to look upward and around
rejoicing in the wonders of God's world, and breathing in with the
mountain air, the rich inspirations of the scene.
We are now so far up in the world that the snow, though the month of
August is closing, is lying by the side of the pathway, while the wild
flowers, in bright and beautiful colors, are blooming in the sun, and
close to the edges of these chilling banks. On our right hand the
Galenstoch glacier lies among the peaks of naked rock that, like the
battlements of some thunder-riven castle, shoot upward eleven thousand
feet into the clear blue sky. We are among the ice-palaces of the earth.
I hug my great coat closely, as the cold winds from these eternal
icebergs search me, and in a few minutes reached the inn at the summit
of the Furca Pass. Snow-clad summits of distant mountains glistened in
the noonday sun, and blue glaciers wound along and down the gorges, and
so far above the valleys were we now that it seemed like a world without
inhabitants, desolate, cold, and majestic, in its solitude and icy
splendor.
The descent was too rapid for safe riding, and, giving the horse to the
guide, who would lead him around, I leaped down the steep declivity, and
soon found myself in a lovely vale. Turning suddenly around a
promontory, a scene of such grandeur and beauty burst upon our sight as
we had not yet encountered, even in this land of wonders. An ocean
lashed into ridges and covered with foam, then suddenly congealed, would
not be the spectacle! Freeze the cataract of Niagara and the rapids
above it, and let them rise a thousand feet into the air; congeal the
clouds of spray, the falling jewelry; pile up pyramids and minarets, and
columns, and battlements of ice, and then, at each side of this
magnificent scene, set a tall mountain, with green pasturage on its
sides, and its head crowned with everlasting snow, and you have some
faint image of the Glacier of the Rhone! Travellers have called it the
Frozen Ocean of Switzerland. But it is more than this. And yet out of
its bosom, its cold but melting heart, the River Rhone is flowing. This
is its source. The daring adventurer may follow it up, beneath the blue
arches and between the polished walls, till he finds himself far away in
these caverns of ice, where no living thing abides. And here he learns
the great design of a beneficent Creator in forming these glaciers. The
snows of winter are here stored up, and, instead of being suddenly
melted in the spring, and then sent down in torrents to devastate the
lands through which the overwhelming currents would be borne, they are
melted by degrees, and led by channels through these mountain passes
into the river beds that water all the countries of Europe! For this
great purpose Switzerland was built! It has been lightly said that this
Swiss country looks as if it had been the leavings of the world when
creation was finished, and the refuse material that could not be
conveniently worked in had been thrown in dire confusion, heaps on
heaps, into this wilderness of jagged rocks, and shapeless mountains,
and disordered ranges of hill and vale--impracticable for man or
beast--a rude, wild land, doomed to perpetual poverty, and existing only
to be an object of curiosity to the traveller. But we find it to be the
great fountain of living waters, pouring its inexhaustible streams into
the wide and many lands below, carrying fertility and beauty over
millions of acres, and food and gladness to countless homes.
A hard hill to climb was the Grimsel. Sometimes I rode, but more
frequently I was content to toil upward on my own feet, without taxing
the jaded horse with my weight to be added to his own. But when we
reached the summit, and overtook other parties who were before us, and
were overtaken by yet others coming up behind, we formed a picturesque
procession of some forty or fifty pilgrims, who wound slowly along the
banks of the _Dead Sea_--a lake that lies away up among these frozen
heights, and derives its name from the fact that it was once the grave
of a multitude of soldiers who perished in the fight in these mountain
fastnesses.
The vale of the Grimsel is beneath us, and just before the sun sets we
reach the Hospice, and eagerly ask for lodgings. On the borders of a
little lake, in the bottom of a narrow valley, surrounded by almost
perpendicular rocks, stands this solitary house, in former years
inhabited by friendly monks who made it their pious care to entertain
the traveller and furnish free hospitality to the poor. Now it is a
hotel, and a very poor one at that, where you may get a supper, and a
bed, and a large bill in the morning. This is a dreary spot now, and in
the winter more fearful it must be.
In the morning we found the path that led us out of the valley to the
Glaciers of the Aar. The mountain of earth, rocks, ice and snow that we
encountered put to flight all ideas we had formed of a glacier. We
seemed to have come to a vast heap of sand, or to the _debris_ brought
down by an avalanche, but from the base of it a torrent was rushing of a
dirty milky hue, and out of its front we could see rocks of blue ice
projecting. Now and then a mass of earth or a huge boulder would be
hurled along down the precipice.
And this mighty mass of ice, decaying at the front and pressed down from
above, is slowly moving onward at the rate of some twelve inches a day.
If a stream of water running across it cuts a wide seam, so that the
mass is suddenly brought down, the shock will throw up the ice in
ridges, and in various fantastic shapes, as if some great explosion had
upheaved the frozen ocean, and the fragments had come down in wild
confusion, like the ruins of a crystal city. Then the sun gradually
melts the towers, and they assume shapes of dazzling beauty, palaces of
glass, silver domes, and shining battlements--making us to wonder that
so much beauty and magnificence are seemingly wasted in these dreary
solitudes.
Nestled charmingly among the hills is the sweet village of Interlaken.
The plain which it adorns stretches from Lake Thun to Lake Brienz, and
the quiet retreat it furnishes is improved by hundreds of English
people, who make it a summer residence. It combines two advantages, very
rarely blended in this world--it is _cheap_ and _genteel_. A large
number of neat boarding-houses, some of them aspiring to the rank of
first-class hotels, are scattered along the main street of the village;
and at the _Hotel des Alpen_, the largest establishment and admirably
kept, the traveller may find good rooms and board for a dollar a day,
and at even less than that if he is disposed to be very economical. We
had crossed the Wengern Alp and passed the vale of Grindelwald; had seen
an avalanche come down from the side of the Jungfrau, and been amused
with the little cascade called the Staubach, about which poets and
printers have gone into ecstasies; and we were glad to find so quiet,
beautiful, and civilized a spot in which to sit down for a few days and
rest.
While we were at Interlaken we made a beautiful excursion on Lake Brienz
to the Giesbach Fall. It has some peculiarities that claim for it the
very first rank among the falls of Switzerland. See the little stream
that issues as from a cleft in the rock, nearly a thousand feet above
the waters of the lake. Then among the dark evergreens the white flood
comes swelling and plunging into secret abysses where the eye can not
search its hidings, but it rises again with a widened torrent, and now
spreads a broad bosom of waters over a mighty precipice; and here a
bridge has been thrown across in front of the falls, and a gallery cut
away behind it, so that it may be circumvented by the visitor who is
provided with an overcoat of India rubber, or is willing to take a
thorough sponging for sake of the submarine excursion. When I had
completed the circuit, a lady was regretting that she could not venture
on the tour, but her scruples were instantly removed when I offered her
my water-proof, and in a few minutes she returned "charmed" with her
trip. Once more the swollen mass of waters plunges over the rocks and
shoots out into the lake, in one of the most romantic and beautiful
regions that is to be found in this wildly beautiful land.
I pass over the experiences of a few days' travel, and come suddenly to
the summit of the Col de Balm.
Mont Blanc is in sight! Not a faint and doubtful view of a peak among a
hundred peaks, but the monarch of the Alps stands there--a king in his
glory, revealed from his summit to the base. A cloud is gathered like a
halo on his head; but it rises and vanishes as we look upon it with
silent admiration and awe. Around him are the Aiguilles or Needles, bare
pinnacles of rock stretching up like guards into the heavens, and
between are the glaciers--reflecting now the rays of the noonday sun,
and among them the _Mer de Glace_--winding along down the gorges, and
resting their cold feet in the vale below.
[Illustration: UNDER THE GEISBACH FALLS.]
Afterward I saw Mont Blanc from its base, and sought other heights from
which it might be surveyed, but I could find nothing comparable to the
view from the _Col de Balm_. There it stands, towering fifteen thousand
eight hundred and ten feet toward the sky, the loftiest summit in
Europe, with thirty-four glaciers around it; and as I gazed, it was a
strange question to discuss--but one that might well be argued till
sundown--is old Ocean, or Niagara, a sublimer sight?
It seems so near the sky that the blue firmament kisses its brow. It is
so far off, yet so near, so bright and pure, that the angels might be
sporting on its summit and be safe from the intrusion of men. It is a
_solemn_ mountain. Even the hills of Syria and Palestine, on which I
afterward gazed, Lebanon and Hermon, Carmel and Horeb, with their
hallowed memories clustering on them, were not more impressive than this
hoary hill--forever clothed in white raiment, standing there like an
ivory throne for the King of Kings!
We went down into the vale of Chamouni, and at evening saw the stars
like diamonds sparkling in the crown of the monarch, and then the
moonbeams fell all cold upon his crest. We rose the next morning early,
and saw the summit of Mont Blanc in a blaze of glory long before the
dwellers in the vale had seen the rays of the rising sun.
And then we left Switzerland.
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Footnote 1:
The preceding letters were originally addressed to the New York
Observer. This chapter, embracing a general view of the country, with
pictures of scenes already noticed, was contributed to Harper's
Monthly Magazine.