_Italiam petimus!_ We left our upland home before daybreak on a clear
October morning. There had been a hard frost, spangling the meadows with
rime-crystals, which twinkled where the sun's rays touched them. Men and
women were mowing the frozen grass with thin short Alpine scythes; and
as the swathes fell, they gave a crisp, an almost tinkling sound. Down
into the gorge, surnamed of Avalanche, our horses plunged; and there we
lost the sunshine till we reached the Bear's Walk, opening upon the
vales of Albula, and Julier, and Schyn. But up above, shone morning
light upon fresh snow, and steep torrent-cloven slopes reddening with a
hundred fading plants; now and then it caught the grey-green icicles
that hung from cliffs where summer streams had dripped. There is no
colour lovelier than the blue of an autumn sky in the high Alps,
defining ridges powdered with light snow, and melting imperceptibly
downward into the warm yellow of the larches and the crimson of the
bilberry. Wiesen was radiantly beautiful: those aerial ranges of the
hills that separate Albula from Julier soared crystal-clear above their
forests; and for a foreground, on the green fields starred with lilac
crocuses, careered a group of children on their sledges. Then came the
row of giant peaks--Pitz d'Aela, Tinzenhorn, and Michelhorn, above the
deep ravine of Albula--all seen across wide undulating golden swards,
close-shaven and awaiting winter. Carnations hung from cottage windows
in full bloom, casting sharp angular black shadows on white walls.
_Italiam petimus!_ We have climbed the valley of the Julier, following
its green, transparent torrent. A night has come and gone at Muehlen. The
stream still leads us up, diminishing in volume as we rise, up through
the fleecy mists that roll asunder for the sun, disclosing far-off snowy
ridges and blocks of granite mountains. The lifeless, soundless waste of
rock, where only thin winds whistle out of silence and fade suddenly
into still air, is passed. Then comes the descent, with its forests of
larch and cembra, golden and dark green upon a ground of grey, and in
front the serried shafts of the Bernina, and here and there a glimpse of
emerald lake at turnings of the road. Autumn is the season for this
landscape. Through the fading of innumerable leaflets, the yellowing of
larches, and something vaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not
unlike that of the lands we seek. By the side of the lake at Silvaplana
the light was strong and warm, but mellow. Pearly clouds hung over the
Maloja, and floating overhead cast shadows on the opaque water, which
may literally be compared to chrysoprase. The breadth of golden, brown,
and russet tints upon the valley at this moment adds softness to its
lines of level strength. Devotees of the Engadine contend that it
possesses an austere charm beyond the common beauty of Swiss landscape;
but this charm is only perfected in autumn. The fresh snow on the
heights that guard it helps. And then there are the forests of dark
pines upon those many knolls and undulating mountain-flanks beside the
lakes. Sitting and dreaming there in noonday sun, I kept repeating to
myself _Italiam petimus!_
A hurricane blew upward from the pass as we left Silvaplana, ruffling
the lake with gusts of the Italian wind. By Silz Maria we came in sight
of a dozen Italian workmen, arm linked in arm in two rows, tramping in
rhythmic stride, and singing as they went. Two of them were such
nobly-built young men, that for a moment the beauty of the landscape
faded from my sight, and I was saddened. They moved to their singing,
like some of Mason's or Frederick Walker's figures, with the free grace
of living statues, and laughed as we drove by. And yet, with all their
beauty, industry, sobriety, intelligence, these Italians of the northern
valleys serve the sterner people of the Grisons like negroes, doing
their roughest work at scanty wages.
So we came to the vast Alpine wall, and stood on a bare granite slab,
and looked over into Italy, as men might lean from the battlements of a
fortress. Behind lies the Alpine valley, grim, declining slowly
northward, with wind-lashed lakes and glaciers sprawling from
storm-broken pyramids of gneiss. Below spread the unfathomable depths
that lead to Lombardy, flooded with sunlight, filled with swirling
vapour, but never wholly hidden from our sight. For the blast kept
shifting the cloud-masses, and the sun streamed through in spears and
bands of sheeny rays. Over the parapet our horses dropped, down through
sable spruce and amber larch, down between tangles of rowan and autumnal
underwood. Ever as we sank, the mountains rose--those sharp embattled
precipices, toppling spires, impendent chasms blurred with mist, that
make the entrance into Italy sublime. Nowhere do the Alps exhibit their
full stature, their commanding puissance, with such majesty as in the
gates of Italy; and of all those gates I think there is none to compare
with Maloja, none certainly to rival it in abruptness of initiation into
the Italian secret. Below Vico Soprano we pass already into the violets
and blues of Titian's landscape. Then come the purple boulders among
chestnut trees; then the double dolomite-like peak of Pitz Badin and
Promontogno.
It is sad that words can do even less than painting could to bring this
window-scene at Promontogno before another eye. The casement just frames
it. In the foreground are meadow slopes, thinly, capriciously planted
with chestnut trees and walnuts, each standing with its shadow cast upon
the sward. A little farther falls the torrent, foaming down between
black jaws of rain-stained granite, with the wooden buildings of a
rustic mill set on a ledge of rock. Suddenly above this landscape soars
the valley, clothing its steep sides on either hand with pines; and
there are emerald isles of pasture on the wooded flanks; and then
cliffs, where the red-stemmed larches glow; and at the summit, shooting
into ether with a swathe of mist around their basement, soar the double
peaks, the one a pyramid, the other a bold broken crystal not unlike the
Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka. These are connected by a snowy saddle,
and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags in powdery drifts.
Sunlight pours between them into the ravine. The green and golden
forests now join from either side, and now recede, according as the
sinuous valley brings their lines together or disparts them. There is a
sound of cow-bells on the meadows; and the roar of the stream is dulled
or quickened as the gusts of this October wind sweep by or slacken.
_Italiam petimus!_
_Tangimus Italiam!_ Chiavenna is a worthy key to this great gate Italian.
We walked at night in the open galleries of the cathedral-cloister--white,
smoothly curving, well-proportioned logge, enclosing a green space, whence
soars the campanile to the stars. The moon had sunk, but her light still
silvered the mountains that stand at watch round Chiavenna; and the castle
rock was flat and black against that dreamy background. Jupiter, who
walked so lately for us on the long ridge of the Jacobshorn above our
pines, had now an ample space of sky over Lombardy to light his lamp in.
Why is it, we asked each other, as we smoked our pipes and strolled, my
friend and I;--why is it that Italian beauty does not leave the spirit so
untroubled as an Alpine scene? Why do we here desire the flower of some
emergent feeling to grow from the air, or from the soil, or from humanity
to greet us? This sense of want evoked by Southern beauty is perhaps the
antique mythopoeic yearning. But in our perplexed life it takes another
form, and seems the longing for emotion, ever fleeting, ever new,
unrealised, unreal, insatiable.