With so much practical and theoretical interest in the produce of
the Valtelline to stimulate my curiosity, I determined to visit the
district at the season when the wine was leaving it. It was the winter
of 1881-82, a winter of unparalleled beauty in the high Alps. Day
succeeded day without a cloud. Night followed night with steady
stars, gliding across clear mountain ranges and forests of dark pines
unstirred by wind. I could not hope for a more prosperous season; and
indeed I made such use of it, that between the months of January and
March I crossed six passes of the Alps in open sleighs--the Fluela
Bernina, Splügen, Julier, Maloja, and Albula--with less difficulty and
discomfort in mid-winter than the traveller may often find on them in
June.
At the end of January, my friend Christian and I left Davos long
before the sun was up, and ascended for four hours through the
interminable snow-drifts of the Fluela in a cold grey shadow. The
sun's light seemed to elude us. It ran along the ravine through which
we toiled; dipped down to touch the topmost pines above our heads;
rested in golden calm upon the Schiahorn at our back; capriciously
played here and there across the Weisshorn on our left, and made the
precipices of the Schwartzhorn glitter on our right. But athwart our
path it never fell until we reached the very summit of the pass.
Then we passed quietly into the full glory of the winter morning--a
tranquil flood of sunbeams, pouring through air of crystalline purity,
frozen and motionless. White peaks and dark brown rocks soared up,
cutting a sky of almost purple blueness. A stillness that might be
felt brooded over the whole world; but in that stillness there was
nothing sad, no suggestion of suspended vitality. It was the stillness
rather of untroubled health, of strength omnipotent but unexerted.
From the Hochspitz of the Fluela the track plunges at one bound into
the valley of the Inn, following a narrow cornice carved from the
smooth bank of snow, and hung, without break or barrier, a
thousand feet or more above the torrent. The summer road is lost in
snow-drifts. The galleries built as a protection from avalanches,
which sweep in rivers from those grim, bare fells above, are blocked
with snow. Their useless arches yawn, as we glide over or outside
them, by paths which instinct in our horse and driver traces. As a fly
may creep along a house-roof, slanting downwards we descend. One whisk
from the swinged tail of an avalanche would hurl us, like a fly, into
the ruin of the gaping gorge. But this season little snow has fallen
on the higher hills; and what still lies there, is hard frozen.
Therefore we have no fear, as we whirl fast and faster from the
snow-fields into the black forests of gnarled cembras and wind-wearied
pines. Then Süss is reached, where the Inn hurries its shallow waters
clogged with ice-floes through a sleepy hamlet. The stream is pure and
green; for the fountains of the glaciers are locked by winter frosts;
and only clear rills from perennial sources swell its tide. At Süss
we lost the sun, and toiled in garish gloom and silence, nipped by the
ever-deepening cold of evening, upwards for four hours to Samaden.
The next day was spent in visiting the winter colony at San Moritz,
where the Kulm Hotel, tenanted by some twenty guests, presented in its
vastness the appearance of a country-house. One of the prettiest spots
in the world is the ice-rink, fashioned by the skill of Herr Caspar
Badrutt on a high raised terrace, commanding the valley of the Inn and
the ponderous bulwarks of Bernina. The silhouettes of skaters, defined
against that landscape of pure white, passed to and fro beneath a
cloudless sky. Ladies sat and worked or read on seats upon the ice.
Not a breath of wind was astir, and warm beneficent sunlight flooded
the immeasurable air. Only, as the day declined, some iridescent films
overspread the west; and just above Maloja the apparition of a
mock sun--a well-defined circle of opaline light, broken at regular
intervals by four globes--seemed to portend a change of weather. This
forecast fortunately proved delusive. We drove back to Samaden across
the silent snow, enjoying those delicate tints of rose and violet and
saffron which shed enchantment for one hour over the white monotony of
Alpine winter.
At half-past eight next morning, the sun was rising from behind Pitz
Languard, as we crossed the Inn and drove through Pontresina in the
glorious light, with all its huge hotels quite empty and none but a
few country-folk abroad. Those who only know the Engadine in summer
have little conception of its beauty. Winter softens the hard details
of bare rock, and rounds the melancholy grassless mountain flanks,
suspending icicles to every ledge and spangling the curved surfaces
of snow with crystals. The landscape gains in purity, and, what sounds
unbelievable, in tenderness. Nor does it lose in grandeur. Looking
up the valley of the Morteratsch that morning, the glaciers were
distinguishable in hues of green and sapphire through their veil of
snow; and the highest peaks soared in a transparency of amethystine
light beneath a blue sky traced with filaments of windy cloud. Some
storm must have disturbed the atmosphere in Italy, for fan-shaped
mists frothed out around the sun, and curled themselves above the
mountains in fine feathery wreaths, melting imperceptibly into air,
until, when we had risen above the cembras, the sky was one deep solid
blue.
All that upland wilderness is lovelier now than in the summer; and on
the morning of which I write, the air itself was far more summery than
I have ever known it in the Engadine in August. We could scarcely
bear to place our hands upon the woodwork of the sleigh because of
the fierce sun's heat. And yet the atmosphere was crystalline with
windless frost. As though to increase the strangeness of these
contrasts, the pavement of beaten snow was stained with red drops
spilt from wine-casks which pass over it.
The chief feature of the Bernina--what makes it a dreary pass enough
in summer, but infinitely beautiful in winter--is its breadth;
illimitable undulations of snow-drifts; immensity of open sky;
unbroken lines of white, descending in smooth curves from glittering
ice-peaks.
A glacier hangs in air above the frozen lakes, with all its green-blue
ice-cliffs glistening in intensest light. Pitz Palu shoots aloft
like sculptured marble, delicately veined with soft aërial shadows of
translucent blue. At the summit of the pass all Italy seems to burst
upon the eyes in those steep serried ranges, with their craggy crests,
violet-hued in noonday sunshine, as though a bloom of plum or grape
had been shed over them, enamelling their jagged precipices.
The top of the Bernina is not always thus in winter. It has a bad
reputation for the fury of invading storms, when falling snow
hurtles together with snow scooped from the drifts in eddies, and the
weltering white sea shifts at the will of whirlwinds. The Hospice then
may be tenanted for days together by weather-bound wayfarers; and a
line drawn close beneath its roof shows how two years ago the whole
building was buried in one snow-shroud. This morning we lounged about
the door, while our horses rested and postillions and carters pledged
one another in cups of new Veltliner.
The road takes an awful and sudden dive downwards, quite irrespective
of the carefully engineered post-track. At this season the path is
badly broken into ruts and chasms by the wine traffic. In some places
it was indubitably perilous: a narrow ledge of mere ice skirting
thinly clad hard-frozen banks of snow, which fell precipitately
sideways for hundreds of sheer feet. We did not slip over this
parapet, though we were often within an inch of doing so. Had our
horse stumbled, it is not probable that I should have been writing
this.
When we came to the galleries which defend the road from avalanches,
we saw ahead of us a train of over forty sledges ascending, all
charged with Valtelline wine. Our postillions drew up at the inner
side of the gallery, between massive columns of the purest ice
dependent from the rough-hewn roof and walls of rock. A sort of open
_loggia_ on the farther side framed vignettes of the Valtelline
mountains in their hard cerulean shadows and keen sunlight. Between
us and the view defiled the wine-sledges; and as each went by, the
men made us drink out of their _trinketti_. These are oblong,
hexagonal wooden kegs, holding about fourteen litres, which the carter
fills with wine before he leaves the Valtelline, to cheer him on the
homeward journey. You raise it in both hands, and when the bung has
been removed, allow the liquor to flow stream-wise down your throat.
It was a most extraordinary Bacchic procession--a pomp which, though
undreamed of on the banks of the Ilissus, proclaimed the deity of
Dionysos in authentic fashion. Struggling horses, grappling at the
ice-bound floor with sharp-spiked shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, some
clad in sheepskins from Italian valleys, some brown as bears in rough
Graubünden homespun; casks, dropping their spilth of red wine on the
snow; greetings, embracings; patois of Bergamo, Romansch, and German
roaring around the low-browed vaults and tingling ice pillars;
pourings forth of libations of the new strong Valtelline on breasts
and beards;--the whole made up a scene of stalwart jollity and
manful labour such as I have nowhere else in such wild circumstances
witnessed. Many Davosers were there, the men of Andreas Gredig, Valär,
and so forth; and all of these, on greeting Christian, forced us to
drain a _Schluck_ from their unmanageable cruses. Then on they
went, crying, creaking, struggling, straining through the corridor,
which echoed deafeningly, the gleaming crystals of those hard Italian
mountains in their winter raiment building a background of still
beauty to the savage Bacchanalian riot of the team.
How little the visitors who drink Valtelline wine at S. Moritz or
Davos reflect by what strange ways it reaches them. A sledge can
scarcely be laden with more than one cask of 300 litres on the ascent;
and this cask, according to the state of the road, has many times to
be shifted from wheels to runners and back again before the journey
is accomplished. One carter will take charge of two horses, and
consequently of two sledges and two casks, driving them both by voice
and gesture rather than by rein. When they leave the Valtelline, the
carters endeavour, as far as possible, to take the pass in gangs, lest
bad weather or an accident upon the road should overtake them singly.
At night they hardly rest three hours, and rarely think of sleeping,
but spend the time in drinking and conversation. The horses are fed
and littered; but for them too the night-halt is little better than
a baiting-time. In fair weather the passage of the mountain is not
difficult, though tiring. But woe to men and beasts alike if they
encounter storms! Not a few perish in the passes; and it frequently
happens that their only chance is to unyoke the horses and leave the
sledges in a snow-wreath, seeking for themselves such shelter as
may possibly be gained, frost-bitten, after hours of battling with
impermeable drifts. The wine is frozen into one solid mass of rosy ice
before it reaches Pontresina. This does not hurt the young vintage,
but it is highly injurious to wine of some years' standing. The perils
of the journey are aggravated by the savage temper of the drivers.
Jealousies between the natives of rival districts spring up; and there
are men alive who have fought the whole way down from Fluela Hospice
to Davos Platz with knives and stones, hammers and hatchets, wooden
staves and splintered cart-wheels, staining the snow with blood, and
bringing broken pates, bruised limbs, and senseless comrades home to
their women to be tended.
Bacchus Alpinus shepherded his train away from us to northward, and we
passed forth into noonday from the gallery. It then seemed clear that
both conductor and postillion were sufficiently merry. The plunge they
took us down those frozen parapets, with shriek and _jauchzen_
and cracked whips, was more than ever dangerous. Yet we reached La
Rosa safely. This is a lovely solitary spot, beside a rushing stream,
among grey granite boulders grown with spruce and rhododendron: a
veritable rose of Sharon blooming in the desert. The wastes of the
Bernina stretch above, and round about are leaguered some of the most
forbidding sharp-toothed peaks I ever saw. Onwards, across the silent
snow, we glided in immitigable sunshine, through opening valleys and
pine-woods, past the robber-huts of Pisciadella, until at evenfall we
rested in the roadside inn at Poschiavo.