According to what we had said in our Zermatt letter, if the boys had
not rejoined us by the morning of August 11th, we would continue over
the Gemmi Pass and back to Grindelwald by ourselves.
We talked over the pros and cons, but could see no reason for changing
this. We could not figure out any explanation for their not having
caught up with us, if they had made an effort to do so. The thirty-two
or three miles down grade on a good road, was a long day’s walk,
especially in view of the heat of the last part, but it was by no means
prohibitive. We had walked almost as far several times ourselves, and
the young men always gave us to understand that they had plenty of
reserve strength which _our_ style of walking made no drafts on. The
only inference seemed to be that they had stayed quietly in Zermatt and
sent home for money. We therefore felt that we had been abandoned, so
we cast the ungrateful wretches from our minds and started forth.
Strange to say, although deprived of the stimulus of masculine walking,
we kept nearer to the Baedeker time schedule this day than we had ever
done before. He allows three and a half hours for the walk from Leuk to
Leuk Baden, which we made in four.
It was rather warm all the way, for our rise in altitude was just about
balanced by the advance towards midday. For a long time we were looking
down into the Rhone valley and across to the mountains on the other
side, then we struck north towards the divide, and the foothills closed
up behind us.
We reached Leuk Baden about half-past eleven, got our lunch in a
restaurant that offered us a little table on a second-story balcony
overhanging the main street, visited the baths, which were at that hour
deserted, and continued on our way. We felt a mild curiosity to see the
patrons of the baths disporting themselves in the pools, but not enough
to keep us until the afternoon bathing hour.
The thermal establishments are large, though rather dingy. Besides many
corridors of private baths, there is the great common pool, where
everybody taking the cure is supposed to disport himself or herself for
several hours morning and afternoon standing up to the chin in water,
while the public gazes from a balcony. These rendezvous are said to
be very animated, with plenty of talking and singing. There are also
little trays floating around on which tea or other refreshments can be
served, or books, or writing materials placed. Why, in such prolonged
promiscuous soaking, the afflicted do not interchange microbes and
emerge with three or four diseases instead of one, I do not pretend to
say.
There is something peculiarly unattractive about skin diseases (which
is what the Leuk springs are used for) even if you call them cutaneous
disorders, and Belle Soeur and I gathered our garments particularly
close around us all the time we were there and avoided touching things.
It was partly because of this creepy, crawly feeling that we did not
wait for the bathing hour, and partly because we did not know how long
it might take us to climb the three-thousand-foot rock wall between us
and the pass. Baedeker says two and a half hours, and if it took us
twice that time, we would need the whole afternoon. It did not look
like a place where one would care to be caught after dark.
I do not suppose there is anything quite like the Gemmi Pass anywhere.
The cliff is absolutely vertical. It looks as if you could let down
a bucket by a rope from the top and pull it up full of water without
spilling. The Cantons of Berne and Valais built the path up it way back
in 1736-41, and a very excellent path it is, all hewn out of the solid
rock and winding back and forth in steep zigzags or round and round
like a spiral staircase. Baedeker says the path is five feet wide. I
should have put it at nearer three. But certainly it is wide enough
for entire safety, though a person inclined to dizziness would not
enjoy the look downward. The grade was so steep that our feet were bent
upwards in an acute angle to the axis of the leg, and the little-used
muscles involved ached for days afterwards.
It is possible to go up on horseback (though I think it much pleasanter
to trust to one’s own feet), but the authorities have not allowed the
descent to be made on horseback, since some fatal accidents occurred.
These incidents are commemorated by little tablets and monuments whose
inscriptions we read in passing.
It was a very interesting climb, and to our intense surprise, though
we did not hurry at all, and gave ourselves frequent brief rests, we
made it virtually in the Baedeker time. The ever-expanding view as
we mounted upward led us to expect a great treat when we reached the
summit, but as ill luck would have it, clouds closed in around us just
before we got there and we had to make a run for the hotel to avoid a
drenching.
We ordered tea, for it was cold up there, 7640 feet in the air, and
wrote letters and waited for it to clear off. We had intended to spend
the night at this hotel, but a restless spirit was upon us, the hotel
struck us as dreary, and it was still only the middle of the afternoon.
So when it stopped raining we pushed on.
Our route lay over an almost level plateau, very slightly down grade,
through a desolate region of bare rock with snow peaks on either
hand, past a bleak Alpine lake. We came in about an hour to another
inn, which we knew was the last shelter we should find till we reached
Kandersteg on the other side of the pass. But it was still early, and
we were in the mood for walking, so we kept on.
We passed through what Baedeker aptly calls “a stony chaos,” thence to
a “pasture strewn with stones and débris, which was entirely devastated
in September, 1895, by a burst of the glacier covering the slopes of
the Attels (11,930’) to the left. A tablet commemorates the six persons
who lost their lives on this occasion.”
Many glaciers were hanging above us here, all presumably liable to do
the same sort of thing at any moment. I do not imagine this was any
likelier to happen because of the absence of the boys, but I think
Belle Soeur and I felt the somber and menacing character of the scenery
more keenly than if we had been in their enlivening company.
When we reached tree level, all this desolation vanished. The path ran
through a forest along a ledge cut in the side of a gorge, and through
the foliage we had very lovely views of the leafy ravine and the
mountain slopes on the other side. The colors were especially beautiful
in the sunset glow, and we regretted that we could not linger to enjoy
it; but we had no very clear idea how much farther we had to walk, and
there was evidently not much daylight left.
We quickened our pace, and it was well we did so. The down grade was
now very steep and we could keep up a tremendous gait, though at some
risk of “toppling down from the sky.” At last we came to a place where
the gorge we had been following opened out into the Kander valley, and
we could see the village we were aiming for still a thousand feet at
least below us.
We thought we had been walking as fast as we could before. But we now
began a race with the oncoming darkness, under the stimulus of our
strong objection to spending the night in the very chilly atmosphere
of this high Alpine mountain-side, which quite outdid our previous
performances.
This path was not quite so steep as the one by which we had climbed
from Leuk Baden to the summit, nor was the rock wall as absolutely
perpendicular, but they were close seconds. We used our alpenstocks
practically as vaulting poles and came down in long kangaroo-like
leaps. We had still a remnant of twilight, as indeed was absolutely
essential to walking on this path. Darkness and the safe road at the
bottom arrived simultaneously, and we fairly groped our way the last
half mile to the first hotel, guided only by its lights.
To our great disgust we found the hotel full. We were just wound up to
last that far, and the few hundred yards to the next hotel seemed an
almost impossible exertion. Besides, the painful thought occurred to
us that maybe it was contrary to Swiss etiquette to take in unescorted
women after dark, and we would find all the hotels “full.” However,
this dreadful fear did not prove to be well founded, for at the next
hotel they had a room for us, and we retired to it joyously. It was a
sophisticated place with brass beds and electric bells and liveried
attendants, and we felt eminently safe and well cared for.
We had intended taking the diligence from Kandersteg to Frutigen, but
as we found it involved either starting at 5 A. M. or waiting till
afternoon, we resolved to walk the eight miles involved at our leisure
next morning.
This we did, interrupted only by a shower, which led us to call on a
peasant woman in her châlet. Our road was adorned by a ruined castle or
so, pertaining to extinct robber barons who used to lord it over the
valley. I remember the intense interest manifested by the postmaster
of an infinitesimal village post-office we passed, over a letter I
mailed there addressed to my husband in the Philippines. I had to give
him an epitome of our family history before I could get away. But
somehow his questions were only amusing, not annoying like those of
the man from Kokomo. In the one instance one instinctively felt the
questions an impertinence, in the other they were merely childlike.
What is it makes the difference?
Frutigen is a railway terminus. We took the train from here to Spiez on
Lake Thun, thence another to Interlaken, caught the afternoon express
to Grindelwald, and walked safe and sound into the Châlet Edelweiss.