V.

Instead of going straight down the valley by the high road, a drive of

an hour, to the railway in the Pusterthal, I walked up over the

mountains to the east, across the Plätzwiesen, and so down through the

Pragserthal. In one arm of the deep fir-clad vale are the Baths of

Alt-Prags, famous for having cured the Countess of Görz of a violent

rheumatism in the fifteenth century. It is an antiquated establishment,

and the guests, who were walking about in the fields or drinking their

coffee in the balcony, had a fifteenth century look about them—venerable

but slightly ruinous. But perhaps that was merely a rheumatic result.

All the waggons in the place were engaged. It is strange what an

aggravating effect this state of affairs has upon a pedestrian who is

bent upon riding. I did not recover my delight in the scenery until I

had walked about five miles farther, and sat down on the grass, beside a

beautiful spring, to eat my lunch.

What is there in a little physical rest that has such magic to restore

the sense of pleasure? A few moments ago nothing pleased you—the bloom

was gone from the peach; but now it has come back again—you wonder and

admire. Thus cheerful and contented I trudged up the right arm of the

valley to the Baths of Neu-Prags, less venerable, but apparently more

popular than Alt-Prags, and on beyond them, through the woods, to the

superb Pragser-Wildsee, a lake whose still waters, now blue as sapphire

under the clear sky, and now green as emerald under gray clouds, sleep

encircled by mighty precipices. Could anything be a greater contrast

with Venice? There the canals alive with gondolas, and the open harbour

bright with many-coloured sails; here, the hidden lake, silent and

lifeless, save when

“_A leaping fish

Sends through the tarn a lonely cheer._”

Tired, and a little foot-sore, after nine hours’ walking, I came into

the big railway hotel at Toblach that night. There I met my friends

again, and parted from them and the Dolomites the next day, with regret.

For they were “stepping westward;” but in order to get to the

Gross-Venediger I must make a détour to the east, through the

Pusterthal, and come up through the valley of the Isel to the great

chain of mountains called the Hohe Tauern.

At the junction of the Isel and the Drau lies the quaint little city of

Lienz, with its two castles—the square, double-towered one in the town,

now transformed into the offices of the municipality, and the huge

mediæval one on a hill outside, now used as a damp restaurant and dismal

beer-cellar. I lingered at Lienz for a couple of days, in the ancient

hostelry of the Post. The hallways were vaulted like a cloister, the

walls were three feet thick, the kitchen was in the middle of the house

on the second floor, so that I looked into it every time I came from my

room, and ordered dinner direct from the cook. But, so far from being

displeased with these peculiarities, I rather liked the flavour of them;

and then, in addition, the landlady’s daughter, who was managing the

house, was a person of most engaging manners, and there was trout and

grayling fishing in a stream near by, and the neighbouring church of

Dolsach contained the beautiful picture of the Holy Family, which Franz

Defregger painted for his native village.

The peasant women of Lienz have one very striking feature in their

dress—a black felt hat with a broad, stiff brim and a high crown,

smaller at the top than at the base. It looks a little like the

traditional head-gear of the Pilgrim Fathers, exaggerated. There is a

solemnity about it which is fatal to feminine beauty.

I went by the post-waggon, with two slow horses and ten passengers,

fifteen miles up the Iselthal, to Windisch-Matrei, a village whose early

history is lost in the mist of antiquity, and whose streets are pervaded

with odours which must have originated at the same time with the

village. One wishes that they also might have shared the fate of its

early history. But it is not fair to expect too much of a small place,

and Windisch-Matrei has certainly a beautiful situation and a good inn.

There I took my guide—a wiry and companionable little man, whose

occupation in the lower world was that of a maker and merchant of

hats—and set out for the Pragerhütte, a shelter on the side of the

Gross-Venediger.

The path led under the walls of the old Castle of Weissenstein, and then

in steep curves up the cliff which blocks the head of the valley, and

along a cut in the face of the rock, into the steep, narrow Tauernthal,

which divides the Glockner group from the Venediger. How entirely

different it was from the region of the Dolomites! There the variety of

colour was endless and the change incessant; here it was all green grass

and trees and black rocks, with glimpses of snow. There the highest

mountains were in sight constantly; here they could only be seen from

certain points in the valley. There the streams played but a small part

in the landscape; here they were prominent, the main river raging and

foaming through the gorge below, while a score of waterfalls leaped from

the cliffs on either side and dashed down to join it.

The peasants, men, women and children, were cutting the grass in the

perpendicular fields; the woodmen were trimming and felling the trees in

the fir-forests; the cattle-tenders were driving their cows along the

stony path, or herding them far up on the hillsides. It was a lonely

scene, and yet a busy one; and all along the road was written the

history of the perils and hardships of the life which now seemed so

peaceful and picturesque under the summer sunlight.

These heavy crosses, each covered with a narrow, pointed roof and

decorated with a rude picture, standing beside the path, or on the

bridge, or near the mill—what do they mean? They mark the place where a

human life has been lost, or where some poor peasant has been delivered

from a great peril, and has set up a memorial of his gratitude.

Stop, traveller, as you pass by, and look at the pictures. They have

little more of art than a child’s drawing on a slate; but they will

teach you what it means to earn a living in these mountains. They tell

of the danger that lurks on the steep slopes of grass, where the mowers

have to go down with ropes around their waists, and in the beds of the

streams where the floods sweep through in the spring, and in the forests

where the great trees fall and crush men like flies, and on the icy

bridges where a slip is fatal, and on the high passes where the winter

snow-storm blinds the eyes and benumbs the limbs of the traveller, and

under the cliffs from which avalanches slide and rocks roll. They show

you men and women falling from waggons, and swept away by waters, and

overwhelmed in land-slips. In the corner of the picture you may see a

peasant with the black cross above his head—that means death. Or perhaps

it is deliverance that the tablet commemorates—and then you will see the

miller kneeling beside his mill with a flood rushing down upon it, or a

peasant kneeling in his harvest-field under an inky-black cloud, or a

landlord beside his inn in flames, or a mother praying beside her sick

children; and above appears an angel, or a saint, or the Virgin with her

Child.

Read the inscriptions, too, in their quaint German. Some of them are as

humourous as the epitaphs in New England graveyards. I remember one

which ran like this:

_Here lies Elias Queer,

Killed in his sixtieth year;

Scarce had he seen the light of day

When a waggon-wheel crushed his life away._

And there is another famous one which says:

_Here perished the honoured and virtuous

maiden,

G. V.

This tablet was erected by her only son._

But for the most part a glance at these _Marterl und Taferl_, which are

so frequent on all the mountain-roads of the Tyrol, will give you a

strange sense of the real pathos of human life. If you are a Catholic,

you will not refuse their request to say a prayer for the departed; if

you are a Protestant, at least it will not hurt you to say one for those

who still live and suffer and toil among such dangers.

After we had walked for four hours up the Tauernthal, we came to the

Matreier-Tauernhaus, an inn which is kept open all the year for the

shelter of travellers over the high pass that crosses the mountain-range

at this point, from north to south. There we dined. It was a bare, rude

place, but the dish of juicy trout was garnished with flowers, each fish

holding a big pansy in its mouth, and as the maid set them down before

me she wished me “a good appetite,” with the hearty old-fashioned

Tyrolese courtesy which still survives in these remote valleys. It is

pleasant to travel in a land where the manners are plain and good. If

you meet a peasant on the road he says, “God greet you!” if you give a

child a couple of kreuzers he folds his hands and says, “God reward

you!” and the maid who lights you to bed says, “Good-night, I hope you

will sleep well!”

Two hours more of walking brought us through Ausser-gschlöss and

Inner-gschlöss, two groups of herdsmen’s huts, tenanted only in summer,

at the head of the Tauernthal. Mid-way between them lies a little

chapel, cut into the solid rock for shelter from the avalanches. This

lofty vale is indeed rightly named; for it is shut off from the rest of

the world. The portal is a cliff down which the stream rushes in foam

and thunder. On either hand rises a mountain wall. Within, the pasture

is fresh and green, sprinkled with Alpine roses, and the pale river

flows swiftly down between the rows of dark wooden houses. At the head

of the vale towers the Gross-Venediger, with its glaciers and

snow-fields dazzling white against the deep blue heaven. The murmur of

the stream and the tinkle of the cow-bells and the jödelling of the

herdsmen far up the slopes, make the music for the scene.

The path from Gschlöss leads straight up to the foot of the dark pyramid

of the Kesselkopf, and then in steep endless zig-zags along the edge of

the great glacier. I saw, at first, the pinnacles of ice far above me,

breaking over the face of the rock; then, after an hour’s breathless

climbing, I could look right into the blue crevasses; and at last, after

another hour over soft snow-fields and broken rocks, I was at the

Pragerhut, perched on the shoulder of the mountain, looking down upon

the huge river of ice.

It was a magnificent view under the clear light of evening. Here in

front of us, the Venediger with all his brother-mountains clustered

about him; behind us, across the Tauern, the mighty chain of the

Glockner against the eastern sky.

This is the frozen world. Here the Winter, driven back into his

stronghold, makes his last stand against the Summer, in perpetual

conflict, retreating by day to the mountain-peak, but creeping back at

night in frost and snow to regain a little of his lost territory, until

at last the Summer is wearied out, and the Winter sweeps down again to

claim the whole valley for his own.