BUOCHS--GERSAU--THE BAY OF URI--ALTORF--AM
STAG--WASEN--GÖSCHENEN--SCHÖLLINEN--THE DEVIL’S BRIDGE--THE URSEREN
THAL--ST. GOTHARD.
Oh! how I love with thee to walk,
And listen to thy whispered talk!--THOMSON.
As you leave the bay of Buochs you find that the mountains on all sides
show well from the lake. Behind is Obburgen, at which we have just
now been looking. On your immediate right is Buochserhorn. Beyond it
is Seelisberg, though not yet itself visible, but only the way to it
by Beckenried, on the east face of which is the Sonnenberg Hotel, a
head-quarters for much that is good and interesting. On your left is
the Rigiberg. Before you, in sight of which you soon come, is Brunnen,
the port of Schwyz, which is seen three miles back, at the foot of
the rocky and precipitous Mythen. A fair expanse, how fair! of bluest
crystal, set in a glorious frame of multiform mountains, superficially
more or less subdued by long ages of human industry: this, however,
being possible only to such a degree as to diversify, and enrich the
interest of the scene. In itself a glorious scene! but there is,
besides, all about it the glamour of the memory that it was the cradle
of Swiss liberty.
Along the beach at Buochs I had seen several peasant women, turning
over in the bright sun to dry, as if it were so much wet hay, the roots
and fragments of wood they had collected from what the storm of Friday
night last had swept from the mountains into the Engelberg Aa, which
had brought them down to the lake. This was to be added to their store
of winter fuel. Fuel has now become very dear in Switzerland, not only
from its participation in the general rise of prices--that affects
everything--but also from an exceptional cause. The recent increase of
population has led to a corresponding increase of cultivation; and this
has been effected chiefly at the expense of the forests, which are here
the only source of fuel. While, therefore, the number of consumers has
increased the supply of fuel has diminished. On reaching Gersau I came
on further evidence of the violence of that great storm.
But first a word about Gersau itself. Its history is interesting. Its
territory is a little valley in the Rigiberg, every rood, tree, and
house of which is taken in at a glance from the deck of the steamer.
Its population may now number about 2,000 souls. The increase this
implies is due to the advantages of its situation, and to the industry
of its inhabitants, having enabled it to keep abreast of the general
advance of the whole of this much-frequented region. To it belonged,
for many centuries, during which its population was much less than at
present, the distinction of being the smallest independent sovereign
state in Europe. San Marino was four times as populous, and had a
proportionately larger area. Its valley, which looks to the south,
is about three miles in length. It rapidly descends from the top of
the _col_ to the lake. Its sides, east and west, with far more rapid
descents, are about a mile, each, in width. The whole of this area
is covered with little green prairies, studded thickly with fruit
trees, and with dispersed houses. The toy capital is at the bottom of
the valley, on the margin of the lake. All the water that flows from
natural springs, or that, in heavy rains, runs off its surface, will
evidently reach the lake by the central trunk-channel that passes
through the little town. This flow of water is sufficient in ordinary
times for the machinery of a silk-mill, which has been placed at its
mouth.
Against such a storm as that of Friday no adequate precautions had,
or probably could have, been taken. As the steamer approached the
pier, we saw heaps of fresh rocky _débris_ piled up on the beach, and
observed that the main street had been cut up, and the materials of the
road partly carried away, by the torrent that had swept over it. The
silk-mill had been pretty well wrecked, and a great many houses, and
much land injured. Some of the rocks brought down into the town were
so large that they had to be broken up by blasting, before they could
be removed. I, afterwards, saw in the Swiss papers that a collection
was being made to assist those of the humbler classes here, who had
suffered by the storm. I heard also that the new road that passes along
the margin of the lake, from Brunnen to Flüelen, had, like that through
the valley of Unterwalden, in some places been blocked with _débris_,
and in some cut through. As to the poorer sufferers at Gersau, we may
be sure that, whether aided from without, or not, by the proposed
subscription, the long tradition of self-help is not yet forgotten in
this little community; and that it will soon repair the damages it has
sustained, as effectually as a hive of bees would an injury done to
their comb.
As far as Brunnen, which is about four miles beyond Gersau, our
steamer’s course had been due east. Her head was now put due south,
down the bay of Uri, which is the southern branch of this tortuous
lake. The character of the scene changed as rapidly and completely as
the direction of our course. The mountains no longer, as at Buochs,
Ennetburgen, Beckenried, Gersau, and Brunnen, gradually shelve down
to the water, offering space for little communities, whose successful
industry, and careful thrift, it is so pleasing to contemplate. Their
sides are now mostly naked precipitous rock; in some places rising a
thousand feet, sheer above the glassy water, which, in its turn, is
another thousand feet deep. But even on these mountains, which like
some old-fashioned fish, wear bones on the outside, and, going further,
are bone to the heart, the industry of the people, which will take no
denial, has set its mark. Wherever a little space could be found for
grass, there its emerald green gems the rocks, just as some bright
parasite might the ganoid fish. So, too, wherever a little wood, or
even a tree, or two, could be made to grow, there it springs from
the mountain side. On the left you face the line of the new road to
Flüelen, with the Axenstein Hotel above it; on the right, two or three
thousand feet above the water, you look up to the Sonnenberg Hotel.
Above and beyond the latter, reaching on for some distance in front, a
combination of snow-fields, and of naked peaks, appropriately completes
a scene, which once beheld is for ever remembered.
In some places you see sections of rock, exposing strata that have been
contorted into zigzags. This convolution of the rock, the mountain high
precipices, and the depth of the water, indicate how great were the
forces that have been at work here, and with what mighty throes they
worked, or through how long a range of ages.
* * * * *
I reached Altorf, in time for the 12 o’clock dinner, at the Golden Key.
There were twenty-five people at table, among whom I was, I believe,
the only Englishman; the rest being Germans, or Swiss. English
people, however, do not like these hours; but I had breakfasted early.
Altorf, though the capital, is not itself a Commune, but belongs to
the quasi-Commune of Attinghausen, as Am Stag does to that of Silenen.
I use the word quasi-Commune, because politically all the Communes of
northern Uri, speaking roundly, and subject to some qualifications and
explanations, form one body; each being a distinct body, again with
qualifications and exceptions, only for economical purposes. This is
the case also with the Communes of Southern Uri, or the Urseren Thal.
After dinner I walked over the whole capital in a vain search for a
shop, in which I might get some statistical account of the Canton. Not
one was to be found in which printed matter of any, even the humblest,
kind was sold. Ammer laughed at my simplicity. ‘In Uri people do not
spend money on books. But if I were to go to the _Hotel de Ville_,
where the authorities were then holding a sitting, I might find the
Archivar, or some such officer, who possibly might be of use to me.’ I
acted on the suggestion; and brought away with me an abstract of the
last census of Uri. But I found that in the capital of Uri printed
matter, in accordance with the general rule in all matters, was dear
in proportion to its scarcity. For a few figures--for the population
of the Canton is only 16,095--printed on a small square of coarse
spungy paper, not good enough to wrap up grocery in, I had to pay a
franc. But I hold that the franc was not ill spent, as I found that,
under the head of ‘Confession,’ of the above given number 16,025 were
‘Catholics;’ 60 ‘Protestants,’ 1 (with commendable precision) of ‘other
Christian professions,’ and 3 ‘Israelites, and of other non-Christian
professions.’ Considering the relation of Israelitism to Christianity
it is not quite right to class it with all kinds of heathenism; though
perhaps this heading may be defended by our own ‘Jews, Turks, Infidels,
and Heretics.’ But what a Priest’s Paradise must Uri be! Only 4 per
thousand, not nearly a half per cent., of heretics and misbelievers
of all kinds; and then not a book to be bought! How long will it be
before these one-minded and unreading folk reach the debate of the old
question What is truth; and come to understand that demonstrable fact
is an alternative answer to the thimblerig of authority?
* * * * *
In the afternoon, having left my _malle_ in charge of the landlord of
the Golden Key, I went on to Am Stag. So far there is bottom land in
the valley; broad at Altorf, and narrowing all the way to Am Stag,
where it ends. The bounding ranges are always interesting, as seen
from the road, which runs pretty straight, and pretty much on a level,
for the intervening nine miles, among meadows, in which numerous fruit
trees, as elsewhere in Switzerland, appear to be of little, or no,
detriment to the grass.
Am Stag was reached at 6 o’clock. This gave time enough to look at
the village, and its _entourage_. It is a small place created by the
traffic through the valley, to which it is a kind of half-way house,
where _voituriers_ bait their horses, and the diligences take fresh
teams. The mountains close in above and below it, forming a deep hollow
of about a third of a mile in diameter. The environing mountains look
unusually hard and pitiless; in part of naked rock, in part clothed
with stunted woods. On the west side of the village the Reuss races
by, being joined in the village by the stream of the Maderaner Thal,
of about the same volume, and quite as noisy. These, with the breadth
of sky above, are all the objects in nature the peasants of Am Stag
have to contemplate. And in winter everything is buried in snow. And,
then, the capital, for the dissemination of ideas, is Altorf. The time
must be still distant when the coming bookseller of Altorf will have a
customer from Am Stag.
From several conversations I had, during this excursion, with young
women in these Catholic cantons, I came to think that they are not
so keen and hard as, more gentle, artless, and pleasant to talk with
than--to make the comparison as personal as possible--they would have
been, had they been brought up under a different system. They seemed
to wish to be friendly, and not to be afraid of being so; and not to
have _des arrière-pensées_, nor to suspect other people of having
them; and to be taking life as it came, as if it were not they who were
responsible for what it brought. This may be a mere fancy of my own;
but, because I think it something more, I set it down here.
What is the intellectual life of the peasants of Am Stag? If even in
a broad country-side, where a bookseller can live, and the world is
not quite unknown, the one subject of conversation that interests all,
and alone never flags, is one’s neighbours, and their affairs; and if,
even in its larger atmosphere, petty jealousies and heart-burnings
abound; and often grow, for the soil and atmosphere have some qualities
that stimulate such growths, to not insignificant dimensions, from
beginnings no bigger than, and as unsubstantial as, the midge’s wing;
what, in these matters, must be the state of this little community,
when imprisoned for the winter in its mountain cage? How A. manages,
now that he no longer has a cow; or how B. managed to get one, are
fruitful topics, that will not be dropped till next summer. That
C. has, or is supposed to have, beaten her cat, that D.’s hen is
reported to have laid an egg, will not be without interest, though
the former particular, however long and sedulously nursed, may never
get beyond the stage of inference. This, however, will not unfit
it for many improvements; which, perhaps, the intervention of the
Priest, in his capacity of moral policeman, may sometimes prevent
being carried too far. For, though his authority may not now be always
quite unquestioned, he still wields a machinery which, under the
circumstances of the valley, leaves him master of the situation.
As to A.’s not having any longer a cow to send up to the common
pasture--poor fellow! he does not see exactly how this came about.
But it is not inexplicable. He is a peasant burger, with a pedigree
as old as that of the Hapsburgs. His ancestors, each in his day, to
a time back beyond history, had a cow or two to send in the summer.
He does what he can; and yet, though still a co-proprietor of the old
pastures, just as his ancestors were, he has no cow to send. That is
the puzzle. His voice is as potent as that of any of his fellow-burgers
in the management of those pastures. He is as much co-owner of them as
they. Nothing can divest him of his right in their common use. It is
a personal right inherent in his blood. But now he can turn it to no
account. He looks on as the rich Innkeeper sends up his dozen, or score
of cows, while he has himself none to send. As the herd is driven by,
through the village, with bells tinkling, and joyous at the prospect of
returning at last to the fresh, thymy, mountain herbage, he looks on in
silence, with his mouth open, as if his hopes, and his wits, too, were
departing from him, through the passage he is providing for their exit.
He cannot understand how things have come to be as they are. He worked
hard all the summer. But, then, he worked for wages: and that is the
key to the puzzle. The valley is now advancing into the condition
in which, on account of the traffic and business it supports, there
will be some who will have to employ others; and many, as population
is increasing, who will have no means of living except that of being
employed by others. Those who employ others will have cows, some of
them many, to send up to the common pastures; some very many more than
any had in old times. Of those who are employed by others, many, having
necessarily been otherwise occupied, were not able in the foregoing
summer to collect food for keeping a cow through last winter, and so
this summer, and among these is our poor friend, have not one cow to
add to the herd, that is now being collected from the village for
their three months’ sojourn on the mountain pastures. These he can no
longer turn to account. And he will not emigrate to a new world, where
there are openings for his industry and thrift to make him a richer
man than anyone in his Canton will ever be; nor will he even leave
his Canton for another. And all this for the sake of his long line of
burger ancestors, and for the sake of his common rights in the land,
which--as far as pasturage go--are of no manner of use to him. It is
the sentiments, so lovely and so human, of home, of kindred, of the
accustomed locality, of country, that have fastened themselves to, and
fed on, the now valueless corporeal hereditament, that bind him to the
spot with a chain he has no power to break. The hopes and chances of
the distant world do not allure him. For them he will not sell the
inheritance, nor leave the graves, of his Fathers.
And as it is, here, with the common pasturage, so is it in some degree
with the produce of the common forests. In conformity with immemorial
usage, the fuel, and timber for repair of houses, are distributed in
proportion to the size of the house. A large house, in which many
fires are needed, and which will require more timber for repairs, will
receive its proportion. So will also the poor man’s humble tenement.
To him this will perhaps give for fuel one klafter, which will not be
enough for his wants. But to his rich neighbour, who could well afford
to pay for his fuel, it will give four or five klafters. A klafter of
wood is a solid measure, six feet long, wide, and high, and three feet
deep. This method of distribution, which worked fairly enough under
the old condition of things, when none were rich, and none were poor,
works unfairly now, when there are opportunities, of which some will
be able to avail themselves, for getting rich. A man may now prosper
at home in ways unknown formerly; or he may go out into the world, and
make several thousand francs, as my Am Stag informant had done, and
then come back, and resume his rights, none of which absence forfeits;
and he will be rich, and will, therefore, build, and live in, a large
house; and this will entitle him to a large proportion of the common
fuel and timber. There will, therefore, be so much the less to divide
among his poorer fellow-burgers.
_August 7._--Had breakfasted at the Croix Blanche, and cleared out
of Am Stag, by 6 A.M. I was never in bed after 5. The bottom land
having now completely thinned out, you here enter on the ascent of the
St. Gothard Pass. Henceforth the road is cut in, or built upon, the
mountain side, and frequently changes from side to side of the Reuss.
At the last bridge before you enter Wasen, the Reuss flows below in
a channel it has excavated for itself, so deep, dark, and narrow,
that you cannot make out where the water is, till you have looked for
it. On the left of the bridge, the eastern bank of the torrent is
much higher than the opposite side. The place is called the Priest’s
Leap--Pfaffensprung. Here Ammer repeated the legend, you will find
in the books, of the enamoured Priest, who baffled his pursuers, in
the days before the bridge, which were also the days of faith, by
leaping across the stream, with the cause of his lapse in his arms. He
concluded the story with the comment, that, ‘if the Priest did it, the
devil must have helped him;’ then adding, as a comment on his comment,
that ‘in these days the Devil has become inattentive to his friends,
and does not aid them as he did of yore.’ This legend will help us to
understand how it came about, that, in order to promote morality, the
people of these Cantons persuaded their priests to keep concubines.
I was at Wasen, seven and a half miles, by 8 o’clock. The road, all
the way, was at this time of the morning, in the shadow of the eastern
mountains. Yesterday evening at Am Stag, I had debated with myself the
question, whether it was better to have, or not to have, an object. I
had walked a little way up the Maderaner Thal, under the influence of
a growing desire to give up my pre-arranged route--arranged because I
had an object--and to take to the mountains. There was before me an
inviting opportunity, the charming Maderaner Thal, by which I might
find a way to Dissentis. But virtue triumphed. And now that I was at
Wasen, and saw a party starting for the Meien Thal, the same question
recurred. I had had enough of carriage-road valley-work for the
present, and wished for something rougher and harder. Having, however,
once entered on the path of virtue, you keep it, if only for the sake
of consistency. This was the first time I had ever travelled, when on
my own hook, along a prescribed route. In former excursions, I had
always left the route throughout, from day to day, an open question.
It is very pleasant, so unlike staying quietly at home, to be going
you do not at any time know exactly where, and you do not at all care
where. An object, which requires a plan, makes this impossible, and
substitutes bondage for what the recollection of former excursions
tells you would be freedom. An object is not bad, still no object
may be better. But I had also another reason for adhering to my
pre-arranged plan, which was, that it would bring me to Andermatt,
where I was to meet my wife, and the blue boy of last year’s excursion;
and some mountain work with them was part of this pre-arranged plan.
But still I said to myself this morning, It is all pre-arranged, and
that excludes liberty.
* * * * *
Above Wasen the road, having crossed to the eastern side of the
valley, passes through a pine forest. The trees are well grown, and
the roadside is full of ferns. The Reuss below is unusually noisy. In
places the lofty mountains ahead are in sight, and through openings in
the forest, occasionally, the mountains on the opposite side of the
valley, with here and there on their flanks a little prairie; on some
of these a small summer _châlet_, or hay-grange. As I walked on alone,
a little ahead of Ammer, the feeling came over me that I was advancing
into one of Nature’s sanctuaries, one of her great laboratories. It was
as if I was being admitted to see the anatomy and mechanism of nature,
the rocky skeleton, the mountain-ribs of the solid earth. ‘And here
too,’ I said to myself, ‘she is busy making the rivers, and’ (as the
dinning noise of the Reuss reminded me of the hundreds of glacier-fed
rills out of which it was formed) ‘she is making them out of the
glaciers; and the glaciers she had made by lifting up the mountains
to attract the clouds, the vapour of distant oceans; and then causing
its precipitation from their cold and rarefied atmosphere. So is she
forming rivers. And these mountain Reusses are grinding down rocks and
pebbles, and floating off the vegetable mould, to become the particles
of the soil, that is, down below, to form broad green meadows and
fruitful golden cornfields. The skittish, noisy stream is young and
playful now, and leaps from rock to rock like a young lion. When it
has attained to its maturity it will move majestically. Cities will
then be built on its banks, and commerce will make a highway of its
surface. Up here man has but very slight hold on the scene. In this
workshop of Nature her work almost excludes his. He is not the master
here. His business and gain here are to understand nature.’ My reverie
was suddenly interrupted by the apparition, at the wayside, of a woman
on her knees, breaking stones for metalling the road. I could not pass
her without a word: even a word would be in some sort a recognition of
our common humanity. Poor soul! In a life of 57 years she had seen no
more of the wide, rich, busy world than may be seen at Wasen, and a few
miles above and below it. Her days were now spent in quarrying pieces
of rock above the road, bringing them down to the road, and breaking
them in heaps by the roadside. It was with her a good day, a very good
one, when she could earn sixty cents. But she was well satisfied with a
day that gave her fifty cents, just fivepence. Hard work, and exposure
in all kinds of weather, hot and cold, wet and dry, early and late, had
scored her face with many wrinkles, long and deep; had enlarged her
mouth, and had widened her nostrils, for she had to breathe hard; and
by making her eyelids swollen and pendulous, had more than half-buried
her eyes. All this had given her somewhat of the features and
expression of an ape. I wondered whether in her long solitary days she
ever compared her life with that of the gay and prosperous thousands
coming and going in carriages, in making a road for whom her life was
expended. And I wondered how many of them compared their lot with hers.
On returning the following week, this way, I found her again, at the
same place, in the same attitude, engaged in the same work. For a few
years longer, perhaps, she will be able to continue it; and then she
will have sunk, out of sight of the folk who pass in carriages, to
something lower and harder, and will be looking back regretfully to the
better times, when between sunrise and sunset, she could earn fivepence.
* * * * *
In an hour from Wasen I reached Göschenen. Here the aspect of things
becomes what you might have been expecting in a great and famous
pass. All the way up from Am Stag the valley of the Reuss had been
narrowing and hardening: and now a break in its western wall forms the
Göschenen Thal. You see the snow-field of the Damma, and the eastern
glacier-shed of the Damma, of the Galen, and of the Rhone-Stock; on
the other or western side of which is the vast Rhone glacier. Here,
as in Alpine, and as indeed in all scenes, thought aids in deepening
the interest of what is at the moment before your eyes. As I looked
around I felt as the spider feels in the centre of its web. Along one
thread, sensitive to thought, I passed by the arrowy Rhone to the sunny
Middle sea, through thrifty Switzers, and light-hearted Frenchmen.
Along another by the vine-clad Rhine to the stormy North Sea, through
studious Germans and plodding Hollanders. Along a third attached to the
next mountain a few miles further on, by the way of the Ticino, Lago
Maggiore, and the Po, through many cities of the quickwitted Italian,
cities of ancient renown in the wealthy field of teeming Lombardy, to
the gusty Adriatic, and its lovely Queen, whose glories have not yet
all departed.
No sooner have you passed through Göschenen than Schöllinen takes up,
and advances, the interest of the spectacle. The gorge now becomes
narrower, more precipitous, more iron-faced. Here it is that you come
upon the mouth of the tunnel that is being bored beneath St. Gothard
for fifteen miles, from Schöllinen to Airolo, all in granite, with
Andermatt and St. Gothard above it. You are walking on the carriage
road, a grand work completed thirty years back. The old horse-road it
superseded is close on your right. On its margin, on your left, is the
long line of iron tubing, of sufficient diameter for a man to crawl
through, which brings from a higher level the water power that is being
used in the excavation of the tunnel for the modern railway, that will
supersede the carriage-road, as that in its turn had superseded the
horse-road. Our world is large and busy, but the world in which our
children will play their part will be larger and busier.
You cut off a few zigzags. The way becomes more precipitous, narrower,
more iron-faced; and you find yourself, a few minutes beyond
Schöllinen, on the Devil’s bridge. Black granite rises in sheer cliffs,
mountain-high above you. The Reuss thunders seventy-five feet below the
arch on which you are standing. You are wet with the spray. A sense of
personal nothingness, of annihilation, comes over you. You feel as a
shrimp might between the jaws of a whale.
The granite appears absolutely naked; but a closer inspection shows
you a few humble Alpine plants in such crannies and crevices as their
roots could find a hold in, together with a little mould from decayed
lichens to feed upon. And, here and there, but never rising more
than a few inches above the storm-swept surface, you will make out a
Pinus pumilio, or two, but of so weather-worn, and weather-stained,
and snow-crushed an aspect as to be thoroughly toned-down to the dark
granite. How bravely and obstinately does life struggle to maintain
itself amidst all this wrath and desolation! It will have the whole
world. It will not submit to exclusion anywhere. Even up here, though
so nipped, and starved, and frozen; so snow-smothered, and storm-torn,
it will not shrink for asserting its universal right.
You pass through a tunnel, excavated in the perpendicular granite,
which here overhangs the dashing, dinning Reuss on your right. As you
step out of the tunnel the broad grass-clad expanse of Urseren Thal
is before you: Andermatt at the near side; Hospenthal, two miles off,
on the far side. All grass between. The mountain slopes, too, around
are all in this livery of soft green. Where else did one ever see such
a contrast, and so unexpected! Behind you the ruthless granite and
eternal snow: before you the sheen of a smooth lawn, with these busy
little communities nestling in its bosom. No one, who comes along this
way, on foot, on a bright sunny day, as this was, will ever forget this
contrast.
* * * * *
At the St. Gothard Hotel, at Andermatt, I came up with my _sac_, which
I had sent on in the morning from Am Stag by an empty return carriage.
I here also found a telegram from my wife--she was at Pontresina--which
told me that she could not be at Andermatt till the evening of
the twelfth. To-day was the seventh. Nothing, therefore, could be
clearer--it was obvious in a moment--that the best thing for me to
do was to go on at once to Como, to breathe for some hours the air of
Italy, and to gladden my eyes with an Italian scene; returning early on
the eleventh, so that I might devote a part of that day, and the whole
of the next, to such inquiries as I might wish to make at Andermatt
and Hospenthal. I had left Ammer behind at Schöllinen, where he had
fallen in with an old friend. On his arrival, about half an hour after
mine, I announced to him my resolve; and told him we should be off at
4 o’clock. It was now 1. This would give him time to get his dinner,
visit his acquaintances in the place, and consume as many pipes, and
thin, long, black, Swiss cigars as he pleased; for it appeared to be
his custom when tired of the one to take to the other. Being of that
conservative turn of mind which is averse to changes of plan, as well
as of anything else; and, too, being now of the age, when exertion
begins to be no longer pleasing for its own sake, he seemed to think
that it was hardly worth while to leave Switzerland for so short a
time. At the appointed hour, however, we were again under weigh; and
at 6h. 40m. had reached the Hotel on the summit of the Pass. The books
give 24 miles for this day’s tramp: but this, from the time we took to
do it, and the ease with which it was done, I think beyond the true
distance.
From Andermatt you walk through the level mead of Urseren to
Hospenthal, 2¼ miles. The grass of course is carefully cultivated,
for the whole dependence of the people is on their cows and horses.
Andermatt and Hospenthal are towns of horses rather than of men, for
here the two great trunk lines of communication from east, along the
Alps, to west, and from north, across the Alps, to south, bisect each
other at right angles. It is a central point for much traffic, and so
a great many horses are needed. It is fortunate that there is so much
grass here, for one cannot tell what would be done without it. With the
exception of some patches of potatoes, chiefly on the sunny foot of the
mountain on the opposite side of this great Alpine prairie, everything
that you see is grass. At Hospenthal you cross the Reuss, and again
begin to ascend. The mountains are not precipitous and craggy, but
somewhat rounded, as if their asperities had been planed off in the
glacial epoch. On them are no trees; only Alpine pasture all the way,
gradually deteriorating as you ascend. To one fresh from the Devil’s
bridge (I wish it had a better name), and the Urseren Thal, these
mountains are full of contrast and interest. Three such scenes in a
single walk make it a memorable one. Sometimes you are far above the
Reuss, sometimes it is close alongside of you. Sometimes the cows are
below you in a deep valley, sometimes above you on a mountain flank.
At last, not very far from the summit, you cross the Reuss for the
last time, by a bridge which is the boundary, on the road, between the
Cantons of Uri and Ticino. It is, hereabouts, a small stream, not far
from its source in a small mountain lake hard by; but what would not
one give to have such a small stream passing one’s door at home--so
clear, so pebbly, so cool, so lively, so murmurous. For the latter part
of the way the snow was often, in large masses, by the roadside. There
was more of it still lingering on the mountains this year than usual,
because there had been a late spring with heavy snow storms. The Hotel,
nearly 7,000 feet above the sea, is on the summit of the _col_, in a
deep depression, surrounded by blackish-gray, jagged, naked peaks,
with snow in the interstices and ravines. But even here animal life is
far from wanting; for in the dark tarn, on the edge of which the Hotel
stands, and which is sufficiently deep not to be frozen to the bottom,
fish are to be found. There is another and shallower tarn close by
without fish. In front of the Hotel is some expanse of grass, a part of
the summer pasture of the summit, which maintains for two months 200
cows.