THE RIEDER ALP--THE BELL ALP.
Minds that have nothing to confer,
Find little to perceive.--WORDSWORTH.
In the afternoon we took up our staves for the Rieder Alp. The path
runs horizontally along the flank of the range: in its seven miles,
from the Eggischhorn Hotel to the hotel at Rieder, you lose about 1,000
feet of altitude. This is a delightful mountain walk, through open
pastures and woods, neither of which are without the rose of the Alps,
over glancing runnels, by many hay granges and _châlets_, and some
small upland villages, and with mountains always in sight at varying
distances. It was towards evening, and the cows were loitering along
the pastures with heads homewards, and women and children were going
out to bring them in.
We reached the Rieder Alp Hotel with still an hour or so of daylight
to spare. It is situated on a little rising in the midst of a large
irrigated prairie of some hundreds of acres. The hay had just been
carried, and we walked straight over the sward to the hotel. The turf
was as smooth as that of a garden lawn. There is no waste here. The
surface of the prairie is kept quite level, without a stone upon it or
a hole in it, in order that every stem and blade of grass might be cut
close to the ground: and it is shorn so skilfully and uniformly that
you cannot trace the swing of the scythe. We found the hotel full:
the proprietor, however, procured for us two apartments in contiguous
_châlets_; one for my wife and the small boy about 200 yards from the
hotel, in the _châlet_ next to the church, and one for me about a third
of a mile off, at the head of the valley that lies beyond the hotel.
As it happened, we were in luck at finding the hotel full, for we were
well satisfied with our rooms in the village and with their owners.
The rooms of course were as clean as those to whom they belonged were
proud of them. And as they were proud of them, they did for us all that
it was in their power to do. They were very desirous of pleasing, and
in turn were ready to be pleased, even with a word. We could not but
have been interested with what we saw of their little resources, and
of their little contrivances for making the most of them, and of the
small matters which naturally were not small to them. There is about
the inner life of a humble home a something, one may almost say of
sanctity, which is not so apparent, at all events on the surface of
things, in splendid mansions. Their splendour, somehow or other, seems
a matter of course: it is taken for granted both by those who witness
it and by those who possess it. It is transmuted money. There is no
poetry in it: if hearts are moved by it it is not in that fashion, or
to that issue, that it touches them. Quite different is it with the
humble home. There every object seems to have a pleasing history. The
care that is taken of it tells you how hard it had been to come by. You
read in it a little tale of the labour, the frugality, the self-denial
expended on its acquisition. It is a revelation of an inner life which
you are the better for contemplating, and for sympathizing with. The
Latin text from Holy Writ, carved in ornamented letters on a beam of my
wife’s room, was a glass window through which you might look into the
hearts of this family, secluded from the world, and maintaining bravely
and contentedly a hard struggle for existence up here in this lofty
Alpine glen.
I did not inquire, but inferred, as I preferred to do, from the
aspect of things in the rooms themselves, their stoves, furniture,
and ornamentation, setting these by the side of the appearance of
the rest of the house, that each of them was the guest chamber, the
reception room of the _châlet_ to which it belonged; and that in the
summer they were hired by the proprietor of the contiguous hotel,
to be converted, when his visitors overflowed his own house, into
bed-rooms. At all events we saw that he had to send bedding to the
nearer one; and in the more distant one, that which I occupied, the
bed had to be prepared after my arrival. I guessed that the _châlet_
near the church was the house of one of the chief peasants of Rieder.
The one I was in evidently did not belong to a peasant. I reached it
when daylight was fast fading. The good woman of the house was profuse
in reiterating her excuses for things not being better. The good man,
taught by experience, bided his time; and, when it came, made the
same apologies in fewer words and with more deliberation. He weighed
his words. She was more femininely impulsive; he was more masculinely
thoughtful and restrained. At last, as far as her resources allowed,
things were arranged to her satisfaction, and she left the room. He
lighted his pipe. I took a light from him; and a conversation commenced
which proved a long one. He was a man not far short of 60 years of age,
and not of the hardy, weather-worn, out-of-doors-battling class. He
appeared more like one who had been engaged in trade: and this might
have been the case, for he told me that he did not live up here, but
only came in summer for two or three months for change of air. Nor was
he more robust in mind than in body. We talked about the condition
and manner of life of the peasants, and about the value of property
on Rieder Alp and in the valley below. These things he seemed to
contemplate rather from the outside. He did not think that the people
were the better morally, not even materially, for the increase that
had lately taken place in the value of land and of its produce. He
was well-to-do: still his tone was that of a man who feels that he has
not been able to turn life and opportunities to so much account as
some of his neighbours have done: or who is refusing to accommodate
himself to the new conditions of business, though he sees that others
are prospering by doing so, and that he is losing ground by not doing
it; or who has had losses and disappointments. Night had now settled
down on the valley, and no sound broke the stillness outside but the
bell occasionally of an unquiet cow or goat that had not yet composed
itself to rest in the neighbourhood of the _châlet_ where it had been
milked. I observed to him that here the goats were of a peculiarly
marked breed. Their bodies and hindquarters are white, and their heads,
necks, and forequarters black. ‘That,’ he replied, ‘is nothing: merely
a fancy.’ He was, then, too rigid a utilitarian to have any respect
for fancies. No matter what the subject of conversation, or how it
might have been dealt with, it always, without fail, by some by-path
or other, brought him back to the same conclusion, ‘All the world is
changing. Everyday there is something new.’ In this _châlet_ there
were no young people--there were in the other--and they it is that
create light, and keep alive hope in a house. But for them interest in
this world and its concerns might flag. It was past 9 o’clock when our
conversation ended, and we wished each other good night.
My room was ceiled and wainscoted with new-varnished deal. On the walls
were hanging three maps--of the World, of Europe, and of Switzerland,
and half-a-dozen coloured prints of the chase. The series commenced
with the hunter receiving, as he sallied forth, fully equipped, the
adieux and good wishes of his family. Then came, in separate pieces,
the death of the bear, the wild boar, the hare, and the fox--no
chamois, our _chasseur_ was got up too elaborately for that. The last
gave his return, when the family inspect the trophies of his prowess,
and offer their congratulations. There were also suspended on the walls
two watches. These, from their size were conspicuous objects: probably
they had for generations been used only for ornament. They may have
belonged to the time when the bear and the wild boar were common in the
Valais. There was, too, against the wall, a frame of two shelves for
books. Upon this were piles of two weekly papers, one illustrated and
one political: both calculated for the meridian of the Valais. They
were carefully folded and preserved. Their wisdom, more particularly as
it had cost money, ought to be preserved; at all events till it weighed
enough for the grocer at Brieg to give something for it. By the side of
the hoarded newspapers were some half-dozen very small religious books.
On these was the impress of Einsiedln. There was no mirror in the room,
and as I saw that the washing-table and its apparatus were brought in,
I claim these facts as supports of my theory that the room was really a
sitting-room.
_August 28._--Rose as early as usual, but, as we were this morning not
to breakfast till eight o’clock, had some time to look about me. My
_châlet_ was charmingly situated. It was above, and out of sight of the
hotel--to the left of it, if you turned your back to the hotel. It was
at the head of the valley of the Rieder Alp. Above it were the summits
of the Riederhorn; a craggy ridge: but immediately behind this house
the crags were missing. Probably what had made the valley was what had
also removed them. Where they were missing, about a quarter of a mile
above the house, was the Pass on the way to the Bell Alp. As I looked
out of my window, I looked down a grassy ravine, not of the narrow,
deep, rocky, precipitous kind. On the left side of it, as far down as
you see, it is all mown smooth. In the central descent, which is that
straight before you, are scattered some dozen or so detached _châlets_
and hay granges. Each is on some little rocky knob or prominence, a few
feet high, to lift it out of the way of the storm-water, that in heavy
rains comes down the valley. About half a mile down, the valley takes a
turn to the right. This prevents your seeing anything more of it; and
also shuts out the view, which there, otherwise, would be down into
the main valley of the Rhone. To the right is unmown pastured grass,
with a dark pine wood below the pasture, and the battlemented crags of
the Rieder ridge above it. As you can see nothing of the Rhone valley
below, the grassy and wooded slopes of this side meet, to the eye,
the flanks of the opposite mountains. In these flanks, just opposite
to you, so that you look into them, are some long smooth ravines, or
yawning fissures, of naked slate-coloured rock. Above these is a ridge
of mountains of the same material and colour. As these opposite ravines
and ridges have no vegetation, and are smooth, they look just like
the pasteboard mountains one has seen in dioramas, and in the scenery
of pantomimes. This is how they show on the upper half. Their lower
half is striated, and dotted with dark pine woods and yellowish green
prairies. The yellowish tinge was partly the result of the dryness of
the season. Behind these scenic pasteboard mountains is Monte Leone,
and a little to the right of it the Great Fletschhorn; both more than
half covered with snow-fields. Between the two you see the zigzags of
the Simplon Pass, descending through forests to the cultivated plain of
Brieg. Brieg itself is not visible, but some part of the plain is. The
view of Brieg is intercepted by the right side of our valley, on which,
below the pasture, is the dark pine wood. We have just been looking
to the south and right of the pasteboard mountains. If we now turn to
the left, we look along the range of the opposite side of the Rhone,
streaked and patched with snow, which the sun is now just getting well
above, for you were up before he was over their tops; and you see that
he is promising, at all events, a fine morning.
There must be some who would find the quiet of a sojourn at Rieder Alp
preferable to the crowding of the Eggischhorn, and of the Bell Alp.
As to the glacier, the great sight of this neighbourhood, that, of
course, is not visible from the Rieder, as it is from the Bell Alp; but
then, in compensation, it is more accessible. Nor is the view from the
Rieder so good as from the Bell Alp; but still it is good. The Bell
Alp, and the Eggischhorn, are both within visiting distance, that is
to say, you may go to either of them for an early dinner, and return
in the evening. I do not mean that I should like, myself, to stay
there. I like staying nowhere, except at home. When I am travelling I
like to be moving on. It was for that that I left home. It seems to
me insufferable to return in the evening to the place I left in the
morning. The same distance in walking would have carried me to some
new place: that is to say, I might have had something additional at
the same cost of time and exertion. But there are many who, on this
point, would not agree with me; and they, I think, might spend a week
pleasantly at Rieder Alp.
This quiet place might also be recommended as an experiment to
those--on the supposition that they mean what they say--who are in
the habit, in season and out of season, of announcing their want
of sympathy with the ideas and tone of mind of their travelling
fellow-countrymen. It may perhaps be conceded to such fault-finders
that they are not quite without materials for getting up a plausible
case. Speaking generally, we do not show to advantage when on our
travels. What is required for making a traveller agreeable to his
fellow-travellers, in their short chance meetings, is versatility,
adaptability, _bonhomie_, _savoir faire_, the art of conversation,
particularly the power of making anyone you may happen to converse
with for a few minutes, believe that you are pleased with him, or,
perhaps, and which may be the easier task, of making him pleased with
himself. These, however, are qualities for which we are not remarkably
conspicuous. For some of them we have not even English expressions. But
deficiencies of this kind, though they come out most prominently in
the rubs, and collisions, and close contacts of travel, pre-existed at
home: our objectors, therefore, ought to have been familiar enough with
the thing; and it is, after all, but a small matter to fash oneself
about. Besides, our want of a provision of such small change may not
be altogether unbalanced by the possession of some pieces of a coinage
which, though not always available at the moment, is yet of sterling
value.
Another of their allegations, and it is one on which they lay much
stress, is that they find their travelling fellow-countrymen haunted
by the idea that they must assert, or maintain, a position. For this,
too, there may be some ground, for it is only what might be expected
in a state of society such as ours, in which the endeavour is made,
illogically, to work the hierarchical principle of rank conjointly
with the democratic principle of wealth; and in which, at the moment,
that which feeds the democratic principle is rapidly increasing. If
wealth and rank were preponderantly found united in the same persons,
as was the case some centuries ago, there would be no difficulty
in working the two principles simultaneously. In fact they would
themselves have entered into combination. But as things are at present,
each of the two principles has its own representatives, and these are
somewhat in antagonism. They have almost been drawn off into opposing
camps. And the representatives of the democratic principle (socially
democratic) are, numerically, in the ascendant. From this emanate
attempts as naturally as light from the sun, to maintain, or to assert,
a position; and as these attempts are made by Englishmen, it is only to
be expected that they will very frequently participate rather more of
the national _fortiter in re_, than of what should be the traveller’s
_suaviter in modo_. It is not in us to work the two principles side
by side with the ease and smoothness and social dexterity of Italians
or Frenchmen. Our objectors then, having, in the close contacts and
promiscuous gatherings of travellers such as we fall in with at
the Eggischhorn and Bell Alp Hotels, sometimes to witness, perhaps
sometimes to deal with, this kind of thing, speak of it as a grievance.
But may not its being annoying to them arise from their ideas being
too Utopian? They may, from their not having been sufficiently ‘tried
and tutored in the world,’ be expecting impossibilities.
They have, too, imbibed, or affect to have imbibed, the foreign
estimate of the ordinary travelling Englishman, which generally assumes
the form of an accusation that our ideas are in some way or other
narrow, insular, and uncosmopolitan; for example, that we are possessed
with the idea that nature has constituted us the moral police of the
race, that is to say, a police for enforcing on the race English
ideas; and hence our frequent announcements that so much of what we
see everywhere is ‘lamentable’ and ‘miserable;’ that every foreigner
we fall in with is likely to be a rogue--honesty being supposed
to be an exclusively English virtue; that people are everywhere
dirty--cleanliness also being assumed to be exclusively English; that
the rest of the world do not understand their own business--knowledge
of this kind being peculiar to this island of ours; that all other
people are in a conspiracy against the great English race, and have, to
their own loss, wilfully blinded themselves to its merits, and general
superiority to the rest of mankind. There is probably some ground for
allegations of this kind too, and it would be better if there were
not. But larger experience of the world will in such matters teach us
what we ought to think, and what we ought, and ought not, to say. In
the mean time it will do us no harm to hear how people talk about us:
perhaps it may do us some good.
If, then, you are one of those who believe in these multifarious
shortcomings and accusations, and are ruffled at what you take to be
exhibitions of what is laid to our charge, you will do well to keep
clear of such places as the Eggischhorn and Bell Alp Hotels, for in
them you will be brought into closest contact with your travelling
fellow countrymen. It may, however, be suggested, that if you did
yourself possess the good qualities you think ought to be found in
others, and were free from the failings you comment on in them, you
probably would not notice, as a ground for annoyance, either the
absence of the one or the presence of the other in those you meet with
in your travels. You would take the world as it comes, and turn it to
your own account. What prompts your objections is, perhaps unknown
to yourself, the amount of negative electricity in your own system,
for from this there are few Englishmen who are wholly exempt. If this
be your case to any considerable degree, for your visit to the Great
Aletsch glacier try for your head-quarters the Rieder Alp. If you find
it dull, then go on to the Eggischhorn, or Bell Alp, taking with you
the thought that friendliness and tolerance, like their opposites, are
repaid in kind.
_August 28._--At 9 A.M. we set out for the Bell Alp. Having passed my
last night’s lodging, we were, a few minutes afterwards, on the crest
of the ridge. Once on the top, we were soon in sight of the great
glacier. To reach it we had to pass through a somewhat dilapidated
wood of ancient pines. This is the Aletschwald. Most of the woods of
the Valais are dilapidated; and in accordance with Valaisan practice
we found here a flock of goats--of the black-jacketed strain--browsing
on the undergrowth, and thus preventing a succession of young trees,
to take, in their turn, the place of the old ones. As we were passing
through the flock, I saw one, reaching over from a rock above, bite off
the leader of a thrifty young birch. We were not long in descending
to the glacier. As there might be some need of help on the ice, and
certainly would be in the ascent on the other side, Ott had asked for
an assistant porter. In crossing the ice there are no difficulties;
the passage took us a short half-hour. You see no more of crevasses
than just about enough to make you think that you had better not,
through carelessness, slip into one of them. But as you look up the
glacier, you see that half a mile or so above you it is composed
entirely of narrow ridges with crevasses between, so that it would
be quite impossible, I suppose, either to ascend it or to cross it
thereabouts. On the path we took we saw crossing, at the same time,
men, women, and children, a flock of goats, a herd of cows, and a
horse. It is interesting to observe how unfailingly in travelling over
such places, that is, where the way is difficult or dangerous, animals
arrange themselves in Indian file. Few people will doubt that there is
reasoning in this as well as reason. The motive in the quadruped is
the same as in the Indian. Those behind understand that it is likely
to be safer for them to go where one of their kind has just passed in
safety, than to take the chances of what may lie on the right or left.
This is an act of reasoning: it is so in the same sense in which is the
choice, made in an instant by a cat, when attacked by a dog, of the
best position for defence the locality offers. In both instances there
is comparison, and selection for a purpose. That it is done always,
instantly, and rightly, does not take the act out of the category of
reasoning.
This leads one to ask whether there is any proof that the faculty of
reason in man differs specifically from the faculty of reason in the
lower animals? If there be no specific difference between the senses,
and the vital functions of the two, that alone would, _primâ facie_, be
some ground for supposing that there is no specific difference between
them as respects the faculty of reason, and this would seem to throw
the burden of proof on those who might be disposed to assert that there
is such a difference. In reply, however, to their arguments it might be
observed that reason in both appears to have the same purpose, and to
act in the same way, that of adapting action by the way of deduction
from observation and experience to useful ends. The differences in the
results are obviously enormous, but perhaps those may be accounted for
without supposing any difference in the faculty itself. For instance,
the possession of language multiplies and enlarges the uses of reason
almost indefinitely. And then, furthermore, the inequalities of
condition that exist among mankind determine very largely the degree in
which each individual shall use his reason. And, with respect to these
inequalities, it is not impossible but that all that exist, and that
ever have existed among mankind, may be traced up ultimately to the
possession of tools. It may therefore be argued, perhaps with more than
plausibility, that if mankind were deprived utterly of language and
of tools, the members of any community of men would be reduced among
themselves to the same uniformity of level as is seen among the members
of a community of any kind of sociable animals; and that then it would
be hard to imagine any way in which the reasoning powers exhibited by
these dumb, toolless, and among themselves indistinguishable men, would
differ from the reasoning powers exhibited by the community of sociable
animals. This supposition, if it be well grounded, would not at all
lower mankind nor at all elevate the lower animals. It would leave
both just where they are. It would only be, as far as it went, a right
way of regarding certain phenomena. Upon this subject it ought to be
kept in mind that the endless inequalities of condition among mankind
oblige every individual to live, more or less, in a way different from
others, and that differences of this kind increase as civilization
advances; and that this may account for the fact that civilized man has
greater powers of adaptation, and is less the child of habit than the
savage. If mankind, from want of tools and language, had to spend their
lives, like the lower animals, in doing a few simple acts always in the
same way, then their way of doing these few simple acts would probably,
as is the case with the lower animals, become transmissive, that is,
instinctive. Man may be supposed to have the same capacity for forming
instincts as the bee and the beaver, but in him the tendency to form
them may be counteracted by the consequences of the use of language and
of tools, which are incessantly varying human life as respects both its
wants and the ways in which they are supplied.
You see a great deal in passing, of the indescribable clear blue of
glacier ice--a tender, ethereal blue. Just as pearly pink, fiery red,
fresh green, and imperial purple give rise within us to correspondent
emotions, almost ideas, so does this glacier-ice blue. You have been
admitted to look upon what has in it no smirch, no grossness, no warmth
of earth--a purity not of this world. The man who can pass by this blue
translucency without emotion, as if he had only looked upon a piece of
blue serge, is of a hard heart and of a dull brain. His blood is thick.
He is a lumpish Bœotian, a one-eyed Cyclops, a mentally distorted
Caliban.
At 11 A.M. we reached the Bell Alp Hotel. It is, I suppose, about
1,500 feet above the glacier, and about a mile back from it. From
the seats on the north-east of the house you look up a long reach of
it. But now you see no blue. Of that I have just endeavoured to give
my impressions: I must now do the same for the glacier as seen from
this point. For all the world it looks like a grand highway in a vast
mountain cutting. So regular are its surface and its sides, that they
appear to have been the engineering, we will not say of man, but of a
race of giants that must have once been on the earth. It has, however,
the appearance of being still used by their pigmy successors, who
never could have constructed it for themselves. They have retained it
for their great north road--not the great north road of an island of
no very considerable dimensions, but the great north road of a great
continent. And it is now winter--for so it appears to be on the road
as you are looking upon it--and the great road has been buried for
some weeks in snow. And over this snow there has been a great deal of
traffic; for it is the mid continental road. And this traffic of a
great continent has beaten the snow very hard and much besmudged it.
And there had, too, been a previous deep fall of snow, which it had
been necessary to heap up in the middle of the road. This heaped up
snow shows as a long dirty ridge. This is the great central _moraine_.
After you have seen it at the Eggischhorn much nearer, and much
cleaner, and in combination with the snow-fields that feed it, this
view, which only gives you a mile or two of the lower part of the
glacier, does not much interest you from what is actually before your
eyes. It only becomes interesting from what the mind supplies--from
the interpretation the mind puts upon the intelligence telegraphed to
it through the eye. As to that dirt upon the surface, the mind sees
how it came there, and that it is now being carried down before you to
aid in forming fruitful valleys. As to the tender ethereal blue below
the dirt, that is still visible to the searching mental eye which sees
beneath the dirt. The mind asks how far down below the dirt does that
blue reach? None can say. There are, however, superficially, twenty
miles of it, all of it a mile at least wide, much of it a great deal
more, stretching away beyond what the bodily eye is beholding; and
all this mass of solid yet ethereal blue was compacted out of little
aery-light flakes of snow, and that was constructed out of little
globules of floating vapour, and that had been pumped up from the far
Atlantic by the sun, acting from a distance of many tens of millions of
miles. And as this river of ethereal blue, so solid, so long, so broad,
so deep, gravitates from the region of perpetual snow, aided, perhaps,
by the irresistible expansion of ever-recurring internal congelation,
it will gradually pass into another form, and go to fill Lake Leman,
and to feed the Rhine, on its way back to the Atlantic, only to go
through again the same process. What a drama of nature passes before
the mind as you sit on that bench alongside the hotel, and look
upon that Titan-engineered, deep-sunk, snow-buried, traffic-beaten,
dirt-streaked road!
And so it is with everything: the mountain, the plain, the city, the
_châlet_, the flower, the grasshopper. At first, and to the mechanical
bodily eye, they are but unintelligible symbols and figures. It is the
mind that enables us to know what the symbols and figures stand for.
If your thought has not made out, or endeavoured to make out, with
respect to these objects, what they are in themselves, how they came
to be what they are, what they do, what is stirring within them, what
are their relations to each other and to the great whole, then they
are to you so many nothings; no more than so many strokes and dashes
and points in nature’s notation, not understood. And just so, too,
with men and women, than whom there is, after all, nothing better in
this world. If we cannot read them--and it is the right reading that
enables us to sympathize with them--then they are to us only so much
organized matter, consuming so much bread and meat, occupying so much
space, and often in our way, standing where we wish to stand; in the
eyes indeed of many, organized matter so heinously endowed as to call
for only dislike, contempt, and hard words. It is the savant and right,
and if savant and right, then kindly, if not always quite pleasing,
reading, even when what we have to read is something no better than men
and women, than interests, and is good for heart and head. But Worldly
Wise, who understands men and women thoroughly, perhaps through what he
is able to understand of himself, is of a different way of thinking.
‘What if the men and women are good for nothing? How then?
‘Flowers are sometimes aberrant: still they ought to have been, and
might have been, things of beauty. Their aberrancy is their misfortune,
not their fault; the result of causes in the soil, the atmosphere,
the parent plant, or something or other not originally in the flower
itself.’
‘But how when the aberrancy has obliterated the flower, and nothing
remains but unsightly monstrosity? A plague on such monstrosity.’
‘Some, perhaps, of the monstrosity is in your own perverted vision. And
what there is of it in aberrant humanity cannot be mended by dislike,
contempt, and hard words, but only by setting right the conditions of
its growth.’
From this point, your seat near the hotel, you may observe that the
glacier, as far as you can see it, is bordered on both sides by a
perfectly clean margin of loose stones on the foot of either mountain.
This margin appears to reach up from the glacier to the wood or turf
or lichen-stained rock above, whichever it may be, for a space of two
or three hundred feet. Its line is quite unbroken and uniform in height
on both sides. It is a very marked feature when observed from this
point. Of course all these are moraine stones and rocks, and are now
actually on the marginal ice of the glacier, or have been deposited
somewhat above its margin, at times when the glacier, having been
flowing at a higher level than at present, was again subsiding.
From another seat, in front of the hotel, you look down on Brieg, 5,000
feet beneath you. Beyond Brieg you have a better view than at Rieder
Alp of Monte Leone, and of the Fletschhorn, with the zigzags of the
Simplon in the wooded depression between them. If you turn your eye to
the right, or south-west, you will have before you, some twenty-five
miles off, the Zermatt Alps. This morning, when we first saw them,
there was a level sea of unbroken cloud resting on their shoulders,
which concealed everything below. The substructure was entirely lost,
and the snowy summits were floating on the sea of cloud.
A storm swept by us in the afternoon, at about the same hour as the one
we had witnessed two days previously at the Eggischhorn. Its character
was different. It came on with so violent a squall of wind, that some
ladies who were caught in it found it difficult to get back to the
hotel. There was not much rain at our height, or just where we were.
The clouds were not dense; so that through them we could see the near
mountains, looking indistinct and weird, like the ghosts of mountains.
But the most interesting effect of this storm was one that was brought
about just opposite to us, and exactly over Brieg. For more than an
hour two squadrons of clouds came sailing along, on exactly opposite
courses; one down the valley to Brieg, and the other up the valley
to Brieg. But over Brieg they never met. They were continuously and
unfailingly absorbed and dissipated before they came into collision.
This I supposed was caused by a large column of heated air ascending
incessantly from the heated plain of Brieg.
* * * * *
A word about these two hotels on the Eggischhorn and Bell Alp. Their
hard-beset landlords thoroughly understand their business. They also
understand their customers. In your dealings with them it is of no
manner of use to put yourself out or to bluster. They are quite
familiar with all that kind of thing, and know exactly how to dispose
of it. These are just the problems they have to solve every day, for
some months every year. How are a score or so of persons more than
the house was constructed to hold, some of them very impatient, some
of them not very rational, to be accommodated without accommodation,
and to be taken in without being imposed upon? All of this score are
persons who have come up, either in the teeth of the answers they
received to their telegrams; or who dated their telegrams from places
they were on the point of leaving, and so could not receive the answers
sent to them; or who telegraphed at the moment they were about to
commence the ascent; or who had never thought of using, or who had
wilfully abstained from using the wires. Some, though they appear to
have dropped from the clouds, appear, nevertheless, to be still up in
them. Our countrymen, we all know--and we pride ourselves on its being
so--like to go where they will find difficulties, and much that will be
disagreeable. But then it is not in logical, though it may be in human
concatenation, that they should be annoyed at finding what they are in
search of. The masters of these two hotels show their knowledge of the
world, and their good sense, by the ease with which they dispose of all
such cases.
As to charges; if you will only consider the height at which you are up
in, or above, the clouds, and that everything you may want--milk is the
single exception--has to be brought up on horseback or on men’s backs
from the valley, and that each journey is a day’s work, you will not
look upon them as excessive.
The moral of the whole is, that in the case of many, a visit to the
Eggischhorn, or Bell Alp, is a dearly bought pleasure, if to them a
pleasure at all. Impatient elderly gentlemen, and strong-minded ladies
of whatever age, who know what they are entitled to, and will insist on
having it, ought to consider beforehand whether, in their cases, the
pleasure will be worth the price.
Of course this does not apply to those who can foresee what, under
the circumstances, is to be expected; and who are not in the habit
of expecting impossibilities; and who have imagination enough to see
things from other points of view than the single one of what they
themselves, at the moment, want; and who can submit to paying in
discomfort, or in any other unavoidable way, the necessary price for
what to them will be well worth it. Some even of the _Intransigentes_
of travel, whose manner it is to kick against the pricks, will not
think that the price was too high, when, at home, they look back to
what they saw at the Eggischhorn, and at the Bell Alp.