[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: MUOTTAS MURAIGL.]
[Illustration: title page]
Beautiful Europe
The Engadine
By
Spencer Musson
A. & C. Black, Limited.
Soho Square, London, W.
Published Autumn, 1924
Printed in Great Britain
AU PROFESSEUR CÉSAR ROUX
DE LAUSANNE
TÉMOIGNAGE DE PROFONDE ESTIME
ET RECONNAISSANCE
{vi}
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE LAKE DISTRICT
II. VAL BERNINA
III. SUOT FONTANA MERLA
IV. THE LOWER ENGADINE
V. THE NATIONAL PARK
VI. WINTER
INDEX
{vii}
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BY J. HARDWICKE LEWIS
SKETCH
I. Muottas Muraigl . . . _Frontispiece_
II. Pontresina from above Celerina
III. Piz Albana and Piz Julier in Winter
IV. Val Fex
V. The Rosegg Glacier
VI. 'Zum Ewigen Schnee'
VII. Piz Kesch from the Sertig Pass
VIII. Lago di Bitabergo . . . _On the cover_
_The sketch on the title-page represents the Julier Pass._
MAPS
Sketch Map of the Engadine
Sketch Map showing Swiss National Park
[Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF THE ENGADINE.]
[Illustration: PONTRESINA FROM ABOVE CELERINA.]
{9}
THE ENGADINE
I
THE LAKE DISTRICT
'Ille terrarum mihi præter omnes angulus ridet' is the inscription
that greets the traveller over the post-stables at Silvaplana. He
is, perhaps, a little surprised, not having hitherto thought of
stables and the postal service as haunts of classic culture; but
those who know the Upper Engadine will readily accept the quotation
as expressing their feeling towards it. There is something about
that high-lying, broad-stretched valley, though its scenery is seldom
of a dramatic, overmastering kind, that gives it a quite individual
claim when Memory makes up her jewels.
There is an individual note, too, about the people, a suggestion of
peculiar history that mocks us as we try to seize it. One of the
earliest documents in a people's archives is ordinarily their
language, but that spoken by Engadiners, the interesting form of
Romanic known as Ladin, one of the many tongues evolved from late
Latin, only takes us back to the Roman {10} conquest of the Rhaetian
upland that won the magniloquent admiration of Horace. In truth, the
population is a human document, a palimpsest on which the Romans are
but the latest and most masterful writers. Since, at the
commencement of our era, the soldiers of Drusus and Tiberius wrote
their enduring record, there have been only interlineations, mainly
Teutonic, but many are the traces of antecedent scripts. Could we
read below the prevailing Latin, we should probably find an elusive
Keltic romance and enwoven with it perhaps a grave Etruscan legend,
while scattered through all are undecipherable memorials of forgotten
races and perished tongues. One ethnic wave after another has surged
up that ancient highway from central Europe into Italy, and each as
it passed or receded has contributed some component to the population.
But even the briefest sketch of the tangled history of the Engadine
is beyond the scope of this booklet. I will stick to my little last,
the graceless business of cutting away four out of every five pages
of a previous work which the world has willingly let die.*
* This little book is mainly an abridgment of 'The Upper Engadine'
(A. and C. Black, 1906).
Most travellers enter the Engadine by the tunnel under the Albula,
having slowly wound up from Chur along a line that can hardly be
surpassed in bold engineering and romantic variety. After a
momentary {11} halt at Spinas, we steam for a couple of miles down
Val Bevers--very interesting to the geologist and botanist, the
singular mixture of Alpine and meadow flora can be noted even from
the rail--and reach the valley of the Inn at Bevers, where are some
excellent specimens of the quaint old Engadine houses that have no
small part in giving the valley its individual character. Away on
the east stands Piz Esan, a bold, bare, dolomitic mass capped with
Rhaetic, which is the south-western sentinel of the lately
established National Park.
The rail turns right and left. Let us turn right to Samaden,
administratively the chief village of the Upper Engadine. Here, too,
are good examples of old Engadine architecture, including a house of
the Plantas, one of the ancient families of the valley whose name is
writ large on every page of its history. St. Peter's at Samaden
enjoys a traditional primacy among the churches of the valley, and
has many representative functions. It bears the date 1491, but this
must refer to the rebuilding of the nave; the Romanesque tower must
date from the tenth or eleventh century. Switzerland has old
churches in plenty, but both care and neglect have combined to denude
them of nearly all the interesting features that the belfries show
they must have possessed. Protestantism is often blamed for this,
but in artistic desert I do not know that there is much to choose
between the two communions; such difference as there may be {12} is
expressed in two different estimates of George IV. Someone remarked
that he had no taste. 'On the contrary,' said another, 'he's a great
deal of taste, but it's bad.'
Piz Ot, near Samaden, is a superb point of view; the neighbouring Piz
Padella is interesting botanically and geologically.
A mile beyond Samaden are Celerina and Cresta, now merged into one.
Plate II. is a view on the way: in the background Piz Albriz, on the
right a buttress of the sombre Piz Chalchaign, Pontresina in middle
distance; nearer, standing lorn among the tombs on a little
larch-clad hill, the ancient church of San Gian, which, except for
funerals, is now disused; in the meadowed floor of the valley the Inn
rests in quiet reaches after its furious descent from the lakes; its
clear waters are joined by those of the Flaz from Val Bernina, turbid
with 'the dust of continents to be,' and larger in volume than those
of the stream in which after their confluence its name and
individuality are lost; in the triangle between the rivers are the
Samaden golf links. The most famous and fatal of toboggan runs
descends between St. Moritz and Cresta.
Between Celerina and St. Moritz the rail threads the romantic
Charnadura gorge above the raging Inn. At the upper end is a fine
fall by which the water descends from the lake of St. Moritz, the
lowest of the chain of blue-green lakes that form {13} the
characteristic charm of the upper reaches of the Engadine.
St. Moritz strikes one on arrival as a town of hotels. Happily,
hotels are becoming sensible that they cannot afford to be unsightly
outrages on the scenery that is their _raison d'être_. An example of
this is the Hôtel Margna, designed by Signur Nichol Hartmann, in whom
the Engadine possesses an architect imbued with the spirit of its
characteristic and picturesque style of building, and with unfailing
resource in adapting it to modern requirements and utilizing old
construction. 'Only a matter of appearance,' said a practical
companion when I was hesitating to enter a restaurant that disfigured
a lovely nook of tarn and fell. It was said with a superior air of
appealing to higher considerations, much as Solomon, in extolling the
God-fearing woman, reminds us that favour is deceitful and beauty is
vain. But, after all, what is scenery save a matter of appearance?
In fact, Switzerland lives on appearances, and it is but business to
take them into account in catering for the thousands who are
attracted thither, not by the sterling virtues of the inhabitants,
but by the superficial beauty of the land.
St. Moritz, seated on a spur of hill at the head of the lake, is the
highest village in the Engadine, being some 200 feet higher than the
Maloja Pass at the head of the valley. At the highest point is the
old church, no longer used, whose interesting belfry seems {14}
leaning to its fall. The inestimable Swiss periodical _Heimatschutz_
has pointed a salutary architectural moral by presenting this
neglected tower with its simple proportions and vestiges of good work
side by side with the modern parish church, a painstaking example of
bad taste.
Beyond the old church the hill slopes up to the Badrutt Park, named
after a famous dynasty of hoteliers. Here is provision for golf,
abounding in speculative and absorbing contingencies. In the larch
wood on the upper road from St. Moritz to Camfer is the Segantini
Museum, in which are gradually being collected works of the painter
who loved and studied the Engadine with life-long devotion.
In the way of pictures, St. Moritz possesses a treasure of the last
kind one would look to find in a mountain village. In the Palace
Hotel is--what shall I say?--a copy, a replica, the original, for
even that claim has been made for it, of Raphael's Madonna di S.
Sisto, assuredly the noblest presentment of motherhood that the world
can show. By a happy inspiration it has been placed in the Ladies'
Room, where it must awaken a _Magnificat_ in many a heart.
Apart from technique, there are slight but unmistakable differences
between it and its famous compeer at Dresden. In the Madonna's gaze
is less of wonder and amazement, something reaching far into
futurity, assurance of final triumph and disdain of intermediate
obstacle; not yet had the sword that should go through {15} her soul
set its sign on the young mother's face. In the Child the difference
is in an opposite sense; in both pictures there is the same wonderful
suggestion of the awakening of the divine spirit amid the strange
limitations of humanity, but here it is rather the human pathos than
the divine power that holds our attention; there is less imperial
moulding of brow and mouth, less profound mastery in the eyes: the
eyes to which all things were open but which saw them now as man
sees, appear contemplating with perplexed wonder the path that was to
be trodden--he had known it all along, but it looked so different now.
In the flat land at the head of the lake, a little more than a mile
from St. Moritz, and linked to it by an electric tramway, are the
famous chalybeate springs, round which has grown up the cluster of
buildings known as St. Moritzbad. About half-way down, on the
larch-clad slope that rises to the right of the road, is the Museum
Engiadinais, the charming building in old Engadine styles in which
Signur Hartmann has housed the magnificent collection of Rhaetian
antiquities made by Signur Campell of Celerina. To speak of this
museum as a collection of antiquities gives a very inadequate notion
of its interior. Whole rooms, halls and corridors have been
installed there, and, combined with the old styles of the building
and the furniture and surroundings of {16} old life, make wandering
about it like an excursion into the past.
A little farther on is the Anglican church, a massive little building
in the grey-green gabbro of the neighbourhood. The tower seems to
have been suggested by that of the half-ruined church of San Gian, an
assimilation of local style that cannot be too highly commended. An
English church on the Continent, like the Englishman himself, his
clubs, customs, and amusements, is apt to have an air of
extraterritoriality. Who has not felt a shock on revisiting some
beloved mountain haunt to find that since he was last there the
church of his fathers, looking as though it had just stepped from a
suburb of London, had added its note of incongruity to those that
hotels and bazaars had accumulated on the devoted spot?
The chalybeate waters of St. Moritz have been known from early times.
In addition to the original spring there are now two others, one of
which wells up in the bed of the Inn. Bubbles of carbonic acid gas
that rise to the surface of the lake where the river enters it are
thought to indicate another spring below; in fact, the whole mass of
crystalline rock that rises into the peaks of Rosatz and Ova Cotschna
is probably a vast laboratory, in which the water that falls from
heaven and filters down to the river and the lake is charged with
healing virtues.
[Illustration: PIZ ALBANA AND PIZ JULIER IN WINTER.]
Its efficacy, no doubt, is largely due to the {17} co-operation of
the air, and to the ample provision made for the comfort and
distraction of health-seekers. Sportsmen, artists, naturalists, and
whatnot find wherewithal to occupy them, while those who wish to
lounge and dream, who are content for a while simply to exist, have
environment to their hearts' content: sleeping lakes and leaping
streams, slopes of pasture starred with flowers, solemn sanctuaries
of forest, wildernesses filled with the large companionable
loneliness of the hills. And all this enchantment shines in the rare
mountain air with a vividness that seems scarcely real. Indeed, it
is hard to set limits to the many and magical effects of altitude on
body and spirit. Though there may be no theological ground for the
statement by which it is said encouragement is sometimes given to
invalids at St. Moritz that in the worst event they are nearer heaven
than in any other health resort of Europe; yet, short of that
unnegotiable contingency, there are undoubted advantages at 6,000
feet above the sea not to be found at lower levels.
Two roads, one from the village and one from the baths, and numerous
paths, direct and digressive, lead from St. Moritz to Camfer,
standing on the uppermost of the three rocky steps that divide the
Upper Engadine into as many lake-basins. The upper lake has been
divided into three by detritus brought down from the Val Fex at Sils
and from the Julier {18} and Surlej at Silvaplana, the mid-lake at St
Moritz has shrunk to a remnant of its former self, while the lower
lake has entirely disappeared, tapped by the gorge that the Inn has
cut from the Upper to the Lower Engadine.
The origin of such lakes has long been a problem. The most
authoritative conclusion seems to be that in the slow tectonic
wrinkling of the earth's crust bars have been raised across the
course of a river, which has thus been dammed up into a lake and
drowned its former bed. Of course, a crustal subsidence might have
had the same effect, or the two movements may have been combined.
A mile and a half beyond Camfer is Silvaplana, seated on the green
promontory by which the silt of the Ova del Vallun descending from
the Julier Pass, seconded on the opposite side by streams from the
Surlej, has cut the original lake in two. A picturesque wooden
bridge spans the channel still left to the Inn between the deltas of
its furious tributaries; in the background rises Piz Margna, a
glacier filling the cleft in its broad head.
The sylvan shades commemorated in the name of Silvaplana have long
given place to flowery meadows, which now cover the broad holm that
the Ova del Vallun has thrust into the lake. High above the village
the vehement stream is commandeered for the electrical supply of the
valley. By the side of the {19} works is a water-wheel, the earliest
and the latest harnessing of water-power, a striking illustration of
the return of industry to its oldest helpmate. It will be a curious
instance of history repeating itself if manufactures again plant
themselves by streams as in the days before water-wheels were
superseded by steam. Population may one day be as congested in the
beautiful highlands that are now the playground of the nations as in
the great coal-basins. Happily the 'white coal,' as the Swiss call
their water-power, deals more sympathetically with nature than the
black. What a contrast to our factories and gasworks is this trim
little building at Silvaplana, with its aqueduct of ruddy larch, and
the fine cascade from the overflow of its reservoir. It is as though
the grimy palm of Vulcan were replaced by the light finger of Apollo.
The _raison d'être_ of Silvaplana was the Julier Pass. Before the
construction of the railway, this was a frequent route for entering
the Engadine, which makes a much more striking first impression here
than from the Albula. After emerging from the grey desolation of the
two upper reaches of the descent, a superb view of the Bernina peaks
and the ice-fields is gradually disclosed. More and more the
panorama is extended to the right, first by the Fex peaks and
glaciers, and finally by the massive Margna. The one thing lacking
is the Engadine; we seem to have arrived in a land of serried and
far-spread mountains, {20} in which there is no place for the valley
of the Inn. So precipitous are its sides at this point that no
suggestion is given of the broad lake-filled chasm intervening
between the immediate foreground and the sombre rampart that rises to
those glistening fields and summits. At length we are among the
first outposts of the forest, gaunt pines and battered larch,
scourged by centuries of storm; suddenly we see through the foliage
the glint of water and of verdure; a moment after, and the lovely
valley from Sils to St. Moritz, with lakes and forests, meadows and
clustered homes, is stretched before us.
It is a pleasant walk from Silvaplana to the pass, a broad saddle of
bog and pasture, flecked with snow, seamed with rivulets, and bright
with abundant flora. The tarns on the left are stocked with trout in
spite of being sealed with ice and buried in snow for half the year.
A path from the dairy of the Julier Alp takes us in three hours to
the summit of the Piz Julier, where, 'walled by wide air and roofed
by boundless heaven,' we have an extensive and splendid view.
Another delightful walk from Silvaplana, as from most places in the
Upper Engadine, is to the Fuorcla Surlej. This saddle between Piz
Corvatsch and Munt Arias is equally accessible from Silvaplana, Sils,
St. Moritz, and Pontresina; it thus affords a pleasant way of going
from any place in the main valley to the Bernina side-valley.
{21}
The road up the valley from Silvaplana lies straitly between the left
shore of the lake and the mountains that rise precipitously from it.
Walkers will do well, after Camfer, to take the path that skirts the
lakes on the right side of the valley, every step of which is
beautiful. It leads now under shady trees, now over parklike or
rock-strewn slopes; picks its way along precipitous hillsides, amid
many-hued crags, set with steadfast-rooted pine and larch, festooned
with red roses, inlaid with dwarf rhododendron, blue clematis, and
countless lovely flowers; occasionally may be found masses of the
rare and stately Alpine columbine. On the right are the
ever-changing waters of the lakes, or the flat, emblossomed meadows
that separate them.
Not quite three miles from Silvaplana the high-road passes the little
hamlet of Sils Baselgia, so called from the ancient church, the
basilica of the neighbourhood, that stands, 'a grief-worn memory of
old years,' in a flat meadow by the tranquil Inn.
Past and present are delightfully merged in Signur Badrutt's Hôtel
Margna on the right of the hamlet, an admirable example of an hotel
in the traditional architecture of the region, and in harmony with
the scenery around it. Nichol Hartmann was given a free hand with a
characteristically massive and picturesque old Engadine house, which
he restored, enlarged, and fitted with every modern comfort and
convenience, but with unfailing antiquarian feeling; old features
have been piously preserved, and their spirit carried {22} into the
new construction, with infinite ingenuity and down to the smallest
detail.
About half an hour farther from the high-road, Sils Maria nestles
cosily in a recess of the valley behind a rocky hill, which rises as
an island from the flat meadows that have supplanted the lake.
Val Fex, which stretches up some five miles to the south-east, is
perhaps the most beautiful of the side-valleys of the Engadine. From
the sunny breakfast-cloisters of the Hôtel Margna we see its
widespread glacier sagging between the Capütschin and Piz Led, as it
were a great white sheet let down from heaven. This forms the
background of Plate IV., with the picturesque little chapel that
stands on the steep meadow slope between the first and second reaches
of the valley in the foreground. On either side of the glacier
interesting passes lead to Chiesa in the beautiful Val Malenco, and
thence down to Sondrio, the capital of the Valtelline; in a few hours
we exchange ice-bound heights, sombre pines, and cautious,
close-growing Alpine flora for umbrageous groves, trellised vines,
and the luxurious breezes of the south.
Various points in the great rocky down that separates the Fex and
Fedoz valleys afford fine views. We look down the whole chain of the
lakes, seeming masses of turquoise in an emerald setting; on the
right the Val Fex mounts to its glacier with crowded peaks beyond; on
the left is the wild ravine of the Fedoz, the billowy ice-field at
its head descending in {23} a crumpled and crevassed glacier, beyond
which a host of rocky peaks ring round the abyss of blue haze that
covers the steep descent into Italy.
On the opposite side of the Val Fex is Marmorè, another fine point of
view. An interesting continuation of this walk leads to the savage
amphitheatre round the little Lej Sgrischus, 'the shuddering lake.'
This lonely tarn, 8,695 feet above the sea, frozen for nine months of
the year, abounds in trout, a striking instance of the hardiness of
these redoubtable little fish. How they came there is a problem; if
introduced by human enterprise it must have been centuries ago as the
renting of the fish-take is of ancient date.
A delightful place in which to pass a lazy hour or so is the narrow
promontory of Chastè, which stretches half a mile into the lake in
front of Sils Baselgia. Couched in springy undergrowth amid
larch-clad rocks and patches of beflowered meadow, we are filled with
a great content; the eye is satisfied with seeing and the ear with
hearing; the ripples lap against the craggy shore, streams hum in the
great mountain that rises like a wall beyond the streak of water,
birds twitter amid the whispering leaves, the earth seems flooded
with a vast, satisfying murmur that
Overtakes
Far thought with music that it makes.
A rock at the end is inscribed to Friedrich Nietzsche, the apostle of
unbridled individualism, himself so {24} helpless in the cruel grip
of idiosyncrasy, who frequently sought to cool life's fitful fever in
this lovely spot.
The charming path runs along the right shore of the lake past the
picturesque hamlet of Isola, slumbering on its green promontory by
the rush and roar of the tumultuous Fedoz. As the path approaches it
along the cliff its lichen-gilt stone roofs, nestling close together,
form a delightful mass of rich colour. These slices of mica-schist
that render roofs such a pleasing feature in the Engadine are mostly
quarried in the neighbouring Val Fex. Behind Isola the Fedoz
descends in a fine fall, bringing material for the delta that bids
fair one day to cut the lake in two. In the village is an
interesting old tavern, formerly a country seat of the Vertimati; the
fittings and furniture are quite a study in woodwork.
A little farther on is a block of breccia inscribed to the memory of
Thomas Henry Huxley, who spent many summers at Maloja. Then, at the
head of the lake, we pass some fine ice-smoothed rocks and ice-borne
boulders, and arrive at the pleasant space between the lake and the
descent towards Italy that goes by the name of Maloja, a name that
strictly belongs to its western edge, the nearest approach to a
terminal pass that the truncated valley of the Inn presents.
[Illustration: VAL FEX.]
Unfortunately for the first impression of Maloja, the most salient
object is the huge bulk of the {25} Kursaal, grotesquely incongruous
with its surroundings. Behind it are the golf links, bristling with
attractive difficulties and deceptions. Above them is the English
church, so light and graceful a little structure that it would be
captious to object that though it be Swiss it is not Engadine, and on
a hillock opposite the Roman Catholic church. In the grounds of the
Hôtel Belvedere are impressive records of ice action, including some
fine glacier-cauldrons.
It is a pleasant walk along the romantic ravine of the Ordlegna and
by the Lago di Cavloccio to the Forno club hut. A digression on the
right soon after starting leads to the little Lago di Bitabergo
(shown on the cover) amid rocks and sombre forests, a beautiful and
sequestered spot.
Those who have followed up the Inn from the beautiful mountain-girt
capital of Tirol, which is named from bridging it, will not willingly
forgo a pilgrimage to the little Lago di Lunghino, which is its
reputed source. It is an imposing cradle for a great river, lying
under a sheer wall of rock that rises into stony spires. The little
stream escapes from its austere birthplace under a bridge of frozen
snow, and flings itself, wild and white, down the steep descent to
its lakes. In the first instance it was probably one of the most
modest affluents of the stream it is now taken to represent. Both
its slender volume and the fact that its direction is different to
that of the Inn preclude its being considered in any real {26} sense
the source of the great stream that hollowed the Engadine, which now
lies a truncated trough with no terminal amphitheatre. The original
source and all the upper affluents of this mighty river that rolled
to the Black Sea have long since been captured by the Maira and
diverted to the Mediterranean. If we walk up the neighbouring Piz
Lunghino we shall look down on the field of that long battle of the
waters. It is the most striking example to be found of the slow but
steady encroachment of the southern streams that is going on all
along the Alps. The more abrupt slope on the south gives the water
greater erosive force, with the result that it is continually eating
back into the range and thrusting the watershed to the north.
Nowhere has this result been so extensive and startling as in the
region below us.*
* The remarkable record of this physiographical change preserved in
the present flora of the valley is noticed in the chapter on botany
in 'Upper Engadine.'
Heim, a great authority, thinks that the original source of the great
river that carved the Engadine was some seven or eight miles away in
the Val Marozzo, which now passes for the head of the Val Bregaglia,
whose normal direction seems thus reversed. The main water-shed of
the Alps must then, he thinks, have lain along a transverse ridge
somewhere above Vicosoprano. The head waters of the Maira gradually
ate through this and, by offering to those of the Inn {27} a more
rapid descent, captured them for the Mediterranean. The Engadine
lakes were thus bereft of their parent source; the current from the
rivulet of the Lunghino tarn was quite unequal to sweeping down the
detritus brought by its furious affluents, which were thus free to
form the deltas that are gradually filling the lakes, whose fate,
happily remote, would seem to be to disappear.
What changes, one wonders, are still to come? How long will the
solid peak beneath us withstand the continual flux? As one gazes on
the 'sea of mountains' stretching on every side, a new aptness is
given to the hackneyed figure. For seeing everywhere below the flash
of cataracts and the riot of descending streams, with the murmur in
the air of innumerable waters all incessantly engaged in the work of
transformation, the everlasting hills seem mutable as the waves of
ocean:
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands:
They melt like mists the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
II
VAL BERNINA
Val Bernina, the most notable of the side-valleys of the Engadine, is
traversed by the railway that runs from St. Moritz to Tirano in the
Valtelline. This is {28} joined by the Rhaetian Railway from Samaden
at Pontresina, the pleasant collective name of the three
villages--Laret, Spiert, and Giarsun--that stretch in a long street
at the entrance to the valley, happier than most resorts in the
Engadine in enjoying magnificent views of the great snow mountains.
Of course, like all popular resorts, Pontresina pays the penalty of
being appreciated. Those who gibe at the Upper Engadine as a
transcendent tea-garden have a special gibe for Pontresina. But the
garden is so very transcendent, so lovely, so extended, so varied, so
full of retreats of wild, sweet beauty, so continually rising into
points of view whence one looks illimitably across the high places of
the earth, that the term is freed from all opprobrium.
Seldom do crowded places have within a few minutes of them such
attractive haunts as the Schlucht promenade along the left bank of
the deep ravine of the Bernina. The many-hued cliffs grasped by the
snaky roots of straight-stemmed firs are writ with records of the
stream's former course: the curve of waterfalls; the winding,
widening, and narrowing of its channel; the swirl and sweep of its
current; the deep holes ground by stones revolving in its eddies, as
it gradually wore down its bed to that along which it now frets and
fumes, incessantly bearing away the substance of staid and sober
Switzerland to make land for the restless peoples of the Danube and
the Black Sea.
{29}
The great points of view are on the other side. The most famous is
the Piz Languard, reached by a beautiful walk. Another is the
Muotlas Muraigl to which we may mount by a cable railway from the
station of Punt Muraigl at the junction of the lines from Samaden and
St. Moritz. Hence we have a splendid prospect: in front lie the
Upper Engadine lakes, like successive reaches of a broad blue river;
to the right is the pinnacled ridge of the lower Julier range; to the
left the Rosegg valley, with the glaciers and peaks at its head;
still more to the left the view in Plate I., the steep northern slope
of the Chalchaign, and the shining summits and far-flung snows of the
Bellavista, Palü, and Cambrena peaks.
Fine, too, is the prospect from the Schaffberg, where is a memorial
to Giovanni Segantini, who for some time before his death was
occupied in painting this magnificent view. Here, one winter day in
1899, he succumbed, in face of the great landscape that had cast its
spell on him.
Could kindliest fortune fairer parting send?
The Rosegg and Morteratsch glaciers are Pontresina's two main
entrances to the high Alpine world, that radiant world which lies so
near us in the Upper Engadine, yet seems as far from soil and smirch
of lower earth as though it had just descended out of heaven from
God. Plate V. gives the former: in front is the pleasant, primitive
little inn; beyond it the {30} glacier, for a long time receding, has
left the usual mean and desolate disorder; farther are the combined
glaciers of the Rosegg and Tschierva; between them is the rocky
Aguagliouls, a curious reserve of vegetable life on which, it is
said, two hundred different specimens of plants have been counted; in
the height of summer sheep are driven across the glacier to graze
there; in the background, from right to left, are the Caputschin and
Mongia peaks, the broad gap of the Fuorcla Glüschaint, the Piz
Glüschaint, the double summit of la Sella, and, hidden in the clouds,
Piz Rosegg.
The Morteratsch glacier is Pontresina's other gateway to the great
white world. The railway has a station within a short distance of
it. A path mounts hence to the beautiful series of falls by which
the Bernina descends among purple rocks from the upper reach of its
valley. About a mile after this path joins the high-road are the
three quaint Bernina Houses, a typical old mountain inn, evidently
prepared to be buried in snow through the winter. Behind them stands
Piz Alv, a huge bare cone of limestone, sole memorial of the teeming
life of the sea that once covered the granite and schist around. A
striking contrast to its dusty bareness is the ruddy granite of the
neighbouring Piz Lagalb, clothed with hardy vegetation.
Continuing on the almost level road, we pass the Lej Minvir, then the
Lej Nair, 'black lake,' the waters of which, filtered through peat,
are of an inky {31} purple. Separated from it by a few yards of
pasture, and in such sharp contrast of colour as to seem almost
unreal, is the Lej Alv, 'white lake,' filled by the turbid stream
from the Cambrena glacier with greenish-white water. The contrast is
said to be reproduced in the trout abounding in them, which are of a
dark and light colour respectively. This narrow neck of bog and
pasture is the watershed between the Inn descending to the Black Sea,
and the Adda to the Mediterranean; occasionally, it is said, a wind
from the south or east, funnelled and furious in the pass, drives the
white waters over into the black, and temporarily unites the lakes.
Presumably at such times the white trout lie low, or the distinction
between the two breeds would have been lost.
The Bernina Hospice is finely posted above Lej Alv. Hence the road
on the left, and the rail and an enchanting footpath on the right,
descend by the lovely Lago di Poschiavo to Italy.
A return to Pontresina may be made by the popular 'Diavolezza Tour.'
Plate VI. gives a fine suggestion of the scenery at its highest
point, the little inn attractively entitled 'Zum Ewigen Schnee' in
the foreground, Piz Palü beyond. Hence we descend to the Pers
glacier, thread our way among its shafts and pinnacles, one of the
most striking and beautiful mazes of ice formation that I know; rest
awhile on the rocks of Isola Persa; {32} and finally pass over the
broad, billowy Morteratsch glacier and follow its right lateral
moraine to the hotel-restaurant set in front of one of the stateliest
pageants of the Alps. I wish the artist had been moved to give a
sketch of it, but he was probably there in conditions that made
sketching impossible. Most persons know the place as a maddening
babel. All day long trains, vans, and lesser vehicles discharge
their close-packed occupants, and a stream of pedestrians pass
through on their way up or down the valley. But one summer evening I
arrived there from over the glacier after walking from early dawn;
the last sightseer had gone; I had my supper at a little table on the
greensward between the larch wood and the rushing stream, in front of
me the majestic Piz Palvi, set on high in the lingering light like
the great white throne of the Apocalypse; it seemed a divinely
peaceful spot, such as may have been that garden of the early world
where God walked in the cool of the day.
III
SUOT FONTANA MERLA
From old time this has been the designation of the dozen miles of the
Upper Engadine below Bevers. Three-quarters of a mile down a lonely
little tavern, {33} las Agnas, marks the most historic spot in the
valley. Here, on the 7th of May, 1462, representatives of all the
communes assembled and settled the constitution and the
administrative and judicial organization of the little political unit
that federated with others into the Free State of the Three Leagues,
and here from time to time they long continued to meet in council.
In the adjoining meadow of las Islas all men who could bear arms
mustered in May, 1499, elected Thomas Planta as their bannerman, and
marched down to join the forces of the Three Leagues at Zuoz, and
bear their part at Calven on that bloody Easter Monday that won the
independence of the land. Near by is the intermittent spring of
Fontana Merla, the Merles' Well, the immemorial boundary between the
two administrative divisions of the valley, sur e suot, above and
below, Fontana Merla.
[Illustration: THE ROSEGG GLACIER.]
We then come to Ponte, with many interesting old houses, and then to
Madulein, a name that is said to have no connection with Magdalen,
while the etymology that derives it from _medio-lacu_ is probably
little more than a pun on some far older name rooted in a forgotten
tongue. The fact, however, that the derivation was current some
centuries ago is interesting as suggesting that there may then have
survived some strand of tradition stretching back to the time when a
remnant of the lake that must once have covered this reach of the
valley still existed. On a rocky spur of mountain above Madulein are
the ruins {34} of Guardaval, erected in 1251 by Bishop Conrad, 'the
castle lover.'
Here and there homely potato-plots and patches of oats and rye give
sign that the severity of the high Alpine climate is mitigating. On
the left opens out the pleasant Val d'Eschia, carved by water from
the glaciers that imbed the four rocky peaks of the Kesch, shown in
Plate VII. Before us is Piz d'Eren, a great cone of limestone capped
with snow. The valley widens and, clustering round a tall spire on a
broad slope of meadow, we see the close-packed houses of Zuoz.
When, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, the villages of
the Upper Engadine rose from the ashes to which the devoted
patriotism of their inhabitants had consigned them--a devotion that
saved the whole Leagueland--Zuoz was by common consent the chief
among them, and all the leading families built residences there.
On entering the village we see the interesting Chesa Gregori-Gilli,
dated 1551. On its front are the Rhaetian wildman and St. George,
with the inscription 'Evviva la Grischa,' followed by a precept that
at some periods of its history la Grischa has sadly needed 'Res parva
concordia crescit, maximæ discordia dilabuntur.' In the central
square is a fine house of the Plantas. On the neighbouring Tuor
Planta an inscription records that it was destroyed by fire in 1499
through the patriotic self-sacrifice {35} mentioned above, and here
again is an exhortation to dwell together in unity.
[Illustration: 'SUM EWIGEN SCHNEE']
These inscriptions point the moral of the municipal history of Zuoz.
Nowhere raged more fiercely the fire of faction that in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries bid fair to bring to naught the
independence that the heroism of a nobler generation had so hardly
won. Yet a saving seed was left. The picturesque Chesa Juvalta,
which preserves many portraits of past Juvaltas in the next village
of S-chanf,* recalls the pleasing legend that when the insanity of
civil strife was at its highest, and the streets of Zuoz were red
with the blood of its citizens, the women of the town, headed by Anna
Juvalta, threw themselves with tears and prayers between the maddened
combatants, and declared that they should only strike one another by
passing over the bodies of their wives and daughters.
* I will not attempt to phoneticize the peculiar _ch_ of Romanic
orthography. English spelling has been styled an invention of the
Father of Lies, but it is nothing to the masterpiece of
misrepresentation that the alphabet has achieved in Romanic. In
Engadine place-names I have preferably used the native Ladin form,
except in the many cases where the German form seemed naturalized in
English.
Relentless criticism has, I believe, relegated Anna to the limbo of
unaccredited immortals that every day becomes more crowded, but I
trust it will be long ere the souls of young Engadiners cease to be
nourished on the exploded legends of their country. It matters
little that they be not history. There are {36} legends that are
truer than history in that they embody the spirit without which the
external facts of history would not have been. William Tell may not
have shot his arrow at Altorf, nor Anna Juvalta stood between the
armed ranks at Zuoz, but had there not been many men and women of the
temper of Tell and Anna the Forest Cantons would still be ruled by
aliens, and Rhaetian independence would long ago have foundered in
anarchic bloodshed.
Zuoz and S-chanf have become of late years something of an
educational centre, and also a resort for winter sports. Zuoz has
provided itself with a Kursaal, which it terms Castell, a finely
situated building in good Engadine style designed by Nichol Hartmann.
Recent building in the district gives gratifying evidence of the
influence of the Heimatschutz, a league for the preservation of old
architecture, and the assimilation of its styles and spirit in new
construction.
Two miles below S-chanf is the hamlet of Capella, so called from the
chapel of St. Güerg of which but a fragment remains. Near it
formerly stood an enormous pine tree sacred to St. George, the patron
of the Upper Engadine, which was an object of profound veneration
throughout the valley. When, on S-chanf declaring for the
Reformation, the aged tree was felled, its fall was probably a
greater wrench with the past than any thesis or formula of faith.
What echoes of old rites, what ghosts of forgotten creeds, may have
haunted the shade of its sombre foliage! {37} That its sacred
character was originally connected with St. George is most unlikely;
it was more probably a relic of a faith and worship to which St.
George was as of yesterday, and which primitive Christianity
recognized as too deeply rooted in the popular imagination to be
lightly discarded. There was a large humanity in those early
missionaries that went for much in their success. They would not
rudely cut away props on which men's souls had leaned, but left them
to stand while they might, consecrated to a new significance. Some
better thing might be reserved for the succeeding time, but without
them it was not to be made perfect.
Soon after this the road crosses the Sulsanna, coming from its
cascaded valley, and the changing character of the scenery ahead
reminds us that we are nearing the end of the upper valley of the
Inn. A mile beyond Capella, in a green basin below the road, is
Sinuos-chel, the last hamlet, a few picturesque houses, one of them
quaintly frescoed, with a demure little church. The valley narrows
to a ravine; the Inn whitens to a torrent as it rages down the gorge
that it has cut for itself through the bar of schist that once dammed
it into a lake; two bridges, one in stone upon the present road, the
other the historic wooden Punt Ota on the grass-grown road above,
span the foaming yellow brook that is the immemorial boundary of the
Upper Engadine.
{38}
IV
THE LOWER ENGADINE
The division of the Engadine into Upper and Lower is not a piece of
arbitrary map-making. We seem to pass into a new country when,
leaving the broad upper valley, lying wide-stretched to the sky,
where only human supervision prevents the Inn spreading out into
lakes and marshes, we go down into the deep trough bordered by
picturesque peaks and ridges, where the river that has so long been
the companion of the road flows far below it between steep walls of
rock. And not only does the scenery change, but the climate, the
flora, the very dialect of the people and their character in history
is different.
Descending from the Punt Ota to the roofed wooden bridge that takes
us to the right bank of the Inn, we are hemmed in by heights in a
land of clamant streams. The sombre severity of Upper Engadine
scenery is broken into a romantic variety of detail: austere masses
of mountain give place to splintered peaks and ragged ridges, their
sides are more furrowed, a luxuriant forest vegetation clothes their
steeper slopes, and the meadows on the gentler slopes are more
interspersed with tilth.
[Illustration: PIZ KESCH FROM THE SERTIG PASS.]
The first village is Zernez, spread on a flat green widening of the
valley, the slender spire and frescoed walls of its church standing
on a little eminence {39} beside it. The church and a few
picturesque old houses are all that escaped a fire that destroyed the
rest of the village in 1872.
A beautiful railway route runs hence by the Fuorn Pass, the Val
Mustair, and the Stelvio road under the dazzling snows of the Ortler,
to Trafoi in Austria. Soon after passing the frontier is the defile
of Calven, where on Easter Monday, 1499, eight thousand hastily
mustered men of the lately formed Leagues attacked and routed a
strongly entrenched and well equipped Imperial army of nearly double
their number, a brilliant feat of arms that laid the foundation of
Rhaetian independence.* For about four miles of its course the
railway passes through the National Park; a clause in the agreement
between the Confederation and the commune of Zernez permits quarrying
and wood-cutting for its construction and upkeep in the sequestrated
region.
* I have described this remarkable little war at greater length in
'The Upper Engadine,' pp. 9-20.
For a couple of miles road and river thread a pine-clad gorge in
which the normally longitudinal valley of the Inn becomes transverse;
before us towers the huge Piz Linard, posted in front of and
dominating the vast Silvretta maze of fell and glacier. Then another
widening of the valley gives standing ground for the picturesque
village of Susch; an ancient tower rises by the quaint minaret of its
church; on a wooded hill beside it is one of the many 'chiefless {40}
castles breathing stern farewell' that add a note of historical
romance to the scenery of the Engadine.
In the Lower Engadine the valley of the Inn seldom widens into a flat
floor as at Zernez. On the right it for the most part rises
precipitously, giving little footing for building and cultivation.
Thus habitation has always been mainly on the sunny slopes and
terraces that look south on the left. At Lavin, two miles below
Susch, walkers can take the old road that runs on this side, high
above the new, by the shells and towers of old castles, and
commanding lovely views. Lavin, Guarda, and Ardez are known as the
Etruscan villages; I believe they have not an even colourable claim
to the appellation, which, however, is of old date, and has given
rise to much ingenious diversion in providing etymologies for
place-names in the neighbourhood. The villages, however, have an
idyllic charm from their quaint old houses and lovely situation that
has no need to borrow interest from factitious history or philology.
Guarda, on an open terrace at the entrance to Val Tuoi, is perhaps
the most frequented as a summer resort. Its neighbourhood affords
rambles to suit all tastes, from mountaineering to dawdling, with
special attractions in Val Tuoi for the botanic dawdler.
At Ftan, delightfully placed on an undulating terrace some 1,500 feet
above the Inn, we enter a region impregnated with mineral waters and
gases of {41} singular potency, where thousands of sufferers from
various ills that flesh is heir to are yearly gathered. It is
claimed that no other district in Europe is so rich in therapeutic
waters.
The springs, which issue with a temperature a little over 60° F., are
all strongly acidulated, and though varying a good deal in their
constituents and in the proportions in which they are mixed, fall
broadly into two classes: Glauber's salts (sulphate, carbonate, and
chloride of sodium) and chalybeate or iron. They are good for both
drinking and bathing; the large proportion of carbonic acid gas with
which they are charged is said to render them peculiarly efficacious
in baths. An interesting evidence of the plutonic character of the
neighbourhood are the mofette, vents in the earth from which carbonic
acid gas issues in considerable quantity. One in a field near Scuol,
in which unwary birds, lizards, and insects are frequently done to
death, has been estimated to discharge eleven million litres a day.
The centres of the little invalid world are the Kurhaus and
Trinkhalle, emparadised in beautiful gardens on the left and right
banks of the Inn respectively, and connected by a roofed bridge.
Both sides of the valley bristle with hotels for the accommodation of
patients: Scuol on an open terrace on the left with magnificent
views, and Vulpera ensconced among woods and meadows on the right.
{42}