When one leaves the dusty Rhone Valley, and turns southward from Visp,
he plunges into the wildest and most savage part of Switzerland, and
penetrates the heart of the Alps. The valley is scarcely more than a
narrow gorge, with high precipices on either side, through which the
turbid and rapid Visp tears along at a furious rate, boiling and leaping
in foam over its rocky bed, and nearly as large as the Rhone at the
junction. From Visp to St. Nicolaus, twelve miles, there is only a
mule-path, but a very good one, winding along on the slope, sometimes
high up, and again descending to cross the stream, at first by vineyards
and high stone walls, and then on the edges of precipices, but always
romantic and wild. It is noon when we set out from Visp, in true pilgrim
fashion, and the sun is at first hot; but as we slowly rise up the easy
ascent, we get a breeze, and forget the heat in the varied charms of the
walk.
Everything for the use of the upper valley and Zermatt, now a place of
considerable resort, must be carried by porters, or on horseback; and we
pass or meet men and women, sometimes a dozen of them together, laboring
along under the long, heavy baskets, broad at the top and coming
nearly to a point below, which are universally used here for carrying
everything. The tubs for transporting water are of the same sort. There
is no level ground, but every foot is cultivated. High up on the sides
of the precipices, where it seems impossible for a goat to climb, are
vineyards and houses, and even villages, hung on slopes, nearly up to
the clouds, and with no visible way of communication with the rest of
the world.
In two hours' time we are at Stalden, a village perched upon a rocky
promontory, at the junction of the valleys of the Saas and the Visp,
with a church and white tower conspicuous from afar. We climb up to the
terrace in front of it, on our way into the town. A seedy-looking priest
is pacing up and down, taking the fresh breeze, his broad-brimmed,
shabby hat held down upon the wall by a big stone. His clothes are worn
threadbare; and he looks as thin and poor as a Methodist minister in
a stony town at home, on three hundred a year. He politely returns our
salutation, and we walk on. Nearly all the priests in this region
look wretchedly poor,--as poor as the people. Through crooked, narrow
streets, with houses overhanging and thrusting out corners and gables,
houses with stables below, and quaint carvings and odd little windows
above, the panes of glass hexagons, so that the windows looked like
sections of honey-comb,--we found our way to the inn, a many-storied
chalet, with stairs on the outside, stone floors in the upper passages,
and no end of queer rooms; built right in the midst of other houses as
odd, decorated with German-text carving, from the windows of which the
occupants could look in upon us, if they had cared to do so; but they
did not. They seem little interested in anything; and no wonder, with
their hard fight with Nature. Below is a wine-shop, with a little side
booth, in which some German travelers sit drinking their wine, and
sputtering away in harsh gutturals. The inn is very neat inside, and we
are well served. Stalden is high; but away above it on the opposite side
is a village on the steep slope, with a slender white spire that rivals
some of the snowy needles. Stalden is high, but the hill on which it
stands is rich in grass. The secret of the fertile meadows is the most
thorough irrigation. Water is carried along the banks from the river,
and distributed by numerous sluiceways below; and above, the little
mountain streams are brought where they are needed by artificial
channels. Old men and women in the fields were constantly changing the
direction of the currents. All the inhabitants appeared to be porters:
women were transporting on their backs baskets full of soil; hay was
being backed to the stables; burden-bearers were coming and going upon
the road: we were told that there are only three horses in the place.
There is a pleasant girl who brings us luncheon at the inn; but the
inhabitants for the most part are as hideous as those we see all day:
some have hardly the shape of human beings, and they all live in the
most filthy manner in the dirtiest habitations. A chalet is a sweet
thing when you buy a little model of it at home.
After we leave Stalden, the walk becomes more picturesque, the
precipices are higher, the gorges deeper. It required some engineering
to carry the footpath round the mountain buttresses and over the
ravines. Soon the village of Emd appears on the right,--a very
considerable collection of brown houses, and a shining white
church-spire, above woods and precipices and apparently unscalable
heights, on a green spot which seems painted on the precipices; with
nothing visible to keep the whole from sliding down, down, into the
gorge of the Visp. Switzerland may not have so much population to the
square mile as some countries; but she has a population to some of
her square miles that would astonish some parts of the earth's
surface elsewhere. Farther on we saw a faint, zigzag footpath, that we
conjectured led to Emd; but it might lead up to heaven. All day we had
been solicited for charity by squalid little children, who kiss their
nasty little paws at us, and ask for centimes. The children of Emd,
however, did not trouble us. It must be a serious affair if they ever
roll out of bed.
Late in the afternoon thunder began to tumble about the hills, and
clouds snatched away from our sight the snow-peaks at the end of the
valley; and at length the rain fell on those who had just arrived and
on the unjust. We took refuge from the hardest of it in a lonely chalet
high up on the hillside, where a roughly dressed, frowzy Swiss, who
spoke bad German, and said he was a schoolmaster, gave us a bench in the
shed of his schoolroom. He had only two pupils in attendance, and I
did not get a very favorable impression of this high school. Its
master quite overcame us with thanks when we gave him a few centimes on
leaving. It still rained, and we arrived in St. Nicolaus quite damp.
There is a decent road from St. Nicolaus to Zermatt, over which go
wagons without springs. The scenery is constantly grander as we
ascend. The day is not wholly clear; but high on our right are the vast
snow-fields of the Weishorn, and out of the very clouds near it seems
to pour the Bies Glacier. In front are the splendid Briethorn, with its
white, round summit; the black Riffelhorn; the sharp peak of the little
Matterhorn; and at last the giant Matterhorn itself rising before us,
the most finished and impressive single mountain in Switzerland. Not
so high as Mont Blanc by a thousand feet, it appears immense in its
isolated position and its slender aspiration. It is a huge pillar of
rock, with sharply cut edges, rising to a defined point, dusted with
snow, so that the rock is only here and there revealed. To ascend it
seems as impossible as to go up the Column of Luxor; and one can believe
that the gentlemen who first attempted it in 1864, and lost their lives,
did fall four thousand feet before their bodies rested on the glacier
below.
We did not stay at Zermatt, but pushed on for the hotel on the top of
the Riffelberg,--a very stiff and tiresome climb of about three hours,
an unending pull up a stony footpath. Within an hour of the top, and
when the white hotel is in sight above the zigzag on the breast of the
precipice, we reach a green and widespread Alp where hundreds of cows
are feeding, watched by two forlorn women,--the “milkmaids all forlorn”
of poetry. At the rude chalets we stop, and get draughts of rich, sweet
cream. As we wind up the slope, the tinkling of multitudinous bells from
the herd comes to us, which is also in the domain of poetry. All the way
up we have found wild flowers in the greatest profusion; and the higher
we ascend, the more exquisite is their color and the more perfect their
form. There are pansies; gentians of a deeper blue than flower ever was
before; forget-me-nots, a pink variety among them; violets, the Alpine
rose and the Alpine violet; delicate pink flowers of moss; harebells;
and quantities for which we know no names, more exquisite in shape and
color than the choicest products of the greenhouse. Large slopes are
covered with them,--a brilliant show to the eye, and most pleasantly
beguiling the way of its tediousness. As high as I ascended, I still
found some of these delicate flowers, the pink moss growing in profusion
amongst the rocks of the GornerGrat, and close to the snowdrifts.
The inn on the Riffelberg is nearly eight thousand feet high, almost two
thousand feet above the hut on Mount Washington; yet it is not so cold
and desolate as the latter. Grass grows and flowers bloom on its smooth
upland, and behind it and in front of it are the snow-peaks. That
evening we essayed the Gorner-Grat, a rocky ledge nearly ten thousand
feet above the level of the sea; but after a climb of an hour and a
half, and a good view of Monte Rosa and the glaciers and peaks of that
range, we were prevented from reaching the summit, and driven back by
a sharp storm of hail and rain. The next morning I started for the
GornerGrat again, at four o'clock. The Matterhorn lifted its huge bulk
sharply against the sky, except where fleecy clouds lightly draped it
and fantastically blew about it. As I ascended, and turned to look at
it, its beautifully cut peak had caught the first ray of the sun, and
burned with a rosy glow. Some great clouds drifted high in the air: the
summits of the Breithorn, the Lyscamm, and their companions, lay cold
and white; but the snow down their sides had a tinge of pink. When I
stood upon the summit of the Gorner-Grat, the two prominent silver peaks
of Monte Rosa were just touched with the sun, and its great snow-fields
were visible to the glacier at its base. The Gorner-Grat is a rounded
ridge of rock, entirely encirled by glaciers and snow-peaks. The
panorama from it is unexcelled in Switzerland.
Returning down the rocky steep, I descried, solitary in that great waste
of rock and snow, the form of a lady whom I supposed I had left sleeping
at the inn, overcome with the fatigue of yesterday's tramp. Lured on
by the apparently short distance to the backbone of the ridge, she had
climbed the rocks a mile or more above the hotel, and come to meet me.
She also had seen the great peaks lift themselves out of the gray dawn,
and Monte Rosa catch the first rays. We stood awhile together to see
how jocund day ran hither and thither along the mountain-tops, until
the light was all abroad, and then silently turned downward, as one goes
from a mount of devotion.