THE VIA MALA--SCHAMSTHAL--ANDEER.
Living things, and things inanimate,
Do speak at heaven’s command to eyes and ears,
And speak to social reason’s inner sense
With inarticulate language.--WORDSWORTH.
_August 7._--As I foresaw that I should not to-day get beyond Andeer,
I breakfasted in a leisurely style at seven o’clock, without at all
feeling that my loins were girded, and my staff in my hand. The head
waiter, a very incarnation of good nature and harmless vanity, availed
himself of the opportunity for trying to persuade me to delay my
departure till the evening, or still better till to-morrow, that I
might see General von Göben, who, as he impressively informed me, was
to arrive to-day with a party of seven, and had taken the whole of the
first floor. At Dissentis I was told that Von Moltke had been there;
and at Pontresina, and elsewhere, I heard of other German celebrities.
At the places where we ourselves most do congregate we find many
Germans; but as they do not much desire our society, and do not go to
Switzerland for precisely the same objects as ourselves, we must not
judge by the proportion of them we find in these places of the number
of them who are travelling in Switzerland. The elders and middle-aged
among them much affect Bads. At such places as Davos am Platz and
Tarasp they may be counted by the hundred. But even at these places
we do not see their largest contingent. That is composed of the young
and active, who wish to see the mountains, and who do all their work
on foot. These are dispersed, like an army of skirmishers, over the
whole country. In my excursion of this year, which took me on foot over
between three and four hundred miles, and fifteen so called Passes,
I nowhere met on the road a single Englishman, (had the Passes been
difficult ones my experience, perhaps, would have been different,)
but I seldom, if ever, passed a day without meeting several Germans,
generally in parties of three, without a porter. We may to some extent
judge of the degree to which Alpinism has penetrated the German mind
by the fact, that, while our Alpine Club numbers 300 members, theirs
numbers 3,000. I have no means of verifying these figures. I only
give them as I found them in a Swiss newspaper. The same authority
informed me that the Swiss Alpine Club now counts 1,700 members. Still
what there may be of fact in the above statements indicates that
mountaineering is not only a more accessible, but also a more popular,
pursuit with them than with us. There must be some reason for this.
Can the reason be that among them culture is both broader in itself,
and more widely diffused than among ourselves? These people, too,
are more gregarious and sociable than we are; perhaps some causes of
repulsion that are operative here may not be felt among them; and so
they may travel in larger parties than are common with us.
At 7.30 started for the Via Mala. A cloudless morning. The freshness
of the air, the clearness of the light, the depth of the blue combined
to stimulate the nerves both of body and mind, and prepared me for
feeling all the effects of the expected wonders of the scene; or as it
is unwise ever to expect anything, for appreciating highly whatever the
walk might present to me. As I walked along, looking down precipices
between lofty pine stems, as straight and round as if they had been
turned in a lathe, to the broken foamy thread of the Hinter Rhein in
the bottom, and then up 1,600 feet of opposite black precipice, on the
summit of which, here and there, a lofty pine broke the sky-line, but
showing at that height no bigger than a hop-pole, the circumnavigator,
understanding how my mind was engaged, and perhaps himself a little
touched by the scene, propounded the only remark he made on the
scenery during the eight days he was with me. ‘If a man,’ quoth he,
‘Sydney-way, had this gully on his run, he might make any amount of
money by showing it. Any amount!’ For the moment I was a little taken
by surprise; but it was no more than an unexpected application of his
governing idea--which I had already had served up in many forms, and
those not always quite _à propos_ to what was before us--that the only
good of anything in the world was its capacity for being turned into
money. Having been brought up to work at his trade from 5 A.M. to 8
P.M. for seven francs a week, (the wages paid at Poschiavo in those
days,) he had come to hate and despise labour; and his Australian
experiences, acting on a Swiss substratum, had made him an ideologist,
but of one idea, that one being that the one sure way to the one great
object was to buy cheap, and to sell dear. Again and again he had
repeated to me that this was the way in which all the money in the
world that had been made honestly had been made. But he never could
explain how the money that was given in the good price had been made,
except by the same process of selling dear. Those, he maintained, who
had been most pre-eminently successful in life were those who had most
thoroughly carried out the rule, perhaps without an undeviating regard
for honesty. He had not succeeded at Sydney, because ice was so dear
there; that is to say because ices could not be made without ice. The
liquor trade had great capacities, because there are other things in
the barrel besides liquor. The world, and its money-making inhabitants
were to him only an enlarged edition of the two American lads, who
during their journey in a railway car, without leaving their seats,
made each of them a large fortune by an incessant repetition of the
process of swapping what they had about them. I had little to say just
now to his remarks, for what of the world was before me indisposed me
to transfer my thoughts to the antipodes, or even to say anything on
behalf of labour and thrift, and of honesty, in reply to his narrow and
unfavourable experiences of life.
The Via Mala though of the same character as the Schyn is both more
diversified and more astonishing. The roadway itself is wider, and of
more solid construction than that of its neighbour; nor is it all on
one general level, for, as you advance along it, you are generally
ascending or descending. It also crosses from side to side, being
carried over the stream by bridges, which here it has been necessary to
build at a great height above the stream. The ravine, too, is not so
uniformly wedge-shaped, but in places the opposite side will appear to
be almost, or perhaps will be quite, perpendicular. There is indeed one
instance of its actually leaning towards you. The hammers and chisels
of the old world would never have made this road. Gunpowder it was that
rendered its construction possible, and we may almost say that made the
want of it felt. It first made the old castles indefensible, and the
man-at-arms as good a man in the field as the armoured knight; in other
words it first helped to sweep away such impediments to production,
freedom of exchange, and accumulation as the Hohen Rhätiens of mediæval
Europe; and when they were gone, and in consequence production had
increased, and facilities for communication became necessary, what had
aided in abolishing the castles was found capable also of aiding in the
construction of the road. We may suppose that the inventors of this
explosive, as has been the case with most inventions, had no glimpse of
the good work it would accomplish. They could have had no anticipations
of its disestablishing feudalism, and constructing roads through the
Alps. And even now we seem to be only feeling our way to some guesses
of what will be the kind of work it will do in any future war, that is
to say what effect it will have on the history of the future.
I observed as I was advancing along this Via Mala, in what good
keeping with the sombreness of the ravines was the monotonous form of
the pines. Were its trees of the kinds that are spreading in limb,
and varied in form and foliage, it would imply that nature was more
benignant than the other features of the scene suggest. But as it is,
you find that only one kind of tree can live here, and that a little
thought shows you is so constructed as to enable it to withstand the
heavy snowfalls and violent gales of winter. Its branches are so short,
perhaps somewhat shorter than they would be with us, and, too, so
constructed, that they never can be called upon to sustain any great
weight of snow, and the trunk tapers so regularly, like a well-made
fishing rod, as to enable it to sustain the most sudden and violent
storm blasts. The top yields to the pressure, but does not snap,
because the stiffness of the stem is gradually increasing; and this,
before the bottom has been reached, has increased to such a degree as
to prevent any strain being felt by the roots. As you observe this
adaptation of form and structure, the hardness of the conditions of the
station that are inferred deepens the effect upon your thought of the
hardness of the conditions that are seen.
At Thusis we had been told that the storm of the previous Sunday night
had so swollen the Hinter Rhein as to have raised the water to within a
few feet of the crown of the arch of the bridge. At the other extremity
of the Via Mala--the place is called Reischen--we found that a bridge
had been swept away. This had interrupted the traffic for twenty-four
hours, when those who had charge of the road succeeded in laying some
pine trunks across the chasm, and forming upon them a roadway of
transverse squared slabs. We stopped a few minutes to see the diligence
pass this improvised structure. The three leaders were taken out, as
there was some chance that the dancing and rattling of the loose slabs
might scare them. With this precaution the passage was effected easily.
I have already mentioned that on the first afternoon of this excursion
I inspected the deep perpendicular channel of the Aare on the eastern
side of the Kirchet to see if it presented any indications of its
having been formed by any other agency than that of the stream that
is now running through it. Every indication seemed to imply that the
channel had been eroded by the stream, and by it alone. Every deep
channel I passed, throughout this excursion, I looked at with the same
thought in my mind, and I nowhere saw anything to suggest the operation
of any other agent. And in this ravine, the most perpendicular and
deepest of them all, I saw nothing that pointed to a different
conclusion. Here a single arch is sufficient to carry you over the
stream at a height of 300 feet above it. It is impossible to suppose
but that the whole of these 300 feet were excavated by the stream that
is now fretting at the bottom of them. If, then, you are certain that
it cut out the 300 feet below you, what, except your niggardly ideas
about the extent of past time, is there to prevent your supposing that
it cut out the 1,300 feet above you? Believe the evidence of your eyes
in this matter, and it will add a hundredfold to the interest with
which you will contemplate this grand example of the method in which
nature makes a stream cut a channel for itself through a mountain
of solid rock. You will think how long she has been engaged in the
work, and that she is now carrying it on with the same instrument,
and applied in the same fashion, as thousands and thousands of years
ago. The reason why in these gorges the rock is cut with comparative
rapidity is that in them the stream is always both rapid and confined.
Because it is rapid it is working with the greatest possible power, and
because it is narrow that greatest power is applied at the greatest
possible advantage, that is to say it is confined to the central
straight line of the narrow bottom, for all the sand and stones are
turned in from each side to that central line. Hence the rapidity,
narrowness, and directness of the cutting action. When, however, the
stream has passed out of the gorge into more level ground, it becomes
diffused: it cannot, therefore, cut any longer at the bottom; and for
its former tendency to directness of course is substituted a tendency
to meandering.
In Switzerland you read much of the past and present life of this
terraqueous globe. So indeed you may on the alluvial flats of our
eastern counties, if it is there that your lot has been cast; but
with this difference, that in them the characters of the writing are
small and indistinct, while in Switzerland they are in Roman text, and
are held up before you, as it were on a signboard, to attract your
attention. The life of the globe, like that of a plant or animal, is
the result of the forces that have acted, and are acting within it, and
upon it. In Switzerland you behold what was their action in past times
in the mighty mountains they have upheaved; and in the stratification
of these mountains you behold what preceded their upheaval; and then
you go on of yourself to consider what preceded the deposition of
those strata. You are reading nature backwards, as you might a Hebrew
volume. In the igneous rocks that you see have been intruded you read
another chapter that reveals to you the action of other forces. The
shivering of mountain pinnacles tells you something about lightning,
storms, and frosts. Excavated valleys, and lakes, polished rocks, and
striated mountain flanks, and old _moraine_ mounds are a lesson to you
upon glacier action, and its greater activity in former epochs. Excised
ravines, filled-up lakes, avalanches of _débris_, mountainside slips,
burying villages and blocking up valleys, roads you are traversing cut
through, and bridges you were to have crossed carried away, fields
buried, or washed away, or lately formed, are chapters on the action
of running water. Forests flourishing on all but naked rock, greenest
prairies on a soil but an inch or two deep, earth-pillars, threads of
water on every mountain side, and a glancing stream in every valley,
oblige you to think of the relation of oceans, clouds, winds, the
varying capacity of the atmosphere for retaining moisture, and of rain,
to the vegetable and animal life of the land. Fragments of mountains
hurled into valleys may remind you of earthquakes. And the interest of
all this is intensified by thinking how it has shaped the life of man,
and is at this moment, while you are reading the lesson before you,
affecting its every day. Manifestly it is these operations of nature
which have provided him with his station here, and manifestly he must
conform his life to the conditions of the station he inhabits. It is
so, of course, everywhere. But here in Switzerland it is more readily
seen and felt that it is so.
On emerging from the ravine of the Via Mala the transformation of scene
has some resemblance to that on the St. Gothard route, when one passes
from the Devil’s Bridge by a few steps through the Urner Loch into
the Urserenthal. In the case of the latter the transformation is more
sudden and complete. There the change of form from pointed ruggedness
to wavy smoothness, and of colour from gray and black to soft green
is so instantaneous that the feeling produced is almost that of being
transferred in a moment from darkness to light. Here the change, though
complete, is not instantaneous. You are prepared for the valley of
Schams, its fields, chiefly of green, but with some gold, its villages,
its churches, its scattered _châlets_, its busy inhabitants by a mile,
or so, of intermediate improvement. The scenes are not shifted, or
reversed, before you know what is being done, but one melts into the
other. It is a diorama in which the valley of Schams takes the place
of the ravine of the Via Mala. Still, if you are at all susceptible to
effects of this kind, the change in the nature of the impressions will
be felt to be great. My feeling was that I was a musical instrument
possessed of consciousness, but not of free agency; and that nature
was playing on me what, and as, she pleased: first something rude,
simple, and clangorous; then something soft, soothing, and varied.
From Zillis, the first village of the valley, where we stopped at the
hotel de la Poste for half an hour, I counted five villages over the
grassy slopes around me, and seven churches, generally on more or less
conspicuous knolls. I was seated outside in the sun on a bench against
the wall. The presence of a stranger soon attracted the curiosity
of some children that were playing about in the street. A few cents
secured their attention. I asked them why they were not at school. The
schools here were not open, they told me, except in winter. During
the four months of summer they are closed, in order that the children
of these industrious peasants may learn to labour, as well as to read
and write; and that the schoolmaster, too, may have as well as other
people, time to get in his hay, or in some way or other to earn what
will enable him to buy hay, for in this part of the world none can live
without a cow.
And as it is with attendance at school, so is it to a great extent in
these valleys with attendance at church: it is affected by times and
seasons. I once asked a woman who was describing to me the rigour of
the winter in one of these high valleys, whether she was speaking from
experience? Did she live up here in winter? Of course she did. Where
else had poor people to go?
‘What do you do to pass the time?’
‘In winter we go every day to church.’
‘Why do you not go every day now?’
‘Because we have now something else to do.’
The custom, then, of going to church, as I have often suspected is
the case with prayer three times a day in the East, does not owe its
existence and its maintenance exclusively to motives of a religious
kind. It in some degree rests upon its giving people something to
do, who otherwise would at the time have nothing to do, and upon its
enabling them to indulge their sense of gregariousness. There is
nothing mischievous, or reprehensible in this. Quite the contrary;
for why in our efforts to keep alive our sense of the Unseen, and our
moral sense, should we reject what aid may be obtained from the action
of motives which, though not religious in the ordinary meaning of the
word, are quite natural and very beneficial?
I found that in this valley, as is the case in most others, there
are very few families who do not reside in houses of their own, and
very few owners of houses who are without a bit of land of their own.
This very much increased the interest with which I regarded the seven
villages, and the multitude of little patches of green, and of gold,
which tesselated the area around me of about a mile and a half in
diameter, walled in by its amphitheatre of rugged mountains. To live
in a house that is your own makes life pleasanter, and to cultivate
a field that is your own makes labour lighter. The thoughts, the
feelings, the lives of peasants who live in their own houses, and
cultivate their own land are of a higher order than the thoughts, the
feelings, the lives of those who do not; and where this underlies the
picture, the scene is a pleasanter one to contemplate.
Having loitered much by the way it was midday when I entered Andeer.
This is the chief place in the valley. It possesses many roomy
substantially built houses, and is quite a little town. From its extent
you would suppose that its population must exceed the 600 it is said
to contain. All these towns, however, cover more ground than towns
of equal population would with us from the fact that almost all the
dwelling houses have annexed to them cow-houses with the hayloft in
an upper story: and these cow-houses with haylofts over them are not
readily distinguishable from dwelling houses. The hotel Fravi, at which
I put up--I do not know whether there is another in the place--rehorses
the diligences and carriages, which go to and fro over the Splügen.
It is therefore a large establishment, making up many beds, and
having stabling for about forty horses. The thickness of the walls of
the hotel, nearly three feet on the third story, reminded me of the
severity of the winter these 600 people have to get through, somehow or
other, with their scanty means and humble appliances, when their houses
are for months together half buried in snow, and they are walled in,
as it were in a prison, with mountain-high snow barriers right and
left, and every breath of air that reaches them is charged with most
benumbing cold.
On this day, however, there was nothing to suggest the severities of an
Alpine winter, except the preparations these good people were making
for its advent. The depth of colour in the blue abyss, unflecked by
cloud, and undimmed by a suspicion of mistiness, was such as we can
know little of here in England. It was one of a succession of sunny
days, that was following a spell of wet; and so every man, woman, and
child was out making, or bringing in, hay. The shutters of almost every
house in the town were up, indicating where their inmates were, and
what they were about. Later in the day the results of the work of the
day, and of the few fine ones that had preceded it, began to be seen in
the streets. There was a constant succession of little trucks drawn by
oxen, some on wheels, and some on runners, loaded high with fragrant
hay. Those who could not afford oxen drew these trucks themselves,
the mother and the little people often pulling it along together;
and, to go a step still lower, those who could not afford the trucks,
carried their hay in large bundles on their own backs. The sun was at
the bottom of all this life and successful labour; and the warmth he
was pouring down into the valley to-day would keep these industrious
families alive in the winter. The amount of air, too, was just what was
enough for their haymaking. To one sitting outside the hotel, close by
its row of poplars, watching the arrival of the hay harvest, the breeze
appealed to four senses at once. You felt the contact of its crisp
freshness; you heard the rustling, and saw the quivering of the aspen
leaves as it moved by them; and it brought to you the fragrance of the
new hay. Later in the day when the hay was housed, and the fields were
wet with dew, you heard the blacksmith’s hammer repairing the damages
the good people’s tools had sustained, and the wood-cleaver’s axe
preparing to-morrow’s fuel. For in this part of the world all trades
work till 8 P.M., having begun at 5 A.M.; two hours in the middle of
the day being appropriated to rest--two sacred hours, the sabbath of
each day--which are most religiously observed everywhere, even at the
post-office bureau. And these men who were now working on till eight,
had been at work all day in the hay-field, from which they had only
been driven by the heavy dew of such an evening, following such a day,
at such a height.