LECTOR. And if you are so worn-out and bereft of all emotions, how can
you tell a story?
AUCTOR. These two conditions permit me. First, that I am writing some
time after, and that I have recovered; secondly, that the story is not
mine, but taken straight out of that nationalist newspaper which had
served me so long to wrap up my bread and bacon in my haversack. This
is the story, and I will tell it you.
Now, I think of it, it would be a great waste of time. Here am I no
farther than perhaps a third of my journey, and I have already
admitted so much digression that my pilgrimage is like the story of a
man asleep and dreaming, instead of the plain, honest, and
straightforward narrative of fact. I will therefore postpone the Story
of the Hungry Student till I get into the plains of Italy, or into the
barren hills of that peninsula, or among the over-well-known towns of
Tuscany, or in some other place where a little padding will do neither
you nor me any great harm.
On the other hand, do not imagine that I am going to give you any kind
of description of this intolerable day's march. If you want some kind
of visual Concept (pretty word), take all these little chalets which
were beginning and make what you can of them.
LECTOR. Where are they?
AUCTOR. They are still in Switzerland; not here. They were
overnumerous as I maundered up from where at last the road leaves the
valley and makes over a little pass for a place called Schangnau. But
though it is not a story, on the contrary, an exact incident and the
truth--a thing that I would swear to in the court of justice, or quite
willingly and cheerfully believe if another man told it to me; or even
take as historical if I found it in a modern English history of the
Anglo-Saxon Church--though, I repeat, it is a thing actually lived,
yet I will tell it you.
It was at the very end of the road, and when an enormous weariness had
begun to add some kind of interest to this stuffless episode of the
dull day, that a peasant with a brutal face, driving a cart very
rapidly, came up with me. I said to him nothing, but he said to me
some words in German which I did not understand. We were at that
moment just opposite a little inn upon the right hand of the road, and
the peasant began making signs to me to hold his horse for him while
he went in and drank.
How willing I was to do this you will not perhaps understand, unless
you have that delicate and subtle pleasure in the holding of horses'
heads, which is the boast and glory of some rare minds. And I was the
more willing to do it from the fact that I have the habit of this kind
of thing, acquired in the French manoeuvres, and had once held a horse
for no less a person than a General of Division, who gave me a franc
for it, and this franc I spent later with the men of my battery,
purchasing wine. So to make a long story short, as the publisher said
when he published the popular edition of _Pamela,_ I held the horse
for the peasant; always, of course, under the implicit understanding
that he should allow me when he came out to have a drink, which I, of
course, expected him to bring in his own hands.
Far from it. I can understand the anger which some people feel against
the Swiss when they travel in that country, though I will always hold
that it is monstrous to come into a man's country of your own accord,
and especially into a country so free and so well governed as is
Switzerland, and then to quarrel with the particular type of citizen
that you find there.
Let us not discuss politics. The point is that the peasant sat in
there drinking with his friends for a good three-quarters of an hour.
Now and then a man would come out and look at the sky, and cough and
spit and turn round again and say something to the people within in
German, and go off; but no one paid the least attention to me as I
held this horse.
I was already in a very angry and irritable mood, for the horse was
restive and smelt his stable, and wished to break away from me. And
all angry and irritable as I was, I turned around to see if this man
were coming to relieve me; but I saw him laughing and joking with the
people inside; and they were all looking my way out of their window as
they laughed. I may have been wrong, but I thought they were laughing
at me. A man who knows the Swiss intimately, and who has written a
book upon 'The Drink Traffic: The Example of Switzerland', tells me
they certainly were not laughing at me; at any rate, I thought they
were, and moved by a sudden anger I let go the reins, gave the horse a
great clout, and set him off careering and galloping like a whirlwind
down the road from which he had come, with the bit in his teeth and
all the storms of heaven in his four feet. Instantly, as you may
imagine, all the scoffers came tumbling out of the inn, hullabooling,
gesticulating, and running like madmen after the horse, and one old
man even turned to protest to me. But I, setting my teeth, grasping my
staff, and remembering the purpose of my great journey, set on up the
road again with my face towards Rome.
I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will
not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to
me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot
seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all
the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going
to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end.
Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living!
For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be
skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and
eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of
his unpublished lyrics, we, by the art of writing--
Can fix the high elusive hour
And stand in things divine.
And as for high elusive hours, devil a bit of one was there all the
way from Burgdorf to the Inn of the Bridge, except the ecstatic flash
of joy when I sent that horse careering down the road with his bad
master after him and all his gang shouting among the hollow hills.
So. It was already evening. I was coming, more tired than ever, to a
kind of little pass by which my road would bring me back again to the
Emmen, now nothing but a torrent. All the slope down the other side of
the little pass (three or four hundred feet perhaps) was covered by a
village, called, if I remember right, Schangnau, and there was a large
school on my right and a great number of children there dancing round
in a ring and singing songs. The sight so cheered me that I
determined to press on up the valley, though with no definite goal for
the night. It was a foolish decision, for I was really in the heart of
an unknown country, at the end of roads, at the sources of rivers,
beyond help. I knew that straight before me, not five miles away, was
the Brienzer Grat, the huge high wall which it was my duty to cross
right over from side to side. I did not know whether or not there was
an inn between me and that vast barrier.
The light was failing. I had perhaps some vague idea of sleeping out,
but that would have killed me, for a heavy mist that covered all the
tops of the hills and that made a roof over the valley, began to drop
down a fine rain; and, as they sing in church on Christmas Eve, 'the
heavens sent down their dews upon a just man'. But that was written in
Palestine, where rain is a rare blessing; there and then in the cold
evening they would have done better to have warmed the righteous.
There is no controlling them; they mean well, but they bungle
terribly.
The road stopped being a road, and became like a Californian trail. I
approached enormous gates in the hills, high, precipitous, and narrow.
The mist rolled over them, hiding their summits and making them seem
infinitely lifted up and reaching endlessly into the thick sky; the
straight, tenuous lines of the rain made them seem narrower still.
Just as I neared them, hobbling, I met a man driving two cows, and
said to him the word, 'Guest-house?' to which he said 'Yaw!' and
pointed out a clump of trees to me just under the precipice and right
in the gates I speak of. So I went there over an old bridge, and found
a wooden house and went in.
It was a house which one entered without ceremony. The door was open,
and one walked straight into a great room. There sat three men playing
at cards. I saluted them loudly in French, English, and Latin, but
they did not understand me, and what seemed remarkable in an hotel
(for it was an hotel rather than an inn), no one in the house
understood me--neither the servants nor any one; but the servants did
not laugh at me as had the poor people near Burgdorf, they only stood
round me looking at me patiently in wonder as cows do at trains. Then
they brought me food, and as I did not know the names of the different
kinds of food, I had to eat what they chose; and the angel of that
valley protected me from boiled mutton. I knew, however, the word
Wein, which is the same in all languages, and so drank a quart of it
consciously and of a set purpose. Then I slept, and next morning at
dawn I rose up, put on my thin, wet linen clothes, and went
downstairs. No one was about. I looked around for something to fill my
sack. I picked up a great hunk of bread from the dining-room table,
and went out shivering into the cold drizzle that was still falling
from a shrouded sky. Before me, a great forbidding wall, growing
blacker as it went upwards and ending in a level line of mist, stood
the Brienzer Grat.
To understand what I next had to do it is necessary to look back at
the little map on page 105.
You will observe that the straight way to Rome cuts the Lake of Brienz
rather to the eastward of the middle, and then goes slap over
Wetterhorn and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called Ulrichen.
That is how a bird would do it, if some High Pope of Birds lived in
Rome and needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk; or if some
old primal relic sacred to birds was connected therewith, as, for
instance, the bones of the Dodo.... But I digress. The point is that
the straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over the lake, and
then over the Wetterhorn. That was manifestly impossible. But whatever
of it was possible had to be done, and among the possible things was
clambering over the high ridge of the Brienzer Grat instead of going
round like a coward by Interlaken. After I had clambered over it,
however, needs must I should have to take a pass called the Grimsel
Pass and reach the Rhone Valley that way. It was with such a
determination that I had come here to the upper waters of the Emmen,
and stood now on a moist morning in the basin where that stream rises,
at the foot of the mountain range that divided me from the lake.
The Brienzer Grat is an extraordinary thing. It is quite straight; its
summits are, of course, of different heights, but from below they seem
even, like a ridge: and, indeed, the whole mountain is more like a
ridge than any other I have seen. At one end is a peak called the 'Red
Horn', the other end falls suddenly above Interlaken, and wherever you
should cut it you would get a section like this, for it is as steep as
anything can be short of sheer rock. There are no precipices on it,
though there are nasty slabs quite high enough to kill a man--I saw
several of three or four hundred feet. It is about five or six
thousand feet high, and it stands right up and along the northern
shore of the lake of Brienz. I began the ascent.
Spongy meads, that soughed under the feet and grew steeper as one
rose, took up the first few hundred feet. Little rivulets of mere
dampness ran in among the under moss, and such very small hidden
flowers as there were drooped with the surfeit of moisture. The rain
was now indistinguishable from a mist, and indeed I had come so near
to the level belt of cloud, that already its gloom was exchanged for
that diffused light which fills vapours from within and lends them
their mystery. A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me,
clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many
turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped
me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive
drifting fog, in which it was most difficult to gauge one's progress.
Now and then a higher mass of rock, a peak on the ridge, would show
clear through a corridor of cloud and be hidden again; also at times I
would stand hesitating before a sharp wall or slab, and wait for a
shifting of the fog to make sure of the best way round. I struck what
might have been a loose path or perhaps only a gully; lost it again
and found it again. In one place I climbed up a jagged surface for
fifty feet, only to find when it cleared that it was no part of the
general ascent, but a mere obstacle which might have been outflanked.
At another time I stopped for a good quarter of an hour at an edge
that might have been an indefinite fall of smooth rock, but that
turned out to be a short drop, easy for a man, and not much longer
than my body. So I went upwards always, drenched and doubting, and not
sure of the height I had reached at any time.
At last I came to a place where a smooth stone lay between two
pillared monoliths, as though it had been put there for a bench.
Though all around me was dense mist, yet I could see above me the
vague shape of a summit looming quite near. So I said to myself--
'I will sit here and wait till it grows lighter and clearer, for I
must now be within two or three hundred feet of the top of the ridge,
and as anything at all may be on the other side, I had best go
carefully and knowing my way.'
So I sat down facing the way I had to go and looking upwards, till
perhaps a movement of the air might show me against a clear sky the
line of the ridge, and so let me estimate the work that remained to
do. I kept my eyes fixed on the point where I judged that sky line to
lie, lest I should miss some sudden gleam revealing it; and as I sat
there I grew mournful and began to consider the folly of climbing this
great height on an empty stomach. The soldiers of the Republic fought
their battles often before breakfast, but never, I think, without
having drunk warm coffee, and no one should attempt great efforts
without some such refreshment before starting. Indeed, my fasting,
and the rare thin air of the height, the chill and the dampness that
had soaked my thin clothes through and through, quite lowered my blood
and left it piano, whimpering and irresolute. I shivered and demanded
the sun.
Then I bethought me of the hunk of bread I had stolen, and pulling it
out of my haversack I began to munch that ungrateful breakfast. It was
hard and stale, and gave me little sustenance; I still gazed upwards
into the uniform meaningless light fog, looking for the ridge.
Suddenly, with no warning to prepare the mind, a faint but distinct
wind blew upon me, the mist rose in a wreath backward and upward, and
I was looking through clear immensity, not at any ridge, but over an
awful gulf at great white fields of death. The Alps were right upon me
and before me, overwhelming and commanding empty downward distances of
air. Between them and me was a narrow dreadful space of nothingness
and silence, and a sheer mile below us both, a floor to that
prodigious hollow, lay the little lake.
My stone had not been a halting-place at all, but was itself the
summit of the ridge, and those two rocks on either side of it framed a
notch upon the very edge and skyline of the high hills of Brienz.
Surprise and wonder had not time to form in my spirit before both were
swallowed up by fear. The proximity of that immense wall of cold, the
Alps, seen thus full from the level of its middle height and
comprehended as it cannot be from the depths; its suggestion of
something never changing throughout eternity--yet dead--was a threat
to the eager mind. They, the vast Alps, all wrapped round in ice,
frozen, and their immobility enhanced by the delicate, roaming veils
which (as from an attraction) hovered in their hollows, seemed to halt
the process of living. And the living soul whom they thus perturbed
was supported by no companionship. There were no trees or blades of
grass around me, only the uneven and primal stones of that height.
There were no birds in the gulf; there was no sound. And the whiteness
of the glaciers, the blackness of the snow-streaked rocks beyond, was
glistening and unsoftened. There had come something evil into their
sublimity. I was afraid.
Nor could I bear to look downwards. The slope was in no way a danger.
A man could walk up it without often using his hands, and a man could
go down it slowly without any direct fall, though here and there he
would have to turn round at each dip or step and hold with his hands
and feel a little for his foothold. I suppose the general slope, down,
down, to where the green began was not sixty degrees, but have you
ever tried looking down five thousand feet at sixty degrees? It drags
the mind after it, and I could not bear to begin the descent.
However I reasoned with myself. I said to myself that a man should
only be afraid of real dangers. That nightmare was not for the
daylight. That there was now no mist but a warm sun. Then choosing a
gully where water sometimes ran, but now dry, I warily began to
descend, using my staff and leaning well backwards.
There was this disturbing thing about the gully, that it went in
steps, and before each step one saw the sky just a yard or two ahead:
one lost the comforting sight of earth. One knew of course that it
would only be a little drop, and that the slope would begin again, but
it disturbed one. And it is a trial to drop or clamber down, say
fourteen or fifteen feet, sometimes twenty, and then to find no flat
foothold but that eternal steep beginning again. And this outline in
which I have somewhat, but not much, exaggerated the slope, will show
what I mean. The dotted line is the line of vision just as one got to
a 'step'. The little figure is AUCTOR. LECTOR is up in the air looking
at him. Observe the perspective of the lake below, but make no
comments.
I went very slowly. When I was about half-way down and had come to a
place where a shoulder of heaped rock stood on my left and where
little parallel ledges led up to it, having grown accustomed to the
descent and easier in my mind, I sat down on a slab and drew
imperfectly the things I saw: the lake below me, the first forests
clinging to the foot of the Alps beyond, their higher slopes of snow,
and the clouds that had now begun to gather round them and that
altogether hid the last third of their enormous height.
Then I saw a steamer on the lake. I felt in touch with men. The slope
grew easier. I snapped my fingers at the great devils that haunt high
mountains. I sniffed the gross and comfortable air of the lower
valleys, I entered the belt of wood and was soon going quite a pace
through the trees, for I had found a path, and was now able to sing.
So I did.
At last I saw through the trunks, but a few hundred feet below me, the
highroad that skirts the lake. I left the path and scrambled straight
down to it. I came to a wall which I climbed, and found myself in
somebody's garden. Crossing this and admiring its wealth and order (I
was careful not to walk on the lawns), I opened a little private gate
and came on to the road, and from there to Brienz was but a short way
along a fine hard surface in a hot morning sun, with the gentle lake
on my right hand not five yards away, and with delightful trees upon
my left, caressing and sometimes even covering me with their shade.
I was therefore dry, ready and contented when I entered by mid morning
the curious town of Brienz, which is all one long street, and of which
the population is Protestant. I say dry, ready and contented; dry in
my clothes, ready for food, contented with men and nature. But as I
entered I squinted up that interminable slope, I saw the fog wreathing
again along the ridge so infinitely above me, and I considered myself
a fool to have crossed the Brienzer Grat without breakfast. But I
could get no one in Brienz to agree with me, because no one thought I
had done it, though several people there could talk French.
The Grimsel Pass is the valley of the Aar; it is also the eastern
flank of that great _massif,_ or bulk and mass of mountains called the
Bernese Oberland. Western Switzerland, you must know, is not (as I
first thought it was when I gazed down from the Weissenstein) a plain
surrounded by a ring of mountains, but rather it is a plain in its
northern half (the plain of the lower Aar), and in its southern half
it is two enormous parallel lumps of mountains. I call them 'lumps',
because they are so very broad and tortuous in their plan that they
are hardly ranges. Now these two lumps are the Bernese Oberland and
the Pennine Alps, and between them runs a deep trench called the
valley of the Rhone. Take Mont Blanc in the west and a peak called the
Crystal Peak over the Val Bavona on the east, and they are the
flanking bastions of one great wall, the Pennine Alps. Take the
Diablerets on the west, and the Wetterhorn on the east, and they are
the flanking bastions of another great wall, the Bernese Oberland. And
these two walls are parallel, with the Rhone in between.
Now these two walls converge at a point where there is a sort of knot
of mountain ridges, and this point may be taken as being on the
boundary between Eastern and Western Switzerland. At this wonderful
point the Ticino, the Rhone, the Aar, and the Reuss all begin, and it
is here that the simple arrangement of the Alps to the west turns into
the confused jumble of the Alps to the east.
When you are high up on either wall you can catch the plan of all
this, but to avoid a confused description and to help you to follow
the marvellous, Hannibalian and never-before-attempted charge and
march which I made, and which, alas! ended only in a glorious
defeat--to help you to picture faintly to yourselves the mirific and
horripilant adventure whereby I nearly achieved superhuman success in
spite of all the powers of the air, I append a little map which is
rough but clear and plain, and which I beg you to study closely, for
it will make it easy for you to understand what next happened in my
pilgrimage.
The dark strips are the deep cloven valleys, the shaded belt is that
higher land which is yet passable by any ordinary man. The part left
white you may take to be the very high fields of ice and snow with
great peaks which an ordinary man must regard as impassable, unless,
indeed, he can wait for his weather and take guides and go on as a
tourist instead of a pilgrim.
You will observe that I have marked five clefts or valleys. A is that
of the _Aar,_ and the little white patch at the beginning is the lake
of Brienz. B is that of the _Reuss._ C is that of the _Rhone;_ and all
these three are _north_ of the great watershed or main chain, and all
three are full of German-speaking people.
On the other hand, D is the valley of the _Toccia,_ E of the _Maggia,_
and F of the _Ticino._ All these three are _south_ of the great
watershed, and are inhabited by Italian-speaking people. All these
three lead down at last to Lake Major, and so to Milan and so to Rome.
The straight line to Rome is marked on my map by a dotted line ending
in an arrow, and you will see that it was just my luck that it should
cross slap over that knot or tangle of ranges where all the rivers
spring. The problem was how to negotiate a passage from the valley of
the Aar to one of the three Italian valleys, without departing too far
from my straight line. To explain my track I must give the names of
all the high passes between the valleys. That between A and C is
called the _Grimsel;_ that between B and C the _Furka._ That between D
and C is the _Gries_ Pass, that between F and C the _Nufenen,_ and
that between E and F is not the easy thing it looks on the map; indeed
it is hardly a pass at all but a scramble over very high peaks, and it
is called the Crystalline Mountain. Finally, on the far right of my
map, you see a high passage between B and F. This is the famous St
Gothard.
The straightest way of all was (1) over the _Grimsel,_ then, the
moment I got into the valley of the Rhone (2), up out of it again over
the _Nufenen,_ then the moment I was down into the valley of the
_Ticino_ (F), up out of it again (3) over the Crystalline to the
valley of the _Maggia_ (E). Once in the Maggia valley (the top of it
is called the _Val Bavona),_ it is a straight path for the lakes and
Rome. There were also these advantages: that I should be in a place
very rarely visited--all the guide-books are doubtful on it; that I
should be going quite straight; that I should be accomplishing a feat,
viz. the crossing of those high passes one after the other (and you
must remember that over the Nufenen there is no road at all).
But every one I asked told me that thus early in the year (it was not
the middle of June) I could not hope to scramble over the Crystalline.
No one (they said) could do it and live. It was all ice and snow and
cold mist and verglas, and the precipices were smooth--a man would
never get across; so it was not worth while crossing the Nufenen Pass
if I was to be balked at the Crystal, and I determined on the Gries
Pass. I said to myself: 'I will go on over the Grimsel, and once in
the valley of the Rhone, I will walk a mile or two down to where the
Gries Pass opens, and I will go over it into Italy.' For the Gries
Pass, though not quite in the straight line, had this advantage, that
once over it you are really in Italy. In the Ticino valley or in the
Val Bavona, though the people are as Italian as Catullus, yet
politically they count as part of Switzerland; and therefore if you
enter Italy thereby, you are not suddenly introduced to that country,
but, as it were, inoculated, and led on by degrees, which is a pity.
For good things should come suddenly, like the demise of that wicked
man, Mr _(deleted by the censor),_ who had oppressed the poor for some
forty years, when he was shot dead from behind a hedge, and died in
about the time it takes to boil an egg, and there was an end of him.
Having made myself quite clear that I had a formed plan to go over the
Grimsel by the new road, then up over the Gries, where there is no
road at all, and so down into the vale of the Tosa, and having
calculated that on the morrow I should be in Italy, I started out from
Brienz after eating a great meal, it being then about midday, and I
having already, as you know, crossed the Brienzer Grat since dawn.
The task of that afternoon was more than I could properly undertake,
nor did I fulfil it. From Brienz to the top of the Grimsel is, as the
crow flies, quite twenty miles, and by the road a good twenty-seven.
It is true I had only come from over the high hills; perhaps six miles
in a straight line. But what a six miles! and all without food. Not
certain, therefore, how much of the pass I could really do that day,
but aiming at crossing it, like a fool, I went on up the first miles.
For an hour or more after Brienz the road runs round the base of and
then away from a fine great rock. There is here an alluvial plain like
a continuation of the lake, and the Aar runs through it, canalized and
banked and straight, and at last the road also becomes straight. On
either side rise gigantic cliffs enclosing the valley, and (on the day
I passed there) going up into the clouds, which, though high, yet made
a roof for the valley. From the great mountains on the left the noble
rock jutted out alone and dominated the little plain; on the right the
buttresses of the main Alps all stood in a row, and between them went
whorls of vapour high, high up--just above the places where snow still
clung to the slopes. These whorls made the utmost steeps more and more
misty, till at last they were lost in a kind of great darkness, in
which the last and highest banks of ice seemed to be swallowed up. I
often stopped to gaze straight above me, and I marvelled at the
silence.
It was the first part of the afternoon when I got to a place called
Meiringen, and I thought that there I would eat and drink a little
more. So I steered into the main street, but there I found such a
yelling and roaring as I had never heard before, and very damnable it
was; as though men were determined to do common evil wherever God has
given them a chance of living in awe and worship.
For they were all bawling and howling, with great placards and
tickets, and saying, 'This way to the Extraordinary Waterfall; that
way to the Strange Cave. Come with me and you shall see the
never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar,' and so forth. So that my
illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very
quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as
to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this
vulgarity and beastliness.
If a man goes to drink good wine he does not say, 'So that the wine be
good I do not mind eating strong pepper and smelling hartshorn as I
drink it,' and if a man goes to read a good verse, for instance, Jean
Richepin, he does not say, 'Go on playing on the trombone, go on
banging the cymbals; so long as I am reading good verse I am content.'
Yet men now go into the vast hills and sleep and live in their
recesses, and pretend to be indifferent to all the touts and shouters
and hurry and hotels and high prices and abominations. Thank God, it
goes in grooves! I say it again, thank God, the railways are trenches
that drain our modern marsh, for you have but to avoid railways, even
by five miles, and you can get more peace than would fill a nosebag.
All the world is my garden since they built railways, and gave me
leave to keep off them.
Also I vowed a franc to the Black Virgin of La Delivrande (next time I
should be passing there) because I was delivered from being a tourist,
and because all this horrible noise was not being dinned at me (who
was a poor and dirty pilgrim, and no kind of prey for these cabmen,
and busmen, and guides and couriers), but at a crowd of drawn, sad,
jaded tourists that had come in by a train.
Soon I had left them behind. The road climbed the first step upwards
in the valley, going round a rock on the other side of which the Aar
had cut itself a gorge and rushed in a fall and rapids. Then the road
went on and on weary mile after weary mile, and I stuck to it, and it
rose slowly all the time, and all the time the Aar went dashing by,
roaring and filling the higher valley with echoes.
I got beyond the villages. The light shining suffused through the
upper mist began to be the light of evening. Rain, very fine and
slight, began to fall. It was cold. There met and passed me, going
down the road, a carriage with a hood up, driving at full speed. It
could not be from over the pass, for I knew that it was not yet open
for carriages or carts. It was therefore from a hotel somewhere, and
if there was a hotel I should find it. I looked back to ask the
distance, but they were beyond earshot, and so I went on.
My boots in which I had sworn to walk to Rome were ruinous. Already
since the Weissenstein they had gaped, and now the Brienzer Grat had
made the sole of one of them quite free at the toe. It flapped as I
walked. Very soon I should be walking on my uppers. I limped also, and
I hated the wet cold rain. But I had to go on. Instead of flourishing
my staff and singing, I leant on it painfully and thought of duty, and
death, and dereliction, and every other horrible thing that begins
with a D. I had to go on. If I had gone back there was nothing for
miles.
Before it was dark--indeed one could still read--I saw a group of
houses beyond the Aar, and soon after I saw that my road would pass
them, going over a bridge. When I reached them I went into the first,
saying to myself, 'I will eat, and if I can go no farther I will sleep
here.'
There were in the house two women, one old, the other young; and they
were French-speaking, from the Vaud country. They had faces like
Scotch people, and were very kindly, but odd, being Calvinist. I said,
'Have you any beans?' They said, 'Yes.' I suggested they should make
me a dish of beans and bacon, and give me a bottle of wine, while I
dried myself at their great stove. All this they readily did for me,
and I ate heartily and drank heavily, and they begged me afterwards to
stop the night and pay them for it; but I was so set up by my food and
wine that I excused myself and went out again and took the road. It
was not yet dark.
By some reflection from the fields of snow, which were now quite near
at hand through the mist, the daylight lingered astonishingly late.
The cold grew bitter as I went on through the gloaming. There were no
trees save rare and stunted pines. The Aar was a shallow brawling
torrent, thick with melting ice and snow and mud. Coarse grass grew on
the rocks sparsely; there were no flowers. The mist overhead was now
quite near, and I still went on and steadily up through the
half-light. It was as lonely as a calm at sea, except for the noise of
the river. I had overworn myself, and that sustaining surface which
hides from us in our health the abysses below the mind--I felt it
growing weak and thin. My fatigue bewildered me. The occasional steeps
beside the road, one especially beneath a high bridge where a
tributary falls into the Aar in a cascade, terrified me. They were
like the emptiness of dreams. At last it being now dark, and I having
long since entered the upper mist, or rather cloud (for I was now as
high as the clouds), I saw a light gleaming through the fog, just off
the road, through pine-trees. It was time. I could not have gone much
farther.
To this I turned and found there one of those new hotels, not very
large, but very expensive. They knew me at once for what I was, and
welcomed me with joy. They gave me hot rum and sugar, a fine warm bed,
told me I was the first that had yet stopped there that year, and left
me to sleep very deep and yet in pain, as men sleep who are stunned.
But twice that night I woke suddenly, staring at darkness. I had
outworn the physical network upon which the soul depends, and I was
full of terrors.
Next morning I had fine coffee and bread and butter and the rest, like
a rich man; in a gilded dining-room all set out for the rich, and
served by a fellow that bowed and scraped. Also they made me pay a
great deal, and kept their eyes off my boots, and were still courteous
to me, and I to them. Then I bought wine of them--the first wine not
of the country that I had drunk on this march, a Burgundy--and putting
it in my haversack with a nice white roll, left them to wait for the
next man whom the hills might send them.
The clouds, the mist, were denser than ever in that early morning; one
could only see the immediate road. The cold was very great; my clothes
were not quite dried, but my heart was high, and I pushed along well
enough, though stiffly, till I came to what they call the Hospice,
which was once a monk-house, I suppose, but is now an inn. I had
brandy there, and on going out I found that it stood at the foot of a
sharp ridge which was the true Grimsel Pass, the neck which joins the
Bernese Oberland to the eastern group of high mountains. This ridge or
neck was steep like a pitched roof--very high I found it, and all of
black glassy rock, with here and there snow in sharp, even, sloping
sheets just holding to it. I could see but little of it at a time on
account of the mist.
Hitherto for all these miles the Aar had been my companion, and the
road, though rising always, had risen evenly and not steeply. Now the
Aar was left behind in the icy glen where it rises, and the road went
in an artificial and carefully built set of zig-zags up the face of
the cliff. There is a short cut, but I could not find it in the mist.
It is the old mule-path. Here and there, however, it was possible to
cut off long corners by scrambling over the steep black rock and
smooth ice, and all the while the cold, soft mist wisped in and out
around me. After a thousand feet of this I came to the top of the
Grimsel, but not before I had passed a place where an avalanche had
destroyed the road and where planks were laid. Also before one got to
the very summit, no short cuts or climbing were possible. The road
ran deep in a cutting like a Devonshire lane. Only here the high banks
were solid snow.
Some little way past the summit, on the first zig-zag down, I passed
the Lake of the Dead in its mournful hollow. The mist still enveloped
all the ridge-side, and moved like a press of spirits over the frozen
water, then--as suddenly as on the much lower Brienzer Grat, and (as
on the Brienzer Grat) to the southward and the sun, the clouds lifted
and wreathed up backward and were gone, and where there had just been
fulness was only an immensity of empty air and a sudden sight of clear
hills beyond and of little strange distant things thousands and
thousands of feet below.
LECTOR. Pray are we to have any more of that fine writing?
AUCTOR. I saw there as in a cup things that I had thought (when I
first studied the map at home) far too spacious and spread apart to go
into the view. Yet here they were all quite contained and close
together, on so vast a scale was the whole place conceived. It was the
comb of mountains of which I have written; the meeting of all the
valleys.
There, from the height of a steep bank, as it were (but a bank many
thousands of feet high), one looked down into a whole district or
little world. On the map, I say, it had seemed so great that I had
thought one would command but this or that portion of it; as it was,
one saw it all.
And this is a peculiar thing I have noticed in all mountains, and have
never been able to understand--- namely, that if you draw a plan or
section to scale, your mountain does not seem a very important thing.
One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to
feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in
one's hand--yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to
us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at
the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its
greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in
theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height to the
distances one views from them, they ought to claim no such effect, and
that they can produce that effect is related to another thing--the way
in which they exaggerate their own steepness.
For instance, those noble hills, my downs in Sussex, when you are upon
them overlooking the weald, from Chanctonbury say, feel like this--or
even lower. Indeed, it is impossible to give them truly, so
insignificant are they; if the stretch of the Weald were made nearly a
yard long, Chanctonbury would not, in proportion, be more than a fifth
of an inch high! And yet, from the top of Chanctonbury, how one seems
to overlook it and possess it all!
Well, so it was here from the Grimsel when I overlooked the springs of
the Rhone. In true proportion the valley I gazed into and over must
have been somewhat like this--