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.