you on stepping out of the _northern forest_. This is the “Rothe Wand”
which, considering its respectable height of 2701 meters, is a decidedly
coy mountain, and more clever at hiding itself than most of them; you
may obtain another clear view of it from the platform of Frastanz
station. It seems incredible that this “Red Wall” which is now climbed
by a hundred tourists every year, should in the days of my father have
been deemed so inaccessible that he thought it worth while to describe
an ascent of it in the transactions of our Alpine Club (1868) in which
he speaks of it as “almost unknown.” The country has indeed changed
since those days, and few pinnacles are left unclimbed; I can mention
one of them, at least, for the benefit of anybody who cares to give it a
trial. This is the so-called “Wildkirchle” or “Hexenthurm,” a fragment
of the Kanisfluh _massif_ near Mellau, a rock-needle; it has the
apparent advantage of being only 140 meters high. All the same, no one
has yet stood on its summit, though many have tried to do so; only a
couple of weeks ago (23 July, 1922) two young men lost their lives while
attempting the feat. My sister, who was the first woman that ever got up
the Zimba--and well I remember the state of her leather knickers when
she came down again--also had a try at the “Hexenthurm,” a little
exploit of which I only learnt after her death. She and a guide, from
all accounts, were roped together and wound themselves aloft somewhat
after the fashion of a nigger climbing a cocoa-palm (I cannot quite
visualize the operation); at a certain moment they were only too happy
to be able to wind themselves down again.
These were the sports she loved; and I marvel to this hour what made her
adopt the married state--she who cared no more for the joys of
domesticity than does a tomcat. Talked into it, I fancy, by some stupid
relation who ought to have known better.
* * * * *
While strolling homewards from that Montiola fountain hallowed by many
memories of my past, I took to relating to my companion all I knew
concerning my father’s fatal accident, which occurred as he was chamois
shooting not far from the Rothe Wand; he fell down a ghastly precipice.
Forthwith Mr. R., who has an imaginative and impressionable turn of
mind, besought me to take him up there and show him the exact site on
the condition, of course, that nothing but English was to be spoken
during the trip. Well, why not? No harm in that, no harm whatever; the
excursion may distract him, and he has so far seen nothing of these
upper Alpine regions. I would gladly go there over the Spuller lake, but
cannot bear to see the place again in its changed condition; for this
fair sheet of water is now being mauled about by a legion of navvies for
the purpose of some miserable railway electrification. Instead of that,
we can take the train to Dalaas and mount to the Formarin lake, which
lies even nearer to the scene of the accident.[19]
GAMSBODEN
_Gamsboden_
There is nothing to tell of our walk to the Formarin lake which lies
under the precipitous red crags (a kind of marble called _Adneter Kalk_)
of the Rothe Wand and thence to the summit of the grass-topped
Formaletsch--nothing, save that the Alpine flowers, not so much the
rhododendrons[20] as the yellow violets, were a source of considerable
interest to my companion. I could have shown him the scarcer Edelraute
(_Artemisia mutellina_) which grows on some rocks near the east foot of
that hill, but preferred taking no risks and did not so much as mention
the plant. Here, also, he was able to inspect a flourishing colony of
marmots, a quadruped which, in spite of my assurances to the contrary,
he had hitherto been disposed to regard as mythological or imaginary.
I chose the Formaletsch because it is from thence--from its southern
base; but Mr. R. rightly insisted on going to the top--that, with the
help of a good glass, a distant but clear view can be obtained of the
scene of my father’s accident while chamois shooting. It occurred, when
he was only thirty-six years old, at the Gamsboden heights, so-called
from the frequency of chamois to be found there; the place is about a
mile off as the crow flies, and on one of its pinnacles you may detect a
wooden cross which is perennially renewed by chamois hunters in memory
of him; it stands as near to the actual site as most people would care
to go. He had just returned from an ascent of the Gross Litzner (or
Gross Seehorn)--the second time this peak had ever been climbed (the
first was in 1869), and the thing must have happened soon after 7
September, 1874, for that is the date of his last letter to his wife, in
which he says: “I shall go shooting for a few days to Spuller and
Formarin” (Gamsboden lies midway between these two lakes); “if I delay,
I may not be able to traverse any longer the upper grounds, because snow
falls there so often and so early.” Now hard by that wooden cross is a
black precipice which scars the mountain from top to bottom; this is the
spot; he fell while attempting to cross the scar, or else, while
standing immediately above it on some soil which gave way under his
weight; the former is probably the truth. I enquired, but have never
heard of any one else essaying the same feat; for my own part, nothing
would induce me to proceed more than a couple of yards on that
particular surface. For even at our distance of a mile you may guess
what it consists of: it is the foul sooty shale called _Algäu-Schiefer_,
perfidious and friable stuff, not to be called rock at all save in the
geological sense of the word.
Slopes covered by ice or snow have their dangers, so have those decked
with the innocent-looking dry grass which, for reasons I cannot explain,
is so abhorrent to me that I will make any detour to avoid them; all
three of these can be tackled by firm feet and the help of an ax-head as
grapnel or for step-cutting. Nothing is to be done, either with feet or
with artificial appliances, on an even moderate incline of such Liassic
shale, for it yields to pressure and slides down, and this is where a
chamois has the advantage over us. A man may scramble about honest crags
like a fly on a wall, as securely as any chamois though not so fast; on
precipices of the crumbling _Algäu-Schiefer_ the animal leaps, and leaps
again before the stuff has gathered momentum, and what shall man do?
Avoid them, until he has acquired the capacity of bouncing like a
chamois; in other words, like an indiarubber ball.
Indeed, shifting material of every kind is objectionable and fraught
with peculiar horrors. Up behind Bludenz you may see a row of limestone
cliffs called Elser Schröfen, whose foot is defended by a “talus” of
rubble which has slowly dropped down from the heights above; and a
pretty thing it is, by the way, when you look closely at natural
features like this talus, to observe with what flawless accuracy they
have been constructed; how these fragments of detritus pass in due order
through all gradations of size down the slanting surface, from minute
particles like sand at the top to the mighty blocks that form their
base. Once, long ago, I conceived the playful project of crossing this
rubble-slope from end to end, just below the cliffs. I started on its
inclined plane, but had not gone far before realizing the situation. The
talus reposed, as it naturally would repose if left to accumulate
undisturbed; that is, at the sharpest allowable angle against the
cliffs, its upper barrier. It soon struck me as being rather a steep
gradient, and not only steep but ominously alive--ready to gallop
downhill on a hint from myself; the mere weight of my body could set the
whole mass in movement and hurl me along in a rocky flood. While making
this sweet reflection I found, with dismay, that it was already too late
to turn back; the least additional pressure on one foot might start the
mischief; once started, nothing would arrest that deluge; its beginning,
without a doubt, was going to be my end.
I was in for a ticklish business. Rush down the slope diagonally and
evoke the landslide but anticipate its arrival? Even that was courting
disaster. I preferred to remain in the upper regions and there finished
the long journey, with curious deliberation, on all fours, in order to
distribute my weight; and then only by a miracle. It was one of those
occasions on which one has ample leisure to look into the eye of death,
and I now wish somebody could have taken a photograph of me--a colored
one, by preference; one would like to possess a record of the exact tint
of one’s complexion during half hours of this kind. Whoso, therefore,
intends to traverse the same place would be well-advised to adopt my
method of locomotion; the upright posture is not to be recommended. A
pleasant farewell to all things! Never a button of you to be seen again;
to be caught in a swirl, a deafening cataract of stones and, after
snatching _en passant_ a few grains of scientific comfort at the thought
that your human interference had modified--if only temporarily--the
angle of a talus, which is not everybody’s affair, to be buried alive at
the bottom under an imposing heap of débris.[21] ...
Now boys seem to make a point of doing risky things, whereas a man of my
father’s age and experience should have made a point of not doing them.
What can have induced him to act as he did? He was well acquainted with
this particular shale; in that very paper on the Rothe Wand which is the
origin of our trip to Formarin, he remarks that the only troublesome
part of the ascent was a steep tract of the “soft, crumbling, blackish
_Algäu-Schiefer_, which continually slipped away under our feet,” adding
that “for the rest, no part of the climb could be called dangerous or
even difficult.” (The present route up there is another and really easy
one.) Was it downright bravura? That is not impossible! He had led an
enchanted life among the rocks and ice, and a friend of his, an old
gentleman whom I saw the other day in Bludenz and who was with him once
or twice in the mountains, spoke to me of his contempt of danger; he
said that while climbing he “seemed to tread on air” and could not be
made to understand what people meant by giddiness. Or was he stalking
some particular chamois? In that case the tragedy grows almost
intelligible; there are few things a man will not do under those
circumstances.
Two others accompanied him on this expedition, Dr. Dürr of Satteins and
his own _Jaeger_ Fetzel, a native of our village; both have died long
since and neither, I believe, was actual eye-witness of what happened at
the fatal moment. Many journalistic cuttings and letters relative to
this affair, and doubtless giving adequate accounts, were contained in
that bundle which disappeared together with other literary and family
papers when a certain portmanteau was broken open on its journey; it is
a loss I shall never cease to deplore. The ground is supposed to have
given way under him; certain it is that he fell from the height, as we
were then told, of _many, many church steeples_--a phrase that stuck in
my mind; from the height, I should reckon, of some thousand feet. There
was nothing about him that was not shattered; his gun, his watch, were
broken into fragments. Strangest of all, even his alpenstock was picked
up in several pieces, which gave rise to the conjecture that this
implement had betrayed him and snapped under his weight as he leaned on
it for support; how else explain the splintering of such light and
resilient material? Be that as it may, they carried his remains to
Dalaas down the steep and savage Radona-tobel, and anybody who has been
there will wonder how they achieved this task.[22] He was laid to rest
in the Protestant cemetery of Feldkirch; for the first time in history
the bells of all the countryside were tolled at the funeral of a
“Lutheran”....
His article on the Rothe Wand is one of several which he contributed to
the Journal of our Alpine Club; they can be traced in the files,
together with his presidential addresses to the Vorarlberg section, of
which I also possess four; one of the most interesting of these papers
describes an ascent of the Piz Linard (3416 meters) and Piz Buin and the
crossing of the Silvretta and Sagliain glaciers, the latter of which had
never been traversed before; it presented _no difficulty_. These
writings betray a strong love of nature, and all the exhilaration
consequent upon “living dangerously.” He was also interested in the
scientific aspects of alpinism, as I can see from his marginal
annotations to Forbes’ “Theory of Glaciers.”
More important are two archæological monographs which reveal another
facet of his mind; I wish I knew whether he wrote any other such things
and where they are to be found; does the library at Bregenz perhaps
contain them? The first one (1865, with two diagrams) deals with his
excavations on a strangely shaped eminence near Mauren--a village in
Liechtenstein, just across our frontier--which he held to be a Celtic
hill-fort; his surmise was proved correct by the discovery of certain
bronze relics. The other treats of the Roman occupation of this
province.[23] It is in the shape of an address to the Museum Society of
Bregenz with which he was connected; an exhaustive and conscientiously
written memoir, full of ripe speculations of his own, enriched with
copious footnotes and citations from those authorities, ancient or
modern, who had hitherto touched upon these matters; and defining all
remains of antiquity excavated here up to that day (some noteworthy new
finds have since been incorporated into the Bregenz Museum). It has
given me a feeling difficult to describe, to go through this paper
again; I seem to be reading my own lucubrations, for at the same time of
life I was writing in the same style on subjects of the same kind; a
scholarly digression, for instance, on the Roman roads of the district,
_no trace of which exists_, is done quite in my manner of that period. I
observe that he contradistinguishes between Celts and Rhætians (p. 6
and note to p. 10);[24] that he takes Lindau, and not either of the
other two islands, to have been the one occupied by Tiberius; and holds
the _Vallis Drusiana_, the Walgau, the heart of our province, to be
called not after the Roman general and stepson of Augustus, seeing that
the name Druso is of Celtic or Rhætian
[Illustration: Bronze statue found near Lauterbach]
origin--pre-Roman, in short, and indigenous to this country, whence
localities like Drusenfluh, Drusenthor, Druseralp, Druserthal.[25]
Of peculiar interest to me, among my father’s writings, are forty or
fifty manuscript essays, long and short, on a variety of themes; mere
“asides” written, to please himself, in three different languages:
English, French and German. French he studied at Geneva; German at the
gymnasium of Augsburg, and so successfully, that he learnt to handle
that tongue with more freedom and elegance than many a native writer of
the country. Most of these miscellanies date from the late fifties or
early sixties when he was still young; he doubtless continued to compose
them to the end, and the later ones would have a greater value; they are
lost. The titles testify to considerable intellectual curiosity: On
ambition--The first snowdrop--A woman’s thoughts about women--On a
passage in Pascal--The carnival--To the memory of ancient Rome--On a
comet--Voices of Nature--Friendship--A characteristic of the German
language--Dreaming of sounds--On certain pictures in the National
Gallery of Scotland--The Lake of Geneva by night--Palleske’s Life of
Schiller--Suicide--The thunderstorm--Spiritualism--Sunset in autumn--On
the want of the habit of writing--The study of Natural Science; and so
forth; a heterogeneous collection! One or two, such as a passionate
lament for the death of some little boy-friend, are set in lines as if
they were poetry, but there is no poetry about them save a certain
rhapsodical elevation of sentiment. Those written in English prove that
he had not yet excreted the poison of a German (metaphysical) schooling,
which lays fetters upon our thought and dims the candor of literary
expression. Immature stuff for the most part, heavy in diction and
saturated with the conventional wisdom of youth, although here and there
one alights upon something more esoteric, such as (in a “Fragment on
Style,” 1858): “A noble thought always commands powerful and harmonious
expression.... When a truly great thought is clothed in language
unworthy of it, the mind which dictated the words can have conceived it
only imperfectly”--which strikes me as an unexpected pronouncement, for
a youngster of twenty. Altogether, the perusal of these things is a
groping, twilight adventure into the soul of a dead man; vainly I ask
myself along what lines he would have developed had his life been
spared.
* * * * *
Hardly had we reached home again, after a long walk down from Formarin
over Lagutz and Marul and Raggal, before Mr. R., who has a sweet nature
but is apt to be pig-headed at times beyond the common measure of man,
began to complain bitterly that I had shown him no chamois, proceeding
thereafter to hint that all my accounts of such animals might well be
pure inventions; the chamois-race was doubtless as extinct as the ibex I
had shown him at Innsbruck; otherwise, why were they not on the spot,
“where they ought to have been,” like those marmots? As if the country
were a kind of perambulating menagerie! I am all for humoring young
people up to a certain reasonable point, but it was a little more than I
had bargained for, to start off climbing again that moment. Had he
expressed any such wish at Formarin, we might have wandered towards Lech
and entered some side-valley on our left, and possibly espied a beast or
two among the crags. He said not a word about it up there. And now it
was nothing but:
“Show them! Show them! What am I here for?”
“To learn English.”
“And to see the sights of the country. Such was our bargain. All you
talk about chamois--ah, ah! I begin to understand.”
“I showed you a wild roe-deer in the Lutz forest last week, the first
you ever saw in your life; and the devil’s own job it was to get you to
see it. Won’t that do?”
“There you made a mistake. You ought to have called it a chamois. Then I
should have believed that chamois still exist.”
“_Still exist?_ Why, we had chamois only the other day for luncheon.”
“It might have been bad mutton.”
“What next! It was delicious; and no more like mutton than--than----”
“I see what it is. You are afraid of climbing rocks. You have lost your
nerve; I noticed it long ago on the cliffs at Scanno, but there are
certain subjects one does not like to dwell upon between friends.
_Troppo vino._ You comprehend?”
“Nothing of the kind. And if it were _troppo vino_, what object do you
gain by being offensive about it?”
“To shame you into showing them.”
“Well, after that, I suppose you will have to see them. As to climbing
rocks---- I think I can show chamois to people without climbing at all.”
So I did; by a stroke of luck which was surely not undeserved. Knowing
Mr. R.’s character only too well, and how that there would not be
another moment’s peace for me until those legendary creatures had been
proved to exist, I called to mind, after some little thought, a place
where chamois could almost invariably be seen, and we left home then and
there, over Bludenz and Brand and the Zalim alp towards the Strassburger
hut which lies under the Scesaplana, between a precipice and a perennial
snow-field; arriving just as the sun went down.[26] Near the end of our
march we turned a little to the right and glanced about us. There they
were, three young beasts, almost straight below; unmistakable chamois,
and as close at hand as any one could wish. Straightway Mr. R., whose
familiarity with precipices is only surpassed by his familiarity with
English grammar, proposed scrambling down a sheer wall of several
hundred feet, and then throwing stones at them from behind. Who knows? A
chance hit on the head, and we might bag one or the other. What a lark,
if we did! The novelty of the idea was so alluring that I might have
succumbed, if the animals had not scented us--as they would have done
ere this, had we been standing below them--and made off amid a
resounding clatter of stones. Mr. R. formally declared himself to be
satisfied.
“Thank God for that,” I replied. “And, now that we are here, I will be
able to show you something still funnier and more interesting to-morrow.
Butterflies on this snow-field.”
“Why not pelicans?”
“Some folks are hard to please.”
There are nearly always frozen butterflies to be found up here. They
have been wafted from their green meadows into these barren Arctic
regions on the upward-striving blasts of the Fön.
Meanwhile we passed the night in the well-heated Strassburger hut, where
we discovered as objectionable a crowd of Teutons as I have ever seen
gathered together; and I have seen not a few. A fierce argument was
proceeding between two of these bullet-headed ones as to whether the
snowfield was a _Ferner_ or a _Gletscher_. The _Ferner_ man was right
(though the Tyrolese use the word “Fern” for a glacier); but his
opponent also came in for some share of applause. He had the louder
voice of the two.
Up the Scesaplana next morning in time for the sunrise, where Mr. R.
grew silent and respectful. Naturally enough. For there is something
oppressive to the spirit on being thus islanded, for the first time, in
a glittering ocean of Alpine peaks, and breathing the icy air of dawn at
3000 meters. I greeted old friends that arose up round us, and my
glance, turning eastwards, rested at last upon the stainless white dome
of the Ortler, fifty or sixty miles away. I called to mind that short
snow-arête just before you reach the summit, knife-like and not even
level; would I now care to run along it as I did then? Well, that was in
the eighties and perhaps they have built a railway up the Ortler by this
time; in the eighties, while we were touring on old-fashioned high
bicycles over the Stelvio pass--a record, I fancy: there was a notice of
it in the C. T. C. Gazette; over the Stelvio into Italy and back by the
Splügen, riding home in one day from the Post at Splügen over Thusis and
Chur and Ragatz and Feldkirch--which was also something of an
achievement for the wretched machines of those days.
On the way down we stepped for a moment into the Lünersee hut, where Mr.
R. had a look at the large photograph of my father after whom the place
had been named, then followed the Rellsthal towards Vandans under that
formidable flank of the Zimba on which the other tourist had died of
sheer fright. During this descent my companion, unfortunately, began to
relapse into something like his normal frame of mind; that is to say,
our pleasure was nearly marred by persistent jocular allusions to that
London hat of mine which has not yet ceased to provoke his merriment.
Some time ago I was under the impression that he had forgotten this
trivial and well worn theme of mirth. Far from it. Young people never
will realize when a joke has grown threadbare, and he now distilled so
much fresh laughter out of its shape, its color, its brim and other
details of construction, its general fit, its suitability to my
particular style, likening me at one time to his own countryman Napoleon
and at another to a certain old female cousin of whose existence I had
hitherto been unaware, that I was on the verge of getting annoyed when I
hit upon the genial expedient of making him translate his miserable
witticisms into the English tongue.
Then, and not till then, did they become really amusing; it was my turn
to laugh.
JORDAN CASTLE
_Jordan Castle_
We often walk past that decrepit castle of Jordan. Situated on the hill
above Bludesch, it is a landmark visible from afar, and was never a
castle at all but a pretentious kind of villa. My mother told me that
the builder had been a Dutch political refugee, and that the red violets
growing on the inside of its westerly wall were planted by him. Those
violets may be found to this hour--their leaves, at least; and you may
find white ones along the path that leads down eastwards out of the
orchard here--you could, at least.
Since then I have learnt a little more, but not nearly enough, about
this strange-looking ruin. There used to be a small, two-roomed house on
the site in olden days; this was bought, and converted into a splendid
palace--_splendidum exstruxit palatium_--by Georg Ludwig von
Lindenspeur, who lived there till his death in 1673. The plan of the
building is as regular as can be, and thoroughly uninteresting; it has
an artificial terrace in front, supported on massive substructures. The
place continued to remain in good state till 1843 when it changed
hands, and the new proprietor, having no use for it, took off the roof
and carried away everything else that served his purposes. Who
Lindenspeur was, I cannot say; the name does not sound altogether German
or Austrian, and is unknown to me. He it was, I imagine, who for his own
convenience or that of his visitors built or enlarged the path that
leads up, some few hundred yards to the east of the ruin, from the
driving-road in the valley below; this path, then broad enough for a
carriage, with sustaining walls on both sides, has now grown quite
narrow from disuse. He also founded a charity for several villages which
exists to this day. The yearly income, for our particular one, is
twenty-two florins; before the war, one might have helped a few poor
people with this sum. Who is going to pick it up nowadays?