Edith Elmer Wood

“ For it is true that there are places in this world which make even a pagan feel religious, and among all the winds and rains and fields and rivers and beasts and stars which “praise the Lord,” there are none which entone their hymns in a voice more inspiringly audible than the mountains which lift their snow-crowned heads so near to Heaven.
Is it surprising that the Swiss are a simple and an honest race? It seems to me it would be surprising if they were anything else. It must be almost a physical impossibility to lie in the presence of a glacier or on the edge of a precipice. ”

“ The joy of finding one’s path again is so great that I do not know but it makes worth while having lost it! With renewed vigor we climbed upward to the plateau-like region of snow drifts and rock ledges that awaited us, which some ironist has named the “Plain of Roses.” We should have had fine views of the Valais mountains but for the clouds which enveloped them. Our immediate foreground was wild and desolate enough, but as none of the peaks were more than two thousand feet higher than we were, our views lacked grandeur of outline. ”

“ Just here Belle Soeur had an attack of mountain sickness and had to lie down flat in the snow and couldn’t eat her share of the bread and cheese. If she was going to do it, though, it was mighty fortunate she chose lunch-time rather than a little later. The luxury of this meal did not tempt us to linger long, and we were soon under way again. We had not even unroped.
In the midst of this primeval solitude we suddenly saw a human being. Nothing could have surprised us more. It was a little black speck of a man appearing on the upper brink of the rock wall and starting to climb down. ”

“ We breakfasted, lunched, drank tea and dined on that balcony till the snow drove us indoors at the end of September. When it rained we pulled the table back into the shelter of the glass at the north end of the veranda. When it was cold, we put on overcoats and golf capes. As we lived with those mountains day by day, and grew to know all their moods and manners, good and bad, as one knows those of one’s truly intimates, they became to us, not scenery, but friends and kindred, not anything external, but a part of our larger selves. ”

“ But principle is a great thing, and we were prepared to sacrifice ourselves for it.
Luck was with us, though, and we found the Bellevue, a first-class hotel on the upper brink of the Rhone Glacier, still open, though preparing to close on the morrow. We enjoyed an excellent dinner and night’s rest after watching the lovely views of glacier, valley and snow mountains pass through the various phases of sunset, twilight and full moon. ”

“ We watched the snow line creep up at the beginning of the season and down again at the end. We watched the mountains hide themselves in black lowering clouds, saw them lit up by flashes of lightning, heard them roll back the thunder, saw them repent and hang out a [30] rainbow from the Wetterhorn precipice across the white of the Upper Glacier and down in front of the Mettenberg, the upper peaks shake off their bad humor and emerge from the clouds all wet and shiny, rocks as well as snow, in the happy sunlight. Eiger is the same as ogre, etymologically, I suppose. ”

“ After we turned aside from the Rhone valley, laid out like a patchwork quilt in cultivated fields, we saw no human being or habitation or trace of man’s labor, save an empty cow-hut or so and the path we were following, till late in the afternoon. The Eginenbach, whose course we were following, drained as wild and desolate a valley as could be imagined. It seemed [98] to have been a great place for landslides, and every once in a while we had to pick our way over masses of fallen rock and débris. ”

“ The Schwarzegg hut being put in excellent order and the last two-francs-for-fuel piece dropped in the box, we bade the place a grateful farewell, adjusted the faithful rope once more and started along the trail—there really is one from here on—which skirts the right bank of the glacier. Wherever there is a bad stretch of rock to be gotten up or down, iron spikes have been driven in, affording foothold and handhold. What luxuries iron spikes would have been the day before in that much more formidable cliff we had to climb! ”

“ Every once in a while one hears of some queer stupid outrage in Switzerland—the tires of an automobile chopped up or obstructions put at a dangerous turn in the road to upset a traveling carriage. I imagine it is always one of these quasi-deficients who is responsible for it.
In the whole world I do not know a finer people, nor one more charming to deal with, than the healthy, intelligent class of Swiss, God-fearing, law-abiding, domestic, industrious, [14] self-respecting, clean in mind and body. ”

“ The little hall stove and the kitchen stove can hardly be said to have kept the lower story comfortable. We could still see our frosted breath. But they made life endurable.
When it cleared off, we looked out at a veritable fairyland. All the world was buried under at least a foot of the purest white snow imaginable. Every tree was bending its branches beneath the burden of it. The mountains were dazzling. Even the rocky cliffs of Wetterhorn and Mettenberg had the soft white powder adhering to their perpendicular surfaces. ”

“ Frater and I walked over the divide by way of the Männlichen, where we ate our lunch and bade an affectionate farewell to that grandest of panoramas, passing down the other side through Byron’s Wengern Alp to the village of Lauterbrunnen, where at tea-time we met the Mother, Belle Soeur and the Elder Babe, who had come by train. The Mother was the only member of the crowd who felt wealthy enough to take the trip to Mürren, a summer resort on a great cliff overlooking the Lauterbrunnen valley on the far side, commanding a fine view of the Jungfrau, with the deep valley well in the foreground. ”

“ There is a hotel on top of the Simplon Pass, and there was no reason in the world why we should not patronize it; but we decided it would be much more interesting to lodge at the Hospice built and endowed by Napoleon and served by the monks of Saint Bernard.
It is a big, barracks-like stone building approached by an imposing flight of steps. At the top is a rope which it is the business of the visitor to pull. It sets a huge bell vibrating in the stone hallway and one feels that one has created an undue disturbance for a mendicant. ”

“ But aside from this academic satisfaction, Mont Blanc is very disappointing,—a wide, rounded [184] excrescence on a long mountain range, hardly any higher apparently than the surrounding peaks, some of which are infinitely more picturesque in form. In fact, the dominating feature of the Chamonix scenery is not that broad lumpy saddle-back of Mont Blanc, but the serrated rows of needle peaks called Aiguilles rising black above the snow, uptilted rock-strata worn away by erosion, the most spectacular objects, except the Matterhorn, in all the Alps. ”

“ Baedeker’s double star and phrase “perhaps the grandest among the Alps” had raised our hopes too high. I doubt if any European waterfalls can look really impressive to an American who has seen his own country. They were at their best that evening after dinner when we wandered down the path a little way below the hotel and looked across and partly up at them, magnified in the dim light. There is a drop of four hundred and seventy feet, over a broad, bare, unpicturesque rock ledge. ”

“ Hyperion is another old-time favorite that I have just reread with a chill of disappointment. The dear poet was obviously bored by a solitary tramp he took to the Grimsel. He got the blues in Interlaken when it rained (which was not surprising) , he saw the Jungfrau from the hotel piazza, took a drive to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and for the rest had no eyes for anything except that uninteresting girl, Mary Ashburton. The Swiss color of it all is distinctly thin.
The tales of high climbing are often thrilling as adventures, but are usually written by people who don’t know how to write. ”

“ We hoped against hope so long as we could, keeping up a desultory talk and a little soft-pedal singing. Then each rolled up in his or her steamer rug, sought six feet of shelf room, and—eventually—fell asleep.
I was awakened by a very penetrating chill in the marrow of my spinal column, and opening my eyes, saw that there was a dim pale radiance over the universe that had been lacking when I went to sleep. I spoke very low. [65] Frater answered. We crawled out of our rugs and clambered up to the Männlichen summit.
I wonder if human eyes ever rested on a scene of more eerie loveliness? ”

“ The cattle went up to the high pastures a few days after our arrival. They went by our house, and all day long we heard the tinkle of the cow-bells, the tramping of their patient feet, and the pushing and rubbing of their heavy swaying bodies, and the air was full of their breath as though we were in a dairy-yard. All the cattle in the valley go up about the middle of June (as soon as the snow is off the ground) and come down the latter part of September. The pasture lands are owned by the commune, and each burgher of the valley has the right to keep a certain number of cows there. ”

“ There is a one-story building whose stone walls, some three feet thick, were built to withstand winter storms. This used to be a hospice kept for travelers by monks like the famous one of St. Bernard, but now it its a hotel run for profit and patronized by Alpinists and passing tourists. The snow peaks rise up all around the bowl, and Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain of the Oberland, dwarfed from Grindelwald by nearer giants, here shows up more nearly in its true proportions. But Finsteraarhorn is really a climber’s peak, and we were not to know it intimately till much later. ”

“ We lost our path and tried to cut across the meadows without one. It looked very easy. We could see the roof of our own house plainly several miles distant, but the streams we had to cross, which ran often through deep ravines, made it hard and sometimes a little risky. There was one beautiful spot on a crag overhanging a stream where we fully intended to return some day to picnic, but we never could find it again!
That was the day we learned the wonderfully resting effect on tired and swollen feet of bathing them in the ice-cold water of a mountain stream. ”

“ And though there are countless tourists who know the Swiss hotels and mountain railroads, numerous villa people well versed in the tennis and golf facilities of Montreux or Lucerne, and a goodly company of Alpinists who can tell you all about guides and ropes and the ascent of the Matterhorn, there never was anybody who got out of a Swiss summer precisely what we did, or who, in fact, knows our own particular private Switzerland at all. ”

“ The Frau Secundärlehrer had some lettuce which she generously invited us to help ourselves to as long as it lasted, but she would not sell it. One hardly realizes that it is summer, for one has to depend so much on canned things. One learns to eat a lot of the local cheese, which is always good. And I must not forget the honey. It is the invariable accompaniment of the Swiss breakfast, which consists for the rest of rolls and butter, coffee and milk. When the bees have gathered their honey from the wild flowers on the Alpine meadows, the flavor is complexly delicious. ”

“ The waitress who pointed out the beginning of it to us plainly thought we were crazy, and perhaps we were. For two women and a small boy to start out at four o’clock in the afternoon to walk seven miles down a rain-soaked mountain-side, hunting for a path which for the first few miles would be a rude cow track, no different from countless others which would cross it or branch off from it, knowing that if they got lost or night overtook them they would [42] find no human habitation to shelter them—well, it didn’t sound sensible! But the gods who protect the imprudent were with us. ”

“ When I had once beaten my way through their uncommunicativeness and learned where I could get the necessities of life, I found it indescribably restful, after the perpetual battle over trifles of my eight months’ housekeeping on the Riviera, to throw myself on the mercy of these good people, secure in the consciousness that they would take no advantage of my ignorance, and that the price of an article would be the same whether I asked before buying it or after. ”

“ I have told this somewhat unsavory story in all its unsavoriness as a warning to others, the moral being that a party including ladies should never plan for a night in an Alpine Club hut unless they are assured of having it to themselves. Mountaineering is not all poetry, and there might be terrors encountered beside which crevasses and avalanches become attractive. ”

“ Then, for nearly a thousand feet, we scrambled up the right bank of the glacier, with the occasional aid of ladders fastened to the rock, till we reached the level part above the ice-fall, where the trail crosses to the Gleckstein Club hut and the summit of the Wetterhorn. Here, on the edge of the glacier, we sat down and ate our luncheon.
Then we were all roped together and proceeded to the opposite side of the hummocky, but not perilous, glacier, whence, leaving the trail to the summit, we followed a narrow goat path on a horizontal ledge of the Wetterhorn cliff known as the Enge. ”

“ There were tourists coming and going all the time, a place for tobogganing, a vender of postal cards, and all that sort of thing. But it is a fine glacier notwithstanding its pollutions.
After luncheon we boarded an ascending train and went through a long tunnel to what was then the terminus, the Eigerwand station (9405 feet high) . One finds oneself in an artificial cavern hewn out of the rock, and an opening in the side gives a fine bird’s-eye view (if one cares for that sort of thing) of the Grindelwald valley, Interlaken and Lake Thun. ”