F. Barham Zincke

“ In this wide, verdureless field, there is no suggestion of life. The midday sun, which is shining brightly upon it, brings out nothing but the gray of the summits of rock, which, when not in the shade, show of a pale ash colour, and the white of the summits of snow, which gleams and dazzles in its purity. This dark gray, pale ash, and gleamy white are the only colouring. The gray and pale ash predominate in an endless variety of forms—mountain walls, ridges, battlements, bastions, and escarpments. ”

“ If the cellar of a house does not prove good, that is to say, if it should prove incapable of keeping wine, cheese, milk, beer, meat, and in these days potatoes, from the cold of winter and the heat of summer, the house itself is of little value. This large rock-cellar doubtless answered well the purpose for which it was designed. I pictured it to myself stored with hogsheads of wine, barrels of flour, salt beef and bacon, and tiers of cheese, against the annually recurrent siege of winter, or an expected summer siege from the lord of some neighbouring castle. ”

“ What dreary confinement to the small comfortless house, with the snow piled up to the windows of the first floor, month after month! How must the returning warmth of the sun, and the first glimpses of the green grass be hailed! How must every hour of the few days of their little summer be prized! In that brief space they have to provision the garrison of each home for the ensuing nine months. Their chief care is for their hay, the one store upon which ultimately the lives of all, both man and beast, depend. We may be sure they do not lose an hour of daylight. ”

“ Beyond the glacier—to you its further boundary—is a mountain so steep that you may suppose, and perhaps rightly, that no human foot could ascend it. This glacier gorge at your side is a lateral of the transverse valley below you, a valley of enormous depth, scantily clad with humble Alpine pasturage. You can just make out the herd that is grazing in it. On looking over the long steep-sided mountain which forms its opposite range, at the foot of which the cows are grazing, the south-eastern region of the Bernese Oberland is spread out before you. ”

“ Considering how slowly the shuttle advances in the hand-loom, I wondered that any human being could have the patience to weave these fifty yards of linen, and hoped that the time would come when the rewards of labour would in these valleys be such as to enable these poor women to withdraw from this old-world monotonous form of labour; and when among them, as among all people claiming to be civilized, all the coarser kinds of labour, which task not the intelligence, but only the hands and muscles, of men, and still more if of women, will be delegated to iron and steam. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Grand, naked, rocky summits, free from weather stains, will rise some thousand feet higher on your right and left. At first your way lies over a good expanse of turfy plateau, with some precipitous rock-faced ravines on the right and on the left. Before you is a troubled sea of mighty ridges and multiform summits, many capped and streaked with snow. Everything is in strong contrast to the somewhat monotonous green of the two long ranges of the Schanfiggthal. A little advance brings to your feet the long valley of Davos, 3,000 feet below you. ”

“ Here every man’s heart is in the land; with us no man’s: not the landlord’s, who may never have seen it, except when he walked over it with his gun; not the tenant’s, who regards it with the feelings of a passing occupier; not the labourer’s, who thinks only of his wages, and regards the land merely as the scene of his daily toil. For the casual beholder, it has no suggestions but those of a food-factory. That it should be a food-factory is certainly the first and most necessary use of the land, and we should be glad to be assured that we were making the most of it in this respect. ”

“ The turf, however, and the little inn will not be unavenged, for the sun, whose warmth you are now feeling so delightful at this altitude, or a diminution of pressure from the snowfields above, will some day oblige the monster to recoil again to his own proper domain of eternal cold and barrenness.
Having finished your bread and cheese, and chopine of wine, and well sunned yourself, your muscles will have recovered their tone, and you will begin to make the last ascent along the side of the northern mountain. ”

“ There is a present sense of the long thread that connects you with home. What is around and before you is not all that is at the moment in the mind’s eye. Even the seas, the lands, the cities, the mountains that lie between are not altogether lost to view. The images it may be of your East Anglian Vicarage, and of all that you have lately seen between it and this charming little halting place below the brow of the bank, and just above the stream, of the Spöl, are recalled to mind. That within you which [Pg 201] thinks and feels is quickened into its own proper life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A little beyond it you come to a scene which has a curious effect. You are turning round the foot of the mountain on your left; but if you will look up the valley of the Adige beyond Glurns, you will see a perfectly smooth, broad grass expanse, descending gradually towards you. It may be somewhat less than a mile wide, and two miles or more long. It is impossible for you to see it without thinking of a glacier; indeed it is very like the one we saw yesterday, flowing down from Monte Cristallo towards the summit of the Stelvio. ”

“ As the flower expands to the light, and turns to it, from the satisfaction it has in absorbing it, so your skin has become sensitive to this ether, and feels the delight of being in contact with it. And a third sense has yet to be gladdened. Up here it is now the middle of hay harvest, and the air is pervaded with the fragrance of the new hay. ”

“ When [Pg 348] human physiology shall be better understood these sad mistakes will not be so frequent. You have now got down into the valley. You look up at the mountain you have been descending. Its height, its steepness, its mass, its ruggedness, its hardness, its inexorableness are so overpowering that your eye shrinks from the effort to aid you in constructing an image of it. At the foot of that high, overhanging, cloud-cleaving upheaval of adamant, you feel very small, very feeble; to your present apprehension your bones are no more than straws, if so much. ”

“ After dinner, then, having entrusted my belongings to the Post, which would now for a few days be my porter, I accompanied him, for he would forthwith commence his return home, as far as Tarasp. As I returned up hill to my hotel at Vulpera, a feeling came over me as though I had undergone a sudden transformation from a well enough contented tourist into a lone wanderer far from home. For the moment neither the thought of home, nor of wandering far from home, pleased. Life seemed a pilgrimage without an object. Of what use could it be to see the world? ”

“ For the first two hours the valley is narrow, not quite of the ravine kind, but still generally with very little grass, and sometimes with none at all. When at this distance from Süs you are just getting clear of the forest, the dreariness and desolateness of the scene begin to be felt. You are high above the brawling stream; you see its foamy line, but cannot make out its movement, nor hear its brawling. Summits scarred with dark cliffs are right and left of you. Before you, and, if you look back, behind you also, are summits capped with snow. ”

“ Half of this little body’s evening task, and half of the daily and yearly toil of every man, woman, and child in Tauffers is lost to them. They have to task themselves with the toil; and then half the fruits of the toil is snatched from the hands of the toilers, and sent to Vienna to support 1,000,000 men in arms, for which a second tax in flesh and blood is levied on poor Tauffers, and to pay the bondholders of a debt incurred through the profitless, and futile attempts of Austria to maintain a hateful dominion in Italy, and a shadowy and impossible hegemony in northern Germany. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Moritz and Campfer, the only point in the vast panorama, at which you can find a trace of man, and of his works—all the rest is but mountain summits innumerable, a world to the utmost horizon of rock and snow. ”

“ With respect to what meets the eye: there is no trace of haze; the definition of every mountain and glacier outline is sharp and clear; the luminous blue is not blue, or luminous, in our subdued fashion; and even the greens and grays of the mountains are hardly less green and gray quite up to the distant sky-line. There is little toning down. Distance only blends the local variegation into an uniform colour. You cannot make out the variegation of the flowery turf, of the lichen-painted rock, and of the glancing foliage and shaded trunks of the forest, on account of the distance: that is all. ”

“ The old Baron, like the modern Kaiser, appealed to the sense of glory, but whoever it might have been that was glorified, it was no more then, than it is now, the poor peasant. And there was then, as now, a claim for personal loyalty, in return for protection; but then, as now, it was a protection that was very costly to those who were supposed to be protected. So wags the world. One unsatisfactory condition is exchanged for another that does not give satisfaction. But, throughout, men are dreaming of, and hoping and striving for, something better. ”

“ Three troubled streams, and six iron-faced lines of mountain precipices, and the little space of unfathomable blue above: these were all. Had I been alone, or had there been with me one who possessed an inner sense capable of being touched by such a scene, I would gladly have loitered at this point for some little time. The feeling that came over me was that which the desert engenders—that you have intruded on a scene not meant for man. There it is stillness, desolateness, absence of life ”

“ As you descend the valley, you ask why its cheese should have become so famous? You find the answer beneath your feet. Its wholesome-looking turf is rooted in disintegrated limestone. If, then, it be true that good horses cannot be bred except on limestone pastures, and that even the human organism is the better for having, as we may say, been bred at second, or third hand upon them, through its vegetable and animal food, then we can understand how it comes about that the cheese of Piora takes high rank in the order of merit. ”

“ Germany is not favoured by nature with a rich soil, with any great variety of produce, or with good harbours: what is giving its people so large a share in the business of the world is that they have endeavoured to fit themselves for it. And in these days of general intercommunication, and of inexhaustible supplies of capital, nations follow the same rule as individuals. The nation that has become better qualified than others for producing anything the world requires, will take the place of those who have not kept themselves up to the mark. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Moritz, you look down on the old monster Kurhaus, and a new and more monstrous one nearly completed. They are upon the alluvial flat at the head of the lake. As I saw by my side a patch or two of potatoes smitten by summer frosts, I thought it strange that any people, possessed of free agency, especially invalids, could be found to descend into, and to stay in, such a place. With what ice-cold vapour must the evaporation from that alluvial bottom load the air so soon in the afternoon as the sun is off the ground, and down there they cannot have much of him! ”