Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

CHAPTER VII

AM STAG—KLUS—THE SURENEN—ENGELBERG.

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows, and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye and ear—both what they half create,

And what perceive: well pleased to recognize

In nature, and the language of the sense,

The Author of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.—Wordsworth.

August 13.—Madame and the little boy arrived, from Pontresina, yesterday evening, as expected, at five o’clock. This morning, after breakfast, he and I walked to the Devil’s Bridge, and a little way below it, for I wished to see how strong he was upon his legs, and to hear his own account of what he had seen and done during the last year, which he had spent in Switzerland, at school at Aigle during the winter, and in the hot weather at Pontresina with a German tutor. In the afternoon we all went to Hospenthal. These are small matters; but not to mention them would be to exclude the reader for a whole day from our society, which would be a violation of the understanding implied on our title-page. This is the record of a month; and an uneventful day must not be dropped out of the record, but shown to have been uneventful. What, however, was uneventful so far as matter worthy of record goes, must be taken as a part, which, though small, has its place and purpose in the sketch of the whole. The reader, too, will understand that even in a Swiss excursion an uneventful day is not necessarily an unsatisfactory one; for just as peace has its triumphs as well as war, so has repose its charms as well as exertion, and the more so if the repose comes in the midst of the exertion.

August 14.—At 6 A.M. with, figuratively, bands playing and banners waving, that is to say with a fine morning, light hearts, and the good wishes of our host and his wife, we commenced our march. Both the heavy, and the expeditionary baggage was left in charge of my wife’s maid, who was now included in the former. By the diligence that left Andermatt at 10.30 A.M. she was to bring it all on to Am Stag, where she would leave what we were to take with us, take the rest on to Lausanne, and there await our arrival, whenever that might be.

Our first object was Engelberg by the Surenen Pass. With this in view we were to walk to-day to Klus, a little village about four miles beyond Am Stag. The way was all down hill, and the Devil’s Bridge, Göschenen, Wasen, the Priest’s Leap were in succession rapidly left behind and a few minutes after 10 A.M. we had reached Am Stag, somewhat over fourteen miles. For old acquaintance’ sake I was for stopping at La Croix Blanche. My recollections of the good-natured, burly landlord, and his neat-handed, pleasant-mannered manageress, were obligatory. There was too—it was a warm sunny day—a most umbrageous walnut-tree alongside his house, with seats and tables beneath it, just at the foot of the eastern mountain. Only a few paces below the tree was the high road of the valley; beyond that, a few paces more, the murmurous Reuss; and then the opposite western mountain. As it was here that our baggage was to be given up to us, we had to wait for the arrival of the diligence, which would be for two hours. We decided, however, as the day was warm, and our halting place had attractions, and also claims upon us, to stay here till late in the afternoon, and then do the remaining four miles of our day’s work. Having had an early dinner, we took up a position under the umbrageous walnut-tree, and whiled away the time with coffee and ices, which we found were to be had at Am Stag, and with looking at the opposite streams of carriages, from the north, and from the south, which are incessantly passing along this arterial line of road.

As each carriage stopped before the house, down the long flight of steps would waddle the good-natured, burly landlord, to receive his visitors, in gait, bearing, and bulk not unlike a young hippopotamus going down stairs. The parties in the successive carriages had each its own idiosyncrasy, and was a distinct study. Before a word was spoken by the occupants of a carriage, the experienced landlord—for many years he had been a courier—divined at a glance whether he should welcome the new arrival in French, or German, or English. Some had a blasé look. They had had enough of everything, and especially of this kind of thing. They knew very well what it all meant, and just what it was all worth. Others were riant, and reciprocated the host’s politeness. Others had a helpless expression, as if they mistrusted the French of the spokesman of the party, but brightened up when addressed in the familiar accents of the Island tongue. In one of the carriages that stopped before us was an American, as burly as the young hippopotamus, and a head taller. His carriage wheels had hardly ceased to revolve, before he was on the road; and having given an order that the fresh horses were not to be put to for a quarter of an hour, walked off, at a quick pace, to the Reuss, throwing out, as he went, the joints of a telescope fishing-rod. There was a grain of the comical in a big man, in the prime of life, who had crossed the broad Atlantic to see Switzerland, here at Am Stag, with the mountains all around him, entirely absorbed in the hope (it proved fallacious) of being able to beguile, with an artificial fly, to an untimely end, an unwary little trout.

I was reminded of an Englishman, of much the same build, I had met some years ago in Italy. He, too, was a sportsman, and had his gun with him, in expectation of falling in with some quail, or a woodcock or two. That was what, in his way of looking at the world, and all that therein is, Italy might be good for. We were at the time passing through the highly cultivated neighbourhood of Bologna, and were occupying opposite seats, next the same window, in a railway carriage. As far as the eye could reach, the rich level, we were traversing, was all in corn, planted, at regular intervals, with lines of mulberry trees, to which were trained luxuriant vines. It was thus yielding, simultaneously, the three valuable crops of maize or wheat, silk, and wine. My fellow traveller, for some time, contemplated the scene in silence; at last, when he had, with due deliberation, formed his ideas, he gave me the benefit of them. ‘Did you ever see such farming as this? These people here pretend to be growing corn. Just look at their land. Every few yards they have got a hedge of miserable pollards, that will never be worth a shilling a-piece, and of old brambles.’ I afterwards met the same gentleman at Venice; and asked him, if he had seen St. Mark’s, and the pictures at the Accademia? ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘I have been to see them; and all that sort of thing may do very well for the sort of people you have here, but you know I am an Englishman, and can’t take any interest in that sort of thing.’ He had, I thought, hit the nail upon the head. It was because he was an Englishman. He was a public school and University man, and so one of the victims of our public school educational system, which, while undertaking to make classical scholars of the few, who have some taste and capacity for such studies, leaves the minds of all the rest, the great majority, who have no taste or capacity for such studies, utterly blank; and, which is still worse, engenders in most cases an insuperable life-long distaste for every other kind of study. I believe it was the attempt, at the cost of every other kind of knowledge, to force down the throat of my fellow traveller not the Classics, but a grammatical and critical knowledge of Latin and Greek, that must be held answerable for his inability to understand the agriculture of Italy, and to find anything to interest him in Venice.

As soon as Ammer had dined, I sent him on to Altorf to get my malle from the landlord of the Golden Key, in whose charge I had left it, and to post it for Lausanne. He was then to return in the evening to Klus. At 3 P.M. we sent on the little man, in an empty return carriage, in charge of the expeditionary baggage: he had walked 14 miles in the morning. At 4 o’clock my wife and myself followed on foot. We reached Klus a little after 5.

The Inn at Klus is quite of the village kind. The ground and first floor appear to be intended only for the accommodation of peasant visitors. The upper chambers are the guest-chambers. They consist of a small sitting-room, and three good bed-rooms. Everything in this part of the house was clean. The people, too, themselves, we found good-natured and attentive. We had intended to have had a baggage horse for the Surenen, as the distance to Engelberg is great for porters. No horse, however, of any kind, or of any degree of badness, could be had. Anticipating the possibility of this, we had tried to get one at Am Stag; but ineffectually, for every animal that could be brought into the valley, and kept on its legs, was wanted for the traffic of the road. We were, therefore, obliged to have recourse to porters; and having engaged two, ordered coffee for 4.40 A.M. next morning.

August 15.—Were under weigh at 5 A.M. A fine bright morning. At Erstfeld, half a mile from Klus, you cross the Reuss. At Rübshausen, a mile and a half further on, you begin the ascent of the mountain. All mountain ascents are pleasant in the fresh morning. You enter the forest at once, the breadth of the bottom land of the valley being hereabouts on the other bank of the Reuss. We found the forest on the mountain side frequently broken with little prairies, and enlivened here and there with châlets. Occasionally we got a good view down the valley, and of the opposite range.

Having climbed to the upper limits of the forest, you reach a place called Bocketobel. You have now earned something, and will be well paid. You are about to enter the upland valley of Waldnacht: but it is not yet in sight. The path is a mere groove along the top of the precipitous talus of the cliffs that rise on your left. You turn your back on these cliffs to make out the particulars of the scene. It is thoroughly Alpine. If you look first to your left there is before you a very fine rock-bound ravine, into which is falling, in a good cascade, the waters that drain into the Waldnacht valley from the heights around it. The opposite side of this ravine is a sheer wall of rock. This is crowned with an upsloping wood. Then a broad expanse of upsloping prairie. Then wood again to the top of the ridge. You then turn to your right. You there have a long sharply shelving talus from the heights above, in part forest, in part grass. Behind, and above all this, at the point at which you are standing, facing south-east, are the rugged snow-streaked tops of the Uri Rothstock. If you are fortunate, as we were, all these objects, and their minutest details, will meet your eye in full sunlight, through the diaphanous sunlit mountain atmosphere. It will, however, be very different when you look down the mountain, you have been ascending, to the deep broad valley, and to the opposite range. It is still early morning, and there is a light haze in the valley; and the sun, which is all about you, above you, and for some way below you, cannot yet reach the valley, or touch a point on the eastern side. The haze, therefore, that fills the valley below, is equally on the side of the opposite range. This haze is of a pale grey, almost white, with a suspicion of blue. It is of the tint of a glass of water into which has been stirred a drop or two of milk. This is but dimly diaphanous. The opposite mountain, therefore, and the works of man in the valley, in contrast to the clear definition of all that is immediately before you, and on either side, appear to be unsubstantial—like objects in a vision that is fading away—the mere spectres of villages and mountains. It is a scene of much variety, and of good contrasts.

Having given to it sufficient attention, and time, to allow it to form its image in your memory, you turn your back upon it, and enter the valley of Waldnacht. This, as L’Industrie Alpestre de la Suisse tells us, is an alpe lying within the Commune of Attinghausen, in which Altorf is situated. It now grazes 116 cows, and 16 pigs. It is nearly 6,000 feet above the sea; is available for 107 days; is worth 7,324 francs a year; and belongs to six co-proprietors. What is visible of it, as you enter it, is a long grassy oval, bounded on the south by precipitous mountains; on the north by a long grassy mountain slope, with, here and there, tufts of dwarfed alders on its side; on the east it contracts to the narrow passage by which you have just entered it, and on the west to the Surenen Pass. What is visible may be three miles long, and in the best part one mile broad. You will understand from these particulars how completely above, and out of the world it is. The herdsmen who milk the cows, and make the cheese, even with the occasional diversion of the few travellers the Pass brings to them, must have plenty of opportunity for studying each others’ character, and the characters of their 116 cows and 16 pigs.

Here we took on one of the herdsmen to assist the little man up to the top of the Pass, for in the ascent of the mountain from Klus to Waldnacht his strength, for climbing, had begun to fail. The path lies along the bottom of the grassy vale by the side of the flower-margined stream; at the western end of the grassy bottom it crosses the stream; and then the ascent begins again. In the valley you had been on level ground. This second stage of the ascent is without trees; rough and rocky, but full of flowers between the rocks. Here a part of the herd of cows was grazing. Many were on the path in preference to the rugged mountain side, though there was not much to choose between the two. The sun was hot. The way was steep. After a time we came to the end of the first stage. It was a kind of landing place in the mountain staircase we had been toiling up. On this was a field of snow about 100 yards across. The very dog, who had accompanied the herdsman, took a mouthful from it. Then climbing again. In this bit was an ice-cold spring which bursts out from beneath a rock, a yard or so from the path. I might have passed it without observing it, and so lost a rare draught, but Ammer and the porters saved me from that loss. We then came to a second ice-field about 200 yards wide. After this the ascent was sharp and toilsome for a warm day, with the sun—at that hour it is on the face of the mountain—on your back. As you near the top the path is steep, loose, and shingly.

When we had climbed to within three or four hundred feet of the top, vegetation almost entirely died out. The surface was everywhere strewn with small slaty débris, from which uprose, at intervals, large masses of harder rock, not yet disintegrated. Here, between these larger and harder fragments, on the scaly, leaden-coloured ground, which otherwise would have been quite naked, was a natural garden of most charming little Forget-me-nots. They stood an inch, or two, apart, as if the soil were too poor to admit of closer proximity. But, even with this amplitude of space, each plant could form no more than a single stem, without branches, perhaps two inches high, with two or three little lateral leaves. This little stem supported a single truss of pale blue flowers, with pale golden eyes. Such soft tints, and amid such hardness! Like pearls upon an Ethiop’s arm. They can do little at this height, and on such a soil. Nothing else can do anything. But this frail little plant bravely holds up to the light its gem-like flowerets in the midst of cold and barrenness. The little it can do it does passing well. The slender stem is stretched up to you as far as it can reach. The little flowers, too, do not droop, but are erect also; nor are they half-closed, but each is expanded out quite level. It looks up to you with the open eye of confiding innocence, and says, ‘If you are pleased with me, look at me. Take me into your eye. Forget me not.’

‘No! gentle little suppliant, never! No cares, nor pleasures, of the world shall ever dim your image in the eye of memory. To recall it will be always pleasant, and at times may charm away care. May sky and sun, whose liveries you meekly wear, smile on what remains of your short day.’

As is the case with many Swiss Passes, the Surenen, looked at from below, appears to be very much less than it proves to be in the ascent. The eye takes the air line to the top, and because it sees none of the depressions, and few of the windings the path is obliged to make, naturally ignores them, till experience has taught the necessity of making due allowances. While you are in the inexperienced stage you will often mock yourself, you may do it here, with the complaint that you have got a long way from the bottom, without getting any nearer to the top. As you advance, the way only lengthens. The more you do, the more there remains to be done.

At last the summit was reached, and with something akin to disappointment, at finding that what we had been so long in toiling up to, from five in the morning till past eleven, was crossed literally in two steps, for the top is only a hog’s back ridge.

Half a dozen steps beyond the summit, inclining to the left, is a little stream, with its channel cut in the short turf, which you had left behind you a long way down on the other side, but which at once reappears on the western slope. This little stream must take its rise, perhaps by some subterranean duct, from the lower stages of the Schlossberg, which is here on your left. The Blackenstock, a lower stage of the Uri Rothstock, is on your immediate right. The depression between these rugged, craggy mountains forms the Pass. Here, on the grassy marge of the little runnel on the summit, was called a halt. From this point you look down on the Surenen alpe, falling away immediately below your feet, with, on its southern side, the grand summit snow-field of the Titlis, in the distance, full before you. Between it and you are several iron-cased, iron-hearted, inaccessible-looking mountains on each side of the valley. All this will feed the eye, as you lie on the smooth short turf by the side of the glancing blithesome little runnel.

It is pleasant, very pleasant, with so much that is grand and unwonted before you—such huge masses, such dark, unpitying, unchanging hardness, pinnacles, precipices, ravines, and snow-fields—to rest on the smooth turf by the side of the cool sparkling streamlet. Your hard work is now done. The strain of the long climb—and it was sharpest at the last—has come to an end suddenly. You feel that your lungs, your heart, your muscles, are rapidly resuming their normal condition. The cigar you have earned is unusually soothing. You notice that a little puff of white vapour is incessantly curling up from the summit of the Blackenstock, hard by on your right. He, then, too, to keep you in countenance, to associate himself with you, has, by the aid of the sun, lighted his pipe. That ‘chartered libertine, the air’ is quiet, with only just enough movement in it to make its Alpine freshness perceptibly restorative. Your draughts of claret, mixed with the water of the lively streamlet, seem to be replacing the moisture of the bodily organism, which the effort and sun-heat of the climb had abstracted; and the sensation of the replacement is contenting. Your camp-followers, too, a few paces off, are, you notice, rejoicing in the sense of release from their burdens, which they have placed, erect in their wooden back-frames, before them, as if they wished to see, as well as feel, that they are no longer upon their backs. You pass the claret to them. They do not dilute it from the stream. To them, undiluted, it is a thin potation.

Half an hour is soon gone. Another quarter is added. And then the words en route are again heard, and the descent commences. You are fresher than when you rose with the sun, though a life seems to have passed since then; and you can hardly bring yourself to believe that that was the morning of to-day. Le petit Caporal—for the blue boy of last year now wears two stripes in the battalion of the Aigle Cantonal College—takes the lead, and keeps it all the way, till at 4.30 p.m. we enter Engelberg. But that is yet a long way off. The descent has many well-defined stages. First comes the topmost pasture—the most exposed, and with the shortest turf. Here are flocks of sheep, and the cows that are out of milk. They will not stray, for right and left they are walled in with mountainous precipices; and over the Pass they would find nothing to eat. In the next stage is a deeply sunk pasture, protected on the north by a semicircle of mighty precipices. Here are some horses and pigs, and the cows in milk, with a châlet for making cheese, from the chimney of which the blue smoke of the wood fire is rising vertically in the quiet air of the sheltered bottom. The third stage is composed of a long green mountain slope on the north, the successor of the semicircle of precipices, which are now transferred, mountain-high, to the opposite, the south side, but not in a semicircle. At one spot in this southern range you may count as many as six torrents, close together, streaming and tumbling down from the summits, which are needles of granite rising out of ravines of snow. In the fourth stage the valley has become narrow. The mountains on each side are naked cliffs; the only green being the narrow grass-clothed talus at the foot of each range. The last stage, which brings you to Engelberg, is one of woods and mown meadows. Two objects accompany you all the way, the brawling Aa at your feet, and the vast expanse of snow on the summit of the Titlis. To one descending the valley, the distinguishing feature of this grand mountain is that its upper stage rises in sheer black rock above the mountain in front of it; and then on this sheer precipice of rock is superimposed a sheer precipice of snow. It seems as if one might stand on the edge of the snow, and let down a plumb-line against the face of the snow, for some hundreds of feet, and then let it fall for some hundreds of feet more, against the face of the underlying rock. You are able, too, at the same time to see that this is not a mere ridge of snow, but that it is the edge of a vast field of snow on the flat crown of this mountain giant’s head, which only gradually slopes off north, south, and west; and which is, in the fashion just described, cut through perpendicularly on the eastern side, which is the one that faces you as you come down the Pass.

As there is no telegraph over the Surenen, we had, after our halt on the summit, sent on Ammer to engage rooms for us at Engelberg. It was fortunate that we had taken this precaution, for he was only just in time to procure them for us in the last hotel at which he applied—the large new hotel of the Titlis, on the further side of the town. The books say that the Surenen requires nine or ten hours. We were out eleven hours and a half. But then we were a family party, recruited from the drawing-room, the junior department of the schoolroom, and the study; and we did our work in family fashion, which, as far as I know, is, taken in its turn, as good a fashion as any other. At all events it is satisfactory to find that you are disposed to think so; for this will justify you in supposing that you are not one of those impetuous souls who have no idea of any pleasure in a Swiss excursion, except what they can extract from the fact that they got over a certain distance in less time than the books allow for it, or than their friends did it in: as if the merit of a book were to be measured by the rate at which it was written, or of a dinner by the rate at which it was eaten. Fair scenes and wondrous scenes are not to be scampered over, and toiled through. They have to be done with the eye and the mind as well as with the legs. What is fair and wondrous should be noted and understood. These are books which those that run cannot read. And they must be read carefully and rightly in order that they may be understood. Otherwise we cannot make them our own, so as to carry them away with us, and have them to look at (mentally) afterwards, whenever we please.

As we passed through the town we found that Engelberg was that day holding high festival. The bells were ringing; everybody was in the streets. The men were in their holiday costume, and of course the women too: each of the latter, if married, had two spatula-headed silver pins in her back hair—a local fashion, confined to the dames of Unterwalden—or, if unmarried, only one pin, the head of which was sometimes a disk, sometimes a globe about the size of an orange, formed of a kind of open filagree work. I asked one of those who was keeping the day with this festal adornment, what it was all about. The answer I received was, that it was in honour of God’s Mother.

In the evening I went to the church of the Monastery for Evening Song. All the day long I had been looking on the face of nature, one of the aids allowed us for the construction of our idea of God; I would now draw near to Him, as He is presented to us in another fashion—the old accustomed human fashion. The shades of evening were beginning to come down on the valley; and the hour, now that work was over, and the day coming to its close, disposed to quiet reverence, to religious reverie. I would go for a time to the house where the sights and the thoughts of the world are excluded. But I did not find what I went for. The chanting of the monks was loud and harsh; and I could not make out a syllable of what they were chanting. And this was the more forced upon me because, they being behind a screen impervious to sight, the ear only was appealed to. The influence of the hour having been thus dispelled, I looked at the people before me. There were among them three men. All the rest were women. Neither, then, the untutored peasants of Engelberg, nor one of the many hundreds of people from many nations, who had such culture as the world now gives, were there. How did they regard the fête and the occasion of it? Here were the old world and the world of to-day face to face. I remained till the end of the service, and then, returning to the hotel, took a place on the seat in front of it.

The day was now gone by. The last traces of light were fast fading away. Darkness was deepening in the valley. In the west, in which direction I was looking, the black silhouette of the mountains was projected from the now silver-white western evening sky. One bright planet alone was seen overhead. A few remaining flecks of cloud were being fast absorbed, and were soon quite lost. The loiterers from many countries and the mediæval Engelbergers were fast disappearing from the streets. And now the last white traces of the dying day are gone from the western heavens; and unnumbered worlds, gleaming from illimitable space, are discoursing of the glory and of the mystery of the Universe. And nothing else is seen and all is still, that their discourse may be heeded.