CHAPTER XIII.
THE GRIMSEL—OBERGESTELN—MUNSTER—VIESCH—THE EGGISCHHORN
Mind stirs in matter, as a soul,
Not less in atoms than the mighty whole.—Virgil.
August 25.—Were off at 5 a.m. for the longest walk of our excursion, across the Grimsel, down to Obergesteln, and then along the Rhone Valley to Munster, where we were to sleep, and the next morning to go on to the Eggischhorn. The little man was mounted; my wife and myself were on foot. Our sacs, somewhat reduced, at Lucerne, from what they had been on the Surenen and the Pragel, where two porters had been required, and this morning again somewhat further lightened by the aid of the little man’s horse, were on the back of one Jean Ott, of Im Hof, a good and true man, and eke the father of ten small children. He remained in our service for five days: this enables us to speak of his merits with some confidence.
Our tramp commenced with the Kirchet. As we passed the entrance to the old deserted ravine channel, all we had seen in it yesterday came back to mind; and with the rest the recollection of a tuft of Maidenhair fern I had espied on one of its walls, with some of its fronds erect and some pendant, placed just where it might most charm the eye of the beholder with the contrast of the beautiful fragility of its black thread-stem and tender green spangle-leaflets, to the grey rock, and to the recollection of the dashing angry torrent that had, long ages gone by, excavated for it its little ledge. And I hoped that no thoughtless, unfeeling hand would tear it from the niche, that had been so prepared for it, so long ago.
Im Hof was soon reached, where we walked along the bed of the old lake. This was succeeded by a narrow ascending gorge, where the road is carried through woods, and the opposite mountains are very close. The green meadows of Güttannen came next; and so on to Handeck. I do not dwell on any of these points, for we are now on ground which was passed over in last year’s ‘Month in Switzerland.’ I only note what was not noted then. The difference, however, in the direction in which you are looking, and the difference in the position of the sun, make a great difference in what you see, and in how you see it. The Grimsel, too, is so full of beauty, grandeur, and interest, that I would gladly walk through it, backwards and forwards, day after day, for a week; and should expect to find in it every time something new.
At Handeck, for the sake of the horse, and of Jean Ott, a halt of an hour was called. It was now nearly 10 A.M.; and so far, with a few short breaks, we had carried along with us the morning shade of the eastern mountains. Some bread and cheese, and a bottle of wine which, if not good in itself, was made to appear so by a five hours’ brisk walk in the fresh morning air, and by the addition of ice-cold water from the glacier that on the west overhangs the châlet, occupied, within the châlet, the first half of our time. The remaining half was spent on the rocks and turf outside, in contemplation of the western glacier, and of the eastern mountain, with its fringe of pine along its lower zone, succeeded by a zone of stripes and patches of Pinus Pumilio, on any fissures and coins of vantage they could lay hold of: the rest to the top being naked, dark slate-coloured rock, ending in the broken summit ridge.
Time is up; and we are off again, as gaily as when we started at 5 A.M., over Hellen Platten, then across the mountain flank beyond: a grand scene of naked gneiss, right, left, before, behind, particularly in the last direction, as it presents itself when you turn round and look back while ascending the flank of the mountain, about two miles above Handeck. The form and windings of the sullen desolate ranges that form the valley are here seen to great advantage, and are very impressive. Then the flank of the mountain is rounded, with the Aare beneath you, on your left, far below; buried and bridged, as we passed it, by what still remained of two great avalanches. Then down to and across the Aare, and on to the Grimsel Hospice. Here another halt: this time half an hour.
Now up to the Todensee: but this year not taking the left side for the mephitic, fly-plagued Rhone Glacier Hotel, but the right side, straight on to Obergesteln. This, just beyond the Todensee, and for some little way on, is for the pedestrian a very good bit of Switzerland. You are at a height of not far from 7,000 feet, with a grand and varied feast for the eye in every direction. Of course you look first for the great Rhone glacier. That you see, from an admirable point of view, in a grand Alpine picture. Mountains and glaciers have souls; still there can be no Landseer for them. They are too vast and too simple, and the scene, though its objects are so few, is too expanded for the canvas. In the foreground is the dark Todensee, surrounded with its scanty, yellowish, sober herbage, interspersed with granite slabs and rocks. In the middle distance the central object is the great glacier, majestically descending from between the Gerstener snow-fields and rock ridges on the left, and the snow-capped summits of the Galenstock on the right. This majestic descent suddenly passes into the broad, and lofty ice-fall of the glacier—not quite a Niagara of ice, but still very grand and imposing; and the more so to those, who remember that it is, while they are looking at it, in motion—an actual ice-fall; and that the majestic descent, too, above it, is flowing—an actual ice-river.
At the point where this is best seen, you get also, by reversing your position, the best view of the Zermatt Alps. There before you, in the south-west, are their multiform summits—Monte Rosa, Weisshorn, Matterhorn, &c. You, who know the whole ground-plan and mountain architecture of that region, recall the relation in which they stand to each other.
Looking straight across the Valais you have a third great sight. Up against the sky, in a gap through the range on the opposite side, is the great glacier over which lies the Pass from the Upper Valais to Domo d’Ossola.
To your right, all along, are the mountain-high cliffs, topped with snow-fields, of the Great and Little Sidelhorn.
It is a glorious panorama. Memorable to you, ever after, will be the day, on which you saw it, with a sense of its grandeur and power.
As we went along we made out, with our glasses, a party of Englishmen on the snow of the Sidelhorn, and another party on the Gerstener snow-field, who were searching, as we were told, for the brother of the manager of the Grimsel Hospice, who that morning, while looking for crystals, had fallen into a crevasse. This, by engendering a feeling of awe, added to the interest of the scene. The next day we heard that the poor man having, on the afternoon of this day, been tracked to the point from which he had slipped, had been recovered in a state of insensibility, but not so far gone as not to be brought round again.
The descent to Obergesteln is down mountain pastures, over thymy turf, by hurrying streams, and through a wood of ancient larch. To see this wood to advantage you must go straight down it by a sentier de speculation, which will carry you by and under some fine trees.
It had been a part of our original plan for the day to take a char at Obergesteln. But, as might have been expected in the height of the season, nothing of the kind was to be had at such a place; every horse and vehicle being on the road, making pecuniary hay whilst the tourist sun was shining. This we thought rather a gain, as there was some good walking in us still; and so, having baited the little man’s horse and our porter at Obergesteln, we carried ourselves on to Munster, which we reached at 5.30 P.M. We had been out, including halts, twelve and a half hours: and had done, I suppose, over thirty miles.
Having been from early days something of a pedestrian, and, during this month’s tramp, never having once felt fatigued, or had a battered, blistered, or swollen foot, I will venture to say a word here on the great question of walking in Switzerland. A combination of walking with chars, when the latter are advisable, of which you must judge yourself, with reference to your own power and objects, and the amount of time at your disposal, is the pleasantest way of conducting an excursion in such a country. To keep yourself in training for a walking expedition, you will find eight miles a day at home quite sufficient. If you are accustomed to this it will be as easy for you to do three times that distance when the whole day is given up to it, as to do the eight miles at home in two hours of the afternoon. But the one primary, indispensable requisite is a proper pair of boots. If they are not what they ought to be, nothing can be done. If they are of the right sort, all that is required may be done with comfort and with pleasure. English shoemakers are the worst and most stupid in the world, except the American; and they are worse because they exaggerate and caricature the stupidity of ours. Crispin, being crassly ignorant of the anatomy and action of the human foot, has come to make it his great object to cripple it, and render it incapable of acting, in the fashion nature intended, as an instrument of locomotion. A moment’s consideration will show you that your foot is a piece of mechanism most wonderfully constructed for the work designed it. First, the heel and the toes are so connected by the arch of the instep as practically to give you four feet upon two legs. Of this advantage, by rendering your foot rigid, a tight boot to some extent deprives you. But we will let that pass, though the loss is by no means small. The great point is that nature intended that your foot, as you set it down, and it receives the weight of the body, should expand; and that when you rise upon it to take a step it should expand still further. All depends upon this power of expansion. To enable it to perform this function, it has been constructed of a multitude of bones and of muscles, the interplay of which should be quite free and unimpeded. But to prevent its expanding at all, your shoemaker puts it into a tight case with a narrow sole. It still, however, endeavours to do its work by making all the effort it can to expand. In this tight case it cannot expand. See, then, what ensues: the bones chafe the muscles; the foot swells. Practically the case is screwed up still tighter. The whole machine becomes internally tender and painful, and externally blistered, particularly between the outer toes, where the tight case has been more ignorantly and cruelly constructed than elsewhere. And now you cannot walk any further; and what you did was done with effort and pain. Naturally you become disgusted with walking.
There is a simple, instantaneous, and complete remedy. Measure the sole of the walking boots you have hitherto used, and insist on Crispin making you a pair with soles at least four-eighths, five would be better, wider than you have ever had before. Henceforth, so far from your feet swelling and getting heated by walking, they will, after twenty miles’ work, be both cooler and smaller than when you got out of bed in the morning. You will never have another blister. And as to the jar of walking, which affects the whole frame, now that your foot has become elastic instead of rigid, there will be none of that. The width also of the sole will of itself and alone, greatly contribute towards breaking the jar. Nature will thank you for having understood her. And you will thank nature for having taken so much pains to contrive and construct for you so marvellous a machine, if rightly treated, for pleasurable exercise.
Last year, as we were driving through these villages of the Upper Valais, I had inferred their mental condition from the few simple elements, of which, obviously, the lives of their inhabitants were compounded. Now, as we passed through them in more leisurely fashion, I reverted to the same subject, and recalled Ammer’s disparagements, and the account of their social and intellectual condition a native of one of them had given me, in a conversation I had chanced to have with him some days back. He had said that ‘he was prospering where he was, but would never be able to return with the fruits of his prosperity to his native village in the Upper Valais. The priests would never allow the return of anyone who, while living elsewhere, had acquired some independence of thought as well as of means; and an indisposition to be fed with’—but for his (in English) monosyllable I will substitute—what Infallibility ought to save us all from, at all events the inhabitants of the Upper Valais. ‘The priests,’ he said, ‘I still had the power, as they had the inclination, to render return to and residence in their old home, very disagreeable for such people. They were too, the cause of the inhabitants of this part of the Valais being lazy and good for nothing. How could it be otherwise with people who throughout their lives are fed only with’—again what Infallibility should save them from; ‘and who are kept in constant subjection? It is bad for men to put themselves into the hands of other men. They should rather be taught to depend upon themselves.’
And so it has come about that an Upper Valaisan who has once seen the world must remain in it, in order that the ignorance in which the priests have a vested interest might be protected against knowledge. If the time is never to be when ‘such evil shall on itself back recoil,’ then
The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth’s base built on stubble.
But as it has recoiled in Italy, Spain, and France, we may believe that it will in the Upper Valais; and this belief may be accompanied by the hope that the evils of the recoil of the evil may not be long-lived.
August 26.—Our destination was the Eggischhorn Hotel. As far as Viesch we took a carriage. Jean Ott was on the box with the driver. But as it proved to be possible—we should not have supposed it—to squeeze in a third sitter, a bare-headed young lady of Munster, not of the slim order of beauty, took it for granted, without leave asked or offered, that there could be no objection (none was made) to her availing herself of the opportunity: and so she got a lift to Biel. This was like the undoubting confidence with which, in the East, the poorest wayfarer will ask you to allow him to light his cigarette from your cigar. It is a kind of assumption which ought not to be displeasing, as it implies a compliment; for it is an assumption of your good sense and good nature.
For agricultural purposes rain had been abundant wherever else we had been, but here it was evident that none had fallen for a long time. There was no second cut on unirrigated grass land; the potato-haulm was short and withered; so was the hemp. The road was very dusty, and almost in a state of disintegration. On inquiring I was told that these spells of dry weather are here of very frequent occurrence. If so, can they be caused by the ascent of the heated air of the Valais dissipating the clouds that would otherwise have supplied its needs? Such droughts must contribute very considerably towards the impoverishment of the people. I observed, however, that they do not do as much as they might in the way of embanking and draining their low ground, and of irrigating their upper prairies. The appearance of the Valais above Sierre indicates that an insufficiency of moisture is its normal condition.
At 9.30 A.M., our belongings were on Jean Ott’s back, and we began the ascent of the Viescher Alp for the Eggischhorn Hotel. The work was warm, for the ascent was steep, and the sun was full on the mountain side; though, in respect of the sun, the forest, as far as it went, befriended us. There was, too, in the air, something of the oppressive closeness which precedes a thunderstorm. The hotel was reached in two hours and a half. We had telegraphed for rooms, but by some contre-temps, the two answers the proprietor had despatched to assure us that no accommodation was at present disposable in his house had failed in reaching us. We had, therefore, to take what could be arranged. It was now only mid-day, and the resources available for possible arrangements could not be ascertained till the evening. This caused some hours of suspense. Of what, at last, the good man did for us, as it was the best he could do, it would be ungracious to say more than that it might have been very much worse.
The Eggischhorn Hotel is, doubtless, all things considered, that is to say, the difficulty of access, shelter from wind, water-supply, view, and the objects to be visited in the locality, in the best site that could have been found. Still it may be observed that it is on a spot on the mountain side, from which the eye has no great range, and where, too, standing room had to be constructed for it; which is the same as saying that it is on a little narrow indent, an artificially formed niche, half excavated and half built up from below. This is in keeping with what you might have expected, and so far good. The house is small, but some additions to it, which will more than double its capacity, and very much improve the character of its accommodation, are nearly completed. The number, however, of travellers increases so rapidly that it will probably be, next year, as difficult to obtain a share in the improved and extended, as it has hitherto been in the existing, accommodation.
We had all the afternoon to look about us, and for familiarizing ourselves with the near and the distant objects. Compared with many other well-known localities 7,000 feet high, the distant objects are not numerous. They could hardly, indeed, be fewer. Still what you see of the valley below, its woods, and prairies, and villages, and of the somewhat snowy range opposite, shagged with peaks and precipices of gray rock, will satisfy one who is more disposed to be satisfied with what he has than to be dissatisfied with what he has not. The confined site of the hotel has a kind of novelty, and produces a sense of imprisonment, particularly when you are pacing up and down its miniature esplanade. And then to convince yourself that you are not a prisoner, you will break away from the miniature esplanade, and take little walks above, and to the right and left, on the mountain; and you will sit on the flowery turf, or on a ledge of protruding rock, and meditate till Fancy has had her fill. And you will not be altogether alone, for the quiet-minded kine will be on the hillside around you; and multitudinous grasshoppers will be starting up at your feet, a light-hearted little people, gaily clad in many colours, whose nerves are supple and springy, and sensitive to enjoyment in their short summer.[2] And so there will be enough of the brotherhood of life to attune your heart pleasantly, if it have not been too far enfeebled by the vanities, or ossified by the vexations of life.
Two or three hours after we had reached the hotel, the thunderstorm, from the premonitory symptoms of which we had, in ascending, suffered, trailed by. The effects of these mountain storms are always interesting. Immediately below the hotel is a ravine, which widens as it descends towards the main valley. On the whole of the left side of this a pasty cloud, as dark as midnight, settled down for a time. Not a trace of any object could now be seen there but the cloud itself. The mountain side, the woods, the valley, were all equally and utterly obliterated. At short intervals this mass of black cloud below us was rent, and illuminated, by flashes of lightning. It seemed as if it was the bearer of the scarth of doom to all wrapped in it and below it. Then the sun burst out above us, and the broadest, and clearest, and most brilliant rainbow I have ever seen, I do not expect ever again to see another such, rested on the turbid blackness of the cloud. It was its nearness, as well as the contrast of the murky background, that made every band of colour so broad, clear, and brilliant. The air where we were standing was filled with a haze of its colours. It would have been strange, indeed, if man, at the time when he knew nothing of what produced the thunderstorm and the rainbow, had not taken one for the wrath, and the other for the smile of God. Our thoughts they still lift from ourselves, and direct towards the Mind that is in everything, but by another and more excellent way.
August 27.—At 9 A.M. started for the ascent of the Eggischhorn. Reader, if you also have made the same start, let us go over the old ground together. If you have not, then let me endeavour to tell you of something you would be the better for seeing. Jean Ott we took with us for our guide. You must call to mind that we are setting out from a height of 7,000 feet above the level we are accustomed to at home. There are no trees above us, or to the right, or left. Our way is all over the flowery Alpine turf, interspersed with rocks. We shall have to climb not quite 2,000 feet more. After a time we shall lose the flowers and the turf: but of that presently. On this morning there had been scuds of rain, but the weather was evidently clearing for a fine day. When we had got about half a mile from the inn, where the path takes a curve round a depression in the mountain side, there came on a heavy shower. A party of Frenchmen were a little ahead of us. They did not like the rain, and returned to the inn. Just, however, at the point where we were, the rocks, which had rolled down in bygone ages from the summits above the depression, had, as you would have expected, lodged in the axis of the depression. At two or three steps from the path they are so piled up as that some project sufficiently to give shelter from rain. We clambered into one of these chance-formed cavities, and remained in it, quite protected, till the rain was over. While there, we observed how the interstices were being filled up by the decay of mosses and lichens. In about twenty minutes the sun was again bright, and there were no more clouds likely to make showers, and so, without any misgivings, we resumed our ascent over the flowery turf, interspersed with rocks. We soon came to a descending rib of the mountain. From this we first saw ice, that of the Viescher glacier. Upon this we turned our backs, and went up the mountain rib. The turf and flowers now began to die out. The little bright indigo Gentian became scarce. We then came upon loose rocky débris from the heights above, with a ravine between us and the summit of the Eggischhorn filled with this loose, naked débris and snow. We rounded the top of this ravine by a good path, in places very narrow, and like a rude rock staircase. And now we were close to the summit, which is composed entirely of a pile of clean slabs and blocks of rock, piled up into a steep mountain cone. It did not take us long to climb these clean slabs and blocks. Then we were on the summit—some dozen feet square, surrounded by a rail.
In the last part of the ascent we had seen nothing but the place where, at each step, we were to set our foot. Now the last step of the ascent had been taken, and one step more would carry us down, 2,000 feet, to the Great Aletsch glacier. All the great mountains, and the great ice-field of the Bernese Oberland, are before us. For some moments not a word is spoken. If at that moment we had had anything to say, we should have done as well if we had stayed at home.
Your first glance can only be at the great glacier so far beneath your feet. This, in your previous thoughts, had occupied the chief place in the scene you were coming to look upon, and have now reached. You wish at once to see what it is like, and to ascertain your relation to it. It is a mile wide, and looks precisely like what it is, a river of ice. All inequalities of surface are, from this height, effaced; and it is, to the eye, as level, though not as glassy, as water. And no river could have such clearly defined banks, for here they are mountains escarped as regularly as if the width and grades of the enormous channel had been cut by human hands working by plans and measurements. This is a conspicuous feature: having observed it, you then raise your eyes to make out the relations of the glacier to the mountains on either side of it, and beyond it. If you were to look across it, you would be looking west. But you do not begin by looking across it, because it is itself the great object; and, therefore, you look up it. You see, following it up, that it takes a gentle curve, a point or two to the west of north. For about five miles up it continues of about the same width. It then expands like an open fan. The fan-like expansion is a continuation of about five miles more. This expansion is, in reality, the great snow-field that is the chief feeder of the glacier; and which not only feeds it, but also by its own descent compacts and forces forward the glacier. Around the further side of the expanded fan stand, beginning on the left, the Mittaghorn, the Gletscherhorn, the Jungfrau, the Mönch, the Viescherhorn. These are more than ten miles off, but the distance appears much less, the objects being so large, and the atmosphere, at these heights, so clear. You see many black summits amid the snow, and many long, lofty scars; but of course the snow on the summits that are unpeaked, and on the sides that are not precipitous, preponderates in the scene. As these are the most prominent and interesting objects, you take mental photographs of them first. You then think of the Finsteraarhorn. You soon find him before you, due north: of course, to the right of the great glacier, and some little way back from it. By the air line he is seven miles from you. Between you and him is the Walliser Viescherhorn, and several subordinate peaks. Between the Walliser Viescherhorn and the Finsteraarhorn is the great snow-field that feeds the Viescher glacier we had a passing glimpse of as we were coming up. You now look across to the west side of the Great Aletsch. There you have before you the Aletschhorn, and an archipelago of connected peaks, entirely surrounded, and everywhere permeated, by snow-fields and glaciers. You see the confluence with the Great Aletsch of two of these subsidiary glaciers, the Mittler Aletsch, exactly opposite to you, and the Ober Aletsch, four miles lower down. Of course you see but little of the glacier to the back of this archipelago; that is the Lötschen, the outflow of which passes down the Lötschenthal to join the Rhone at Grampel. Two miles below the junction of the Ober Aletsch, the Great Aletsch itself terminates. You can see almost to its termination.
You have, then, from your lofty observatory, the whole of this marvellous scene spread out before you. No part of it is seen indistinctly. You have a full and clear view of the mountains supporting the snow-fields; the snow-fields feeding the glaciers; the lateral glaciers converging into the main-trunk glacier; the main-trunk glacier flowing by at your feet, a true river. Though the eye does not see the motion, the mind, aided by the eye, does. For you see that it is streaked with the moraine lines, which came in with the lateral glaciers, and which it is, obviously, carrying on; and you see the wave-like marks on its surface, more advanced, down stream, in the centre than on the sides, which tell you that the centre is moving faster than the sides. There is nothing to mar the unity, nothing wanting to the completeness, of this grand display of Alpine nature.
In the Märjelensee there is even something de luxe. The north side of the Eggischhorn is as precipitous as the west; in fact the north and west sides form a kind of right angle; and you are standing, up in the air over this angle, at an elevation of 2,000 feet above the glacier, from which the summit takes its last rise—all but a vertical one on these sides. The north side is the south wall of a deep fissure, which connects the channel, the broad valley channel, of the Aletsch with that of the Viescher glacier. This fissure is considerably lower than the surface of the Aletsch glacier; but it is not of sufficient depth, or width, to allow any part of the Aletsch to pass into it, which also appears at this point to have its bearing on the opposite side. It, therefore, flows by this depression in cliffs of ice. Just where it passes the depression or fissure is a little lake, occupying the first part of the depression. Its waters, therefore, wash against the ice-cliffs of the Aletsch, which are its western boundary. The water being slightly warmer than the ice has a tendency to undermine it; and as the glacier has here lost its retaining wall of rock, and is somewhat expanded on the outer side of the curve it here makes, it comes to pass that masses of ice frequently detach themselves from the passing ice-cliffs of the glacier and fall into the lake; and then float off in the form of icebergs to the further end of the lake, from which point issues a little stream, the outflow of the lake, which connects it, when full, with the Viescher glacier. As looked down into from the top of the Eggischhorn, this little lake, with its green glass-smooth water, and white icebergs,—in part the cliffs from which they have fallen are of a tender blue,—and with the sober-coloured Alpine pasture occupying the rest of the depression and reaching down to the Viescher glacier, and with the black mountain on the north of it, is a sight that must be quite unique, and is as charming and interesting as unique.
But if not one of all the near objects we have just been looking at were visible from the Eggischhorn, still it would be worth climbing for the sake of the many distant objects it has to show you. On the north-east you may see the Tödi, and on the south-west Mont Blanc—neither, of course, on account of the distance, and of the intervening heights, very conspicuous. But all between—the many summits of the Zermatt Alps, Monte Leone, overlooking the Simplon, the Galenstock, and the summits of the St. Gothard group, are each grandly distinct; and show—which is what they are—like the nucleus, the ganglion, the structural centre of a Continent.