From Fraser's Magazine.
CHAMOIS HUNTING.
I had been staying at Fend (one of the highest inhabited spots in Europe) for some days, existing on a light and wholesome regimen of hard-boiled eggs, harder baked rye bread, and corn brandy, exploring the magnificent scenery round me, and had returned the way I came, to a collection of brown packing-boxes, by courtesy called a village, which rejoiced in the euphonious name of Dumpfen, nestling cozily under the grand belt of pines that feathered the flanks of the mountains, which rose high and clear behind. In front roared, rattled, and grated, a wide glacier torrent, the color of ill-made gruel, and on the opposite side stretched, some quarter of a mile, a flat plain of gravel and worn boulders, here and there gemmed with patches of short sweet turf, till it reached the base of a noble range of cliffs, which rose gray and steep into the clear blue sky, so lofty, that the fringe of world-old pines along their summits could scarcely be distinguished.
On the narrow patch of turf between the village and the torrent I found—it being a fine Sunday afternoon—much mirth and conviviality. The rifle-butts were pitched on the opposite side of the torrent, with a small hut close to them to shelter the marker, a fellow of infinite fun, attired in bright scarlet, and a fantastic cap, who placed marked pegs into the bullet-holes, and pantomimed with insane gestures of admiration, contempt, astonishment, or derision, the good or bad success of the marksmen. And splendid specimens of men they were—firm, proud, yet courteous and gentle, well dressed in their handsome and handy costume, strong as lions, which, in fact, they "needed to be" to support the weight of those young eighteen pounders which they called rifles, with brass enough in the stocks to manufacture faces for a dynasty of railroad kings. Never did I see finer fellows. And the women! How lovely are those Tyrolese damsels, with their dark brown glossy hair braided under the green hat, with a brilliant carnation stuck over their left ear in a pretty coquettish fashion, enough to send an unfortunate bachelor raving. And their complexions! the very flower in their hair paling, looking dull beside their blooming cheeks; and their clear soft hazel eyes, with such a soul of kindness, gentleness and purity peeping through them, as one scarcely sees, even in one and another elsewhere.
The shooting was at last over, the winner crowned with flowers, and, the targets borne in triumph before them, the whole party retired to the wooden hut with a mystic triangle in a circle over the door, to eat, drink, and be merry; and very merry we were, albeit the only tipple strongly resembled very indifferent red ink, both in taste and color. Talk of the dura messorum ilia! what insides those fellows must have had!
We were sitting listening to interminable stories of Berg-geister, and Gemsen Könige, and rifle practice at French live targets, when two herd lads came in from some of the higher mountain pastures, and reported three chamois, seen that morning low down on the cliffs.
Hereupon up rose a vast clatter among the yägers as to the fortunate man who was to go after them, for chamois hunting, gentle reader, requires rather less retinue and greater quiet than pheasant shooting in October.
The lot fell upon one Joseph something or another; I never could make out his surname, if he had one—which I rather doubt. He was a fine, handsome, jaunty fellow, with "nut-brown hair" curling round his open forehead, and a moustache for which a guardsman would have given his little finger.
Now, as it fell out, I also got excited; I too thirsted after chamois' blood; but how to get it? How could I, small five foot seven, and rather light in the build, persuade that Hercules to let me accompany him, unless he put me in his pocket, which would have been derogatory? It is true that I, being light myself, was perfectly convinced that weight was rather an incumbrance than otherwise in the mountains; but how could I persuade the "heavy," whose opinions, of course, ran the other way, to agree with me?
However, as the men thinned off, and the place became quieter, I determined to make the attempt, at least, and commenced the attack by "standing" Joseph a chopine of the aforesaid red ink, and then, fearing the consequences, followed it up by an infinity of "gouttes" of infamous corn brandy, all the while raving about the Tyrol, Andreas Hofer, and the Monk, and abusing the French, till I quite won his heart; he, innocent soul, never imagining the trap I had set for him. At last I glided into chamois hunting, the darling theme of a Tyroler, making him tell me all sorts of wild stories, and telling him some in return, (every whit as true, I have no doubt, as his own,) till at last I boldly demanded to be allowed to accompany him the next morning.
Joseph humm'd and ha'ed for some time; but gratitude for the tipple, my admiration for Hofer, and, perhaps, the knowledge that I had been over some of the stiffest bits of the surrounding ranges solus, and had been after the gems, though unsuccessfully, before, made him relent, and it was finally settled that I should go. He went home to get comfortably steady for the next morning, and I laid violent hands on every thing eatable to stuff into my knapsack; whilst the others, after vainly trying to persuade me out of my determination, retired, shaking hands with me as if I was ordered for execution at eight precisely the next morning. Whereupon I vanished into the wooden box, which it is de règle to get into in that part of the world when one wants to sleep, and slumbered incontinently.
I had been asleep about five minutes, according to my own computation, though, in fact, it was as many hours, when I suddenly awoke to a full perception of the fact that I was "in for it." Alas, those treacherous fumes of "Slibowitz" no longer deluded me into the idea that I was fully up to any existing mountain in the known world; that jumping a ten-foot crevasse was as easy as taking a hurdle; or that climbing hand over hand up rocks "so perpendicular" that one's nose scraped against their stony bosoms, was rather safer, if any thing, than taking sparrows' nests from the top of a stable ladder! However, the honor of England was at stake. Go I must. So I resigned myself to the certainty of breaking my only neck, and jumped up, thereby nearly dashing in the roof of my brain-pan against the top of my box, adding, most unnecessarily, another headache to the one I already possessed—and turned out.
Unfortunately, there was no one awake to see my magnanimity; and it was too dark to see if there had been; so I groped my way down, with my upper garments on my arm. After "barking" my shins against stools and trestles, and being nearly eaten up by a big dog in the dark, I sallied out, preferring to make my morning ablutions in the clear but cold brunnen that plashed and sparkled on the little green before the door, to dipping the tip of my nose and the ends of my fingers into the pie-dish which had been considerately placed for my private use.
How intensely beautiful that dawn was! with the pine-woods steeped in the deepest purple—here and there a faint, gauzy mist, looking self-luminous, marking the course of some mountain brook through the forest. The gray cliffs stood dark and silent on the opposite side of the stream, and one far-off snow-peak, just catching the faint reflected light of dawn, gleamed ghost-like and faint, like some spirit lingering on the forbidden confines of day.
How intense was that silence!—broken only by the harsh rattle of the torrent and the occasional faint tinkle of a cow-bell in the distance, or now and then by a spirit-like whispering sigh amongst the pines, that scarcely moved their long arms before the cold breath of the dying night.
I had finished my toilet, and was just beginning to hug myself in the idea that I had escaped, and had a very good excuse to slip into bed again, when I heard the clang of a pair of iron-soled shoes advancing down the torrent bed that did duty for a road, and to my unmitigated disgust saw Joseph looming through the darkness, like an own brother to the Erl King, a "shooting-iron" under each arm, and a mighty wallet on his back. There was no escape—I was in for it!
Setting our faces to the mountains, we entered the pine-forest, and toiled up and up through the dark, silent trees, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left, till the day began to break, some three-quarters of an hour after our start, when we stopped with one accord, of course only to look back and see the sunrise, though I doubt if either of us could have kept up that steady tread-mill pace much longer, with any degree of comfort.
Well, we halted to look, perhaps for the last time, at the valley and the village now far below us. We had got to the height of the cliffs on the opposite side, and could look over their summits at the tumbled alp-billows that tossed their white crests for many a league beyond; the sun steeping the snow-peaks in tints of purple, pink, and crimson, and here and there a rock-peak shone with the brightest silver and the reddest gold,—enough to send one "clean wud" with their exquisite beauty. Down below in the valley, the sun had not yet risen, though man had; the little columns of blue smoke wreathed gracefully upwards in the calm morning air, and the lowing of the cows, and the faint tinkle of their bells, as they were being driven to their morning pasture, floated up ever and anon in strangely diminished tones, that seemed to come from some fairy world far down in the Alp-caverns.
Having rested, we turned our faces again to the mountains, and toiled anew through the pine-forest, now no longer dark and gloomy, but fleckered with gleams of yellow morning light, and sparkling with a thousand dew-diamonds.
Up, up! still up! across the little sparkling runlets, tumbling head over heels in their hurry to see what sort of a world the valley below might be;—up! over masses of rock, ankle-deep in rich brown moss, bejewelled with strawberries and cowberries, garlanded with raspberries, twisting and straggling out of their crevices, covered with rich ripe fruit;—up! over bits of open turf, green as emeralds, set in pure white gravel, sparkling like a thousand diamonds;—up! through tangled masses of fallen pines, their bleaching stumps standing out like the masts of great wrecks—terrible marks of the course of the avalanche wind!—up! through one short bit more of pine-wood, over the split fir fence, and into the little mountain meadow, smiling in the level sunlight, with its bright stream tinkling merrily through it, its scattering boulders, and wooden sennhutt, with the cows and goats clustered round it, standing ready to be milked,—one of the latter, by the bye, instantly charges me, and has to be repelled by my alpenstock, bayonet fashion,—while all around, the sweet breath of the cows mingles deliciously with the aromatic fragrance of the pine forest, and the rich scent of the black orchis and wild thyme.
Seat yourself on that wooden milking-stool by the door—(beware! it has but one leg, and is "kittle to guide")—after a hearty shake of the hand from that grey old giant of a herdsman, and enjoy yourself.
"Joseph, what's i' the fardel? Turn out your traps, and let us see what 'provaunt' you have got." A mighty mass of cold boiled mutton, an infinity of little drabs of rye-bread, the size of one's hand, and as hard as flints; and—what is that thou art extracting with such a grin on thy manly countenance, as if thou hadst found the best joke in Europe, tied up in the corner of the bag?
A quart bottle of corn-brandy!—I simper, the grey herdsman simpers, and Joseph simpers most of all, as if he was conscious of having done a monstrous clever thing, but was modest. "Schnaps at six in the morning!—hardly correct," say I.
Joseph thinks that it is apt to make one thirsty (it certainly always appears to have that effect upon him); and the grey herdsman shakes his head, and smacks his lips dubiously, as if he were not quite certain, but would rather like to try.
"Well, just one thimbleful, Joseph, 'just to kill the larvæ, ye ken.' Ah! you don't understand, it is a mountain excuse, too. Never mind—hand us the becher."
Here we breakfasted luxuriously, eking out our store with sour milk and crumbly new white cheese from the sennhutt. The grey herdsman eyes me intently, and longs to know what manner of man I am. I take pity on his thirst for knowledge. "Ein Englander?"—I am his friend for life! He has heard of the 30,000l. sent over in the French war-time, and his nephew has seen the letter in a glass-case at Innspruck. "And I want to shoot chamois?" He looks almost sorrowfully at me, but I have gone too far to retreat, and am very valiant. "Yes, there are three up about the Wildgrad Kögle." That is enough, Adé Andre! Pack up, Joseph, Forward!
Stop a bit, let us load here; we may stumble on something shootable. I am soon ready; but loading with Joseph is a very solemn affair, not to be undertaken lightly, or finished in a hurry.
First, he takes a dose of stuff out of a cow's horn, which I, in my ignorance, suppose to be very badly made No. 7 shot. A small quantity of this he places in the pan of his rifle, and crushes with the handle of his knife, the rest he pours down the barrel, and I perceive that it is powder; then he looks up and down, round and about—what the deuce is he after? Is he cockney enough to be going to flash off his rifle, and afraid of some one hearing him? No, there he has it—a bunch of grey moss, "baum haar," as he calls it, from that blasted pine. Wonder again; what in the name of goodness is he going to do with that? Use it as a pocket-handkerchief? I do not believe he carries one; at any rate, if he does, he only uses that pattern said by the Fliegende Blätter to be so popular amongst the Gallician deputies of the Paul's-Kirche Parliament. No,—wrong again; he carefully pulls it to pieces, and making it into a round ball, rams it down upon the powder; and a most excellent dodge it is. Colonel Hawker has only re-discovered an old secret, or, more likely, learnt it on the shores of the Bodensee; then the greased patch and the ball, and all is ready. On we go!
After leaving the meadow, we entered again into the pine forest, which gradually became more open, the trees more stunted and fantastic, and their long straggling arms clothed more and more as we ascended with the ash-grey baumhaar; dead trees and thunder-riven stumps became frequent, rotting in and into the black bog mould, which gives a scanty root-hold to the blushing alpen-rose. Soon we leave the trees behind us altogether; nothing but wild chaotic masses of gravel and stones, tossed and heaped one on the other, by the fierce avalanche—the very rocks grey and crumbling with age; here and there patches of black bog, with little oases of emerald green turf perched in their centre, the black orchis growing thick upon them, and perfuming the air yards around.
Ere long, even these traces of vegetation became more scarce, and the appearance of every thing around us wilder and more steril. Still the brilliant peaks of the Wildgrad Kögle gleamed brightly before us, and beckoned us on.
Our path lay now, steep and rugged, along the edge of a ravine, at the bottom of which we heard the torrent chafing and roaring many a yard below us. There was a precipitous bank of rocks and screes to our right, quite unclimbable, which seemed only to want the will—they certainly had the way—to topple us into the abyss. Just as we were turning an abrupt angle very gingerly, with our eyes fixed on our slippery path, and longing for an elephant's trunk, to try the sound bits from the rotten ones, we suddenly heard a rushing "sough," like the falling of a moist snow avalanche, and a cloud passed across the sun. Glancing hastily upwards, I—yes I, in the body at this present, inditing this faithful description of my chase,—saw, not a hundred paces from me, an enormous vulture! Any thing so fiercely, so terribly grand, as this great bird, saw I never before, and can scarcely hope to see again. He was so near that we could distinctly see the glare of his fierce eye, and the hard bitter grip of his clenched talons. The sweep of his vast wings was enormous—I dare not guess how broad from tip to tip; and their rushing noise, as he beat the air in his first labored strokes, sounded strangely wild and spirit-like in the mountain stillness. A dozen strange strokes, and he took a wild swoop round to our right, and away, like a cloud before the blast, till a neighboring peak hid him from our sight, followed by a wild shout of astonishment from Joseph. I opened not my mouth, or if I did—left it open.
Nothing ever gave me such a feeling of reality as the sight of this vast vulture so near me. Often and often had I seen them, both in Switzerland and the Tyrol, sailing so high that, although well up the mountain flank myself, I almost doubted whether they were realities, or mere muscæ volitantes, produced by staring up in to the clear bright sky, with one's head thrown back. This fellow there was no doubt of—we saw his very beard! We were really then chamois-hunting—we had penetrated into the very den of the mountain tyrant. No fear of gigs and green parasols here; we were above the world!
Soon after our friend had departed, and we had recovered from the astonishment into which his unexpected visit had thrown us, we reached the end of our mauvais pas, and found ourselves at the foot of a wild valley, entirely shut in by ranges of lofty cliffs, with here and there patches of snow lying on the least inclined spots. In front, still far above us, towered the wild rock masses of the Wildgrad Kögle. The Kögle itself ran up into one sharp peak, that seemed from where we were, to terminate in a point. Great part of its base was concealed by a range of precipices, with broad sheets of snow here and there, resting at an extraordinary high angle, as we soon found to our cost, and having their crests notched, and pillared, and serrated in the wildest manner. The floor of the valley was covered with masses of rock and boulder, hurled from the surrounding cliffs, and heaps and sheets of rough gravel, ground and crushed by the avalanches, and fissured by the torrents of melted snow. The silence of the Alp-spirit, as silent as death itself, was in it; only at intervals was heard the whispering 'sough' of some slip of snow, dislodged by the warmth of the mid-day sun.
We advanced stealthily, concealing ourselves behind the boulders, and searched valley and cliff in vain for our prey. Joseph was the proud possessor of a telescope, mysteriously fashioned out of paper and cardboard; a pretty good one, nevertheless, brought from Italy by some travelling pedlar, and an object of great veneration, but one which failed in discovering a single chamois. Our only chance now was that they might be feeding in some of the smaller valleys, between the cliffs at the head of the basin in which we were and the Kögle itself.
"Feeding! what could they be feeding on, when you say yourself that you left all kinds of 'green stuff' behind you long ago."
So I thought, too, doubtless, by this time, most impatient reader; but on the screes at the head of the valley, Joseph showed me, for the first time, the plant on which these extraordinary animals in a great measure live. It has a thick green, trilobate leaf, and a flower so delicate and gauze-like, that one wonders how it can bear for a moment the harsh storms to which it is exposed. Its petals have a most curious crumpled appearance, and are of the softest pink imaginable—almost transparent. As for its class and order, you must go elsewhere for them; I know them not; nor the name either which the Latins would have called it if they had been aware of its existence. Joseph called it "gemsenkraut," or chamois herb, and that was enough for me.
Having finished our botanical investigations, we pushed on to the upper end of the valley, and found that the cliffs, and screes, and snow-patches looked uglier and steeper the nearer we approached them. However, there was no retreat—onward we must go, or be declared "nidding" through the length and breadth of the Tyrol.
Oh! those screes—those screes! lying at an angle of goodness knows how much with the horizon—sharp, slaty, angular pieces of stone, like savage hatchets, slippery as glass, glancing from under our feet, and casting us down sideways on their abominable edges, "sliddering" down by the ton, carrying our unfortunate persons yards below where we wanted to go, crashing and clattering, and then dancing and bounding far down into the valley, like mischievous gnomes, delighted with the bumpings and bruisings they had treated us to! How Joseph did anathematize! For my part, mine was a grief "too deep for swears!"
After crossing, still ascending, two or three beds of screes, we came to the edge of the first snow-field; not very broad, it is true, but lying at a higher angle than I ever thought possible, and frozen as hard as marble on the surface—one sheet of ice, with an agreeable fall of some hundred feet at its lower edge. We were in despair! We had now got excited and confident—our "blood was up;" and here came "the impossible to stop us."
"But what is it that Joseph has picked up from the snow, and is examining so carefully?"
"No matter—'twas not what we sought," but it was something closely connected with it.
"Yes, there is no doubt of it; they have been here, and lately too! See the sharp hoof-prints just above! They must have crossed this morning! Go it, ye cripples (in prospectu), we must cross this, come what may."
We got along steadily, without any slides, though with many slips, always sticking our staves convulsively into the snow the moment our heels seemed to have the slightest disposition to assume the altitude of our heads. It was nervous work—one slip, one moment too late in thrusting our staff perpendicularly in the snow, as an anchor, and away we should have shot like a meteor over the glittering surface for a hundred terrible yards, and then with a wild bound have been launched into the abyss below. However, we could not have turned back if we had wished it, and at last, to our intense satisfaction, we grasped the rough rock that bounded the further side of the field. Grasped it!—we embraced it!—we clung to its rough surface as if we had been six months at sea, and had landed in the Hesperides!
At length on the summit of the ridge, we were able to crouch down and look through a crack in the rock into the next valley. Round and about, above and below, we examined every hole and corner; half-a-dozen times some villanous stone made our hearts leap to our mouths. But alas! "it was no go;" there was not a living thing in sight—barrenness, barrenness, and desolation.
Our chance of chamois was utterly over for the day. N'importe. Better luck to-morrow. Who can feel out of spirits in that brisk mountain atmosphere? There is the highest peak of the Wildgrad Kögle right before us—and hang him, we'll dine on his head.
The ridge on which we found ourselves was but a few feet broad, and about a hundred and fifty feet above the snow on each side. It was composed of innumerable irregular pillar-like masses of rock, of different heights and distances, impossible to descend at the point where we found ourselves, but as it ran at the same general level, we fancied that we could get on the sloping mass of snow which lay on the side of the peak at some distance on. Jumping from one small table of rock to another—now only saved from "immortal smash" by Joseph's strong arm, and now swaying doubtfully on a plateau the size of a small dumb-waiter top, uncertain whether we should be off or not—we hopped along, wishing we were kangaroos, till we found a crevice which seemed practicable, and down which I went with a run—or rather a slide, much quicker than was agreeable, being only brought up by my feet coming on Joseph's broad shoulders, he taking, as I must confess he generally did, the first place, whereby he always came in for a double allowance of stones and gravel, but about which he seemed utterly indifferent.
On reaching the bottom, we found that, as usual, the snow had melted some distance from the rock, leaving a mighty pretty crack to receive us. However, a lucky jump landed us safely, and for a moment erect, on the snow, and then head over heels, rolling, and bumping, and kicking, we spun over the slippery surface till we managed to bring ourselves up about fifty yards below where we had started. But in spite of tumbles we were in high spirits: there were no gems to frighten, and no more tottering avalanches, ready to fall on our heads if we as much as ventured to use our pocket-handkerchiefs.
We toiled up the terribly steep snow-patch merrily enough, not without retracing our path several times in a manner at once undignified and unexpected—though it certainly was not to be complained of as far as speed went—and reached, at last, utterly blown and sick with exertion, the base of the rock forming the summit of the mountain. Hardly giving ourselves time to recover, we climbed up the last sixty or seventy feet of cliff, and I found myself—first this time, for a wonder—on a small platform, the summit of the Wildgrad Kögle.
The platform was some ten or twelve feet square, and the only approach to it was on the side we had ascended; on every other the cliff ran down in a sheer wall, how deep I know not, for I never could judge of distances from above.
As for describing what we saw from our elevated dining-table, it is clean out of the question; we saw nothing but mountains—or rather the tops of mountains, for we were far above the general level of their crests; one wide sea of rock and snow surged around us; shoreless, no bounding range, no sweet glimpses of broad green valleys and glistening rivers in the distance; no pretty villages nestling cosily under the pine forest—nothing but peak on peak, ridge on ridge; bright pinnacles and clusters of pinnacles shooting up here and there far above the rest into the calm blue sky—deep grooves marking the course of distant valleys, like tide-marks on the sea. But no trace of man or beast, herb or tree; the very wind that whistled past us brought no sound or scent from the valleys it had passed, but sounded harsh, and dry, and dead. Vain, indeed would be the effort to convey the slightest idea of the solemn grandeur of that scene! Manfred? Manfred gives the finest and truest picture ever perhaps painted of Swiss Alpine scenery, as seen looking towards the mountains, or from the cliffs bordering some rich pastoral valley; but we had passed all that long ago—we were in the very heart of the range. Alp was still piled on Alp, but we had reached the summit of the pile. The only valleys we saw were fearful scars in the mountain flank, half filled with eternal snow, and the crumbling skeletons of dead Alps. No sound—no herdsman's jödle—no cowbell's tinkle ever reached to half way up our rocky perch: we were far above the vulture and the chamois. We were alone with the rock, and snow, and sky! It seemed profanity to whisper—and yet there was Joseph, after a glance round, and a short "schöne panorama!" whistling and fishing up the eatables and drinkables from the bottom of his wallet, as coolly as if he was seated in his own smoky, half-lighted cabin. He had been born in it, and was used to it. I doubt whether I myself felt the grandeur of the scene as much then as I have often done since, on recalling it bit by bit to my recollection. The really grand gives one at first a sort of painful feeling that is indescribable. One cannot think—one only feels with that strange undescribed sense, that strives, almost to heart-breaking, to bring itself forth, and yet stays voiceless.
We sat long, drinking in alternate draughts of sublimity and Slibowitz (as Joseph called the brandy), till the Berg-geist kindly put an end to our exstasies by drawing a dark gray veil over the whole picture, and pelting us with snow-flakes, as a gentle hint to be off and leave him to his cogitations. It began, indeed, to snow in real earnest, and the weather looked mighty dark and unpromising, so we scrambled hastily down the way we came, and leaning well back on our alpenstocks with our feet stretched out before us, shot down the long sheet of snow, at a considerably quicker rate than we had ascended; and gliding scornfully past our columnar friends, whose fantastic capitals had given us so much trouble in the morning, we reached, with many a tumble and much laughter, the stony ravine at its foot.
Scorning to finish the day without drawing blood from something besides ourselves, we determined to commit slaughter on whatever came across us. We soon heard the shrill signal-whistle of the marmot, and for want of better game, determined to bag at least one of these exceedingly wide-awake gentlemen. Creeping to the top of a neighboring ridge, we peeped cautiously over into a little valley floored with a confused mass of mossy stones and straggling alpen-rosen. Here several of these quaint little beasts, half rat, half rabbit, were frisking in and out of their burrows, cutting all sorts of what Joseph called, 'Burzelbaume,' Anglicè, capers; little suspecting that the all-destroying monster, man, had his eye upon them. One fellow, the sentinel, took my particular fancy as he sat up on his nether end on a large stone. There was an expression of unutterable self-conceit and conscious wide-awakefulness about his blunt muzzle and exposed incisors that was perfectly delicious. Him I determined to bring to bag, and cautiously raising my carbine—crack! Over he rolled, I have no doubt, too astonished to feel any pain, his friends tumbling madly head over heels into their burrows, whilst the astonished echoes repeated crack! crack! again and again, in all sorts of tones and modulations, till warned to silence by the harsh rattle of an old mountain a mile off. We bagged our friend, who looked every wit as conceited in death as he did when alive, and recommenced our descent. On our way we shot a brace of "schnee huhner," a species of ptarmigan, a pack of which very slow birds were running stupidly in and out amongst the rocks—and hurried on. It was growing very dark, the snow fell heavily, and the wind began rushing and eddying round us, depositing the largest and coldest of the snow-flakes in our ears and eyes, till we were half-blinded and wholly deaf. Joseph began to look serious, and hunted about for a small torrent he knew of, to serve as a guide, and after some trouble and anxiety, we found it, and stumbled down its rocky banks till we came to a solitary sennhutt, which was to be our resting-place for the night.
After some trouble, we got the door open, and found that the hut was fortunately not entirely filled with hay; a space about six or eight feet broad had been boarded off between it and the outer wall for the use of the wild-hauer. This was to serve us as parlor and kitchen and all, except bed-room, which was to be sought for in the hay-stack itself. Our floor was the bare earth; the logs which formed the wall were badly jointed, and the wind whistled through the gaping cracks in the most uncomfortable manner; one could almost fancy that it was trying to articulate the dreaded word, rheu—matism.
However, the ever-active Joseph, bustling about, found some dry wood, and we made a blazing fire on the floor at the imminent risk of burning our beds, and slightly thawed ourselves; we continued our researches, and found a shallow wooden pail, carefully covered over, holding some two gallons of sour milk, left by the charitable hay-man some fortnight before, for the use of any benighted hunter who might have the luck to stumble on the hut, and one of those abominable one-legged milking-stools, so common in that part of the world, which, having vainly endeavored to sit on, and having tumbled into the fire in consequence, to Joseph's intense amusement, I hurled madly over the hay out into the storm.
As the clatter made amongst the shingles of the roof by its hasty exist subsided, we heard a noise which struck terror into both our hearts, and would doubtless have chilled our very marrow, if it had not been below freezing-point already. Devils! Berg-geister! Fly! out into the black storm! over the precipice! into the torrent! before some fearful mopping and mowing face, too ghastly horrible for human eye-ball to see without bursting, or human brain to conceive without madness, gibber out upon us from that dark corner! Listen: there it is again! And—mew-w-w-w-w! down tumbled between us a miserable, half-grown, gray kitten, nearly dead with cold and starvation, doubtless absent on some poaching expedition when the hut was deserted, and not thought worth the going back for. Oh! the joy of that unfortunate little beast at seeing man and fire once more! How she staggered about with tail erect, vainly trying to mew and purr at the same time! having to be perpetually pulled out of the fire, and "put out," to prevent her playing the part of one of Samson's foxes with our beds, filling the cabin with unspeakable smells of singed hair! And now she would persist in walking up our backs, and tickling us to madness with her scorched tail!
Having disposed of "Catchins," as she was immediately named, as well as we could, by tossing her by the tail to the top of the hay, whenever she descended to thank us, which happened about three times in every two minutes, we "fixed" our suppers, broiling the schnee-huhner over the bright fire, and enjoyed ourselves mightily. After a smoke and a short cross-examination from Joseph as to our friends, family, and expectations, and particular inquiries for the shortest overland route to England, and the number of years required for the journey, we climbed up into the hay, and grubbed and wormed our way for two or three feet below its surface, and, making unto ourselves each a "spiracle" or blow-hole over our respective noses, tried to slumber.
Now, a bed of short, sweet Alpine grass, fragrant with the spirits of a thousand departed flowers, is as warm, cozy, and elastic as a bed can be, but it has one unfortunate drawback,—the small straws and dust falling down the before-mentioned spiracle, tickle and titilate one's unfortunate face and nose in a most distracting manner; and as you utterly destroy the snug economy of your couch, and let in a rush of cold mountain air, as often as you raise your hand to brush away the annoyance, some fastidious persons might possibly prefer a modest mattress, with a fair allowance of sheets and blankets.
At last, however, I was dozing off, tired of hearing Joseph muttering what certainly were not his prayers, rustling fretfully, and sneezing trumpet-like at intervals, as some straw, more inquisitive than usual, made a tour of inspection up his nostril, when I suddenly heard a round Tyrolese oath rapped out with great fervor, and something whirled over my head and plumped against the timbers of the roof. Dreamily supposing that it was the aforesaid cumbrous Tyrolese execration, which Joseph had jerked out with such energy as to send it clean back into oblivion, when something with an evil smell, and making a noise like a miniature stocking-machine, tumbled down my spiracle, plump into my face. Waking fully, I at once perceived that it was the cat, not the oath, I had heard fly over me shortly before, she, in the excess of her gratitude, being determined to stick as closely to us as possible. Following Joseph's example, I seized her by the tail, and whirled her, purring uninterruptedly, as far as I could. Ere many minutes had elapsed, she was again launched forth by the infuriated Joseph, and backwards and forwards she flew at least half-a-dozen times between us, without appearing in the least disconcerted, perhaps, indeed, finding the exercise conducive to the assimilation of the sour milk, till Nature could stand no more, and we fell fast asleep.
Whether she spent the night on our faces, in alternate watches, I know not, but I had ghastly dreams, and when I woke in the morning, I found my hand and arm thrust forth from the hay, reposing on a cool and clean counterpane of snow, which had drifted in during the night, as if I had been repelling her advances even in my sleep.
Feeling very cold and damp, we turned out as soon as we woke, and blowing up the embers of the fire, warmed ourselves as well as we could, and took a peep out into the night. The storm had passed away, leaving everything covered with a veil of snow, that gleamed faintly under the intense black-blue sky. The stars were beginning to assume that peculiar sleepy, twinkling appearance which shows that their night-watch is drawing to a close, and everything lay in still, calm rest around us.
We breakfasted sparingly, as our provisions were beginning to run short, thanks to the keen mountain air and our hard work the day before, and just as the first cold chill of the approaching dawn began to be felt, we left the cabin, shutting up Catchins, and hanging the marmot on a peg out of her reach, till our return.
Our day's route lay more round to the left of the Wildgrad Kögle. The scene was for some time a repetition of that of the day before, but the cliffs were still more precipitous and the ravines narrower and more difficult to traverse. Many a tumble we got for the first hour amongst the boulders covered with treacherous moss and cowberry plants, but before sunrise we had left all vegetation behind us again, and were up amongst the crags and the snow.
As we ascended, we saw a valley to our left, filled to the brim with dense mist, which, as soon as the sun began to tinge the highest peaks, rose in swirling columns, and shut out every thing that was not in our immediate vicinity. This was advantageous, as, although it prevented our seeing, it at the same time prevented our being seen, from the cliffs before we reached our best ground. We toiled on steadily, crossing vast beds of snow, and occasionally the roots of some glacier, that threw itself into the valleys to our left, climbing, scrambling, and slipping, but still steadily ascending, till we got to where Joseph expected to fall in with chamois, when we called a halt, and sheltering ourselves behind a mass of rock from the keen morning wind, waited for the clearing of the mist.
The Alp-spirit seemed to be amusing himself mightily with this same mist! at one moment, catching it up in huge masses, he piled it on the sharp peaks, as if to make himself a comfortable cushion; and then, sitting suddenly down to try its efficacy, drove it in all directions by his "lubber weight." Enraged, he tossed and tumbled it about for some time, and at last spread it into one broad level plain, with the higher peaks standing out clear and sharp, like rocks from a calm sea. Now and then the mist would disappear entirely for a few moments, leaving everything clear and bright; then a small cloud, "like a man's hand," would form on the side of some distant peak, and spreading out with inconceivable rapidity, would envelope us in its boiling wreaths, while the wind, ever and anon rushing down some unexpected gully, cut a tunnel right through it, giving us glimpses of distant mountains and snow-fields, looking near and strange as if seen through a telescope.
At last the sun began to shine out cheerily and steadily, and the breeze gave a freshness and buoyance to our spirits never to be felt except on high mountains. The heavy atmosphere of the valley squeezes one's soul into its case, and sits on the lid like an incubus. That blessed mountain-spirit is the only power who takes the lid off altogether, and lets the soul out of its larva-case to revel in the strange beauties of his domain without restraint!
After a time, we found ourselves in a region of snow-fields, filling up broad valleys, lying calm and shadowless in the bright sunshine. Here and there, they were marked by delicate blue lines, where the crevasses allowed the substratum of ice to be seen, showing that these apparently eternal and immovable plains of snow were slowly but steadily flowing downwards, to appear as splintered glaciers in the valley far below; and here and there again, dark ridges, standing sharply up from the snow-bed, marked the course of buried mountain ranges, and gave some idea of the vast depth of the deposit.
But wonderfully beautiful as these plains were, and strange and wild as they appeared to an English eye, with a brilliant August sun pouring his whole flood of light and warmth upon them, they were not the great points of interest to us. Those mighty ranges of cliff, rising tier above tier to our right, fretted with a pure white lace-work of fresh fallen snow, with here and there vast beds of screes shot from above, giving promise of gemsenkraut, were the bits we scanned with the greatest eagerness. We had come for chamois, and I am afraid, looked upon the rest as of very secondary importance.
We were advancing along the base of the lowest tier of cliff, which had a sort of step of snow running along it about half-way up for some half-a-mile, bounded at one end by an immense mass of screes and precipice, and at the other by a sudden turn of the rock, when Joseph suddenly dashing off his hat and throwing himself prostrate behind a stone, dragged me down beside him, with a vice-like grasp, that left its mark on my arm for many a day after. Utterly taken aback at the suddenness of my prostration, I lay beside him, wondering at the change that had come over his face; he was as white as marble, his moustache worked with intense excitement, and his eyeballs seemed starting from their sockets as he glared at the cliff. Following his line of sight, I glanced upwards, and my eye was instantly arrested by something—it moved—again—and again! With shaking hand I directed the telescope to the point, and there, at the end of it, hopping fearlessly on the shivered mountain side, scratching its ear with its hind foot, and nibbling daintily the scattered bits of gemsenkraut that spring up between the stones, stood fearless and free—a chamois!
After watching him with intense interest for some moments, we drew back, scarcely daring to breathe, and sheltering ourselves behind a large stone, held a council of war. It was evidently impossible to approach him from where we were: we could not have moved ten steps towards him without the certainty of being discovered; our only chance was to get above him and so cut him off from the higher ranges. Crawling backwards, we managed to place a low range of rock between ourselves and the cliffs, and then making a wide sweep, we reached their base at some distance from where the chamois was feeding.
After examining the precipice for some time, we found that the only mode of access to its summit, here some three or four hundred feet above us, was by a sort of ravine, what would be called in the Swiss Alps, a cheminée a species of fracture in the strata the broken edges of which would give us some foot and hand hold: at its upper termination we could see the end of a small glacier, slightly overhanging the cliff, from which a small stream leapt from ledge to ledge, only alive in the last hour or two of sun-warmth, giving promises, which certainly were faithfully fulfilled, of additional slipperiness and discomfort. But we had no choice; we had already spent nearly an hour in our cautious circuit. Our scramble, wherever it took place, would cost us nearly another before we got above our expected prey, and if we hesitated much longer, he might take a fancy to march off altogether in search of the rest of the herd. So up we went, dragging ourselves and each other up the wet slippery rocks, getting a shivering "swish" of ice-cold water in our faces every now and then, till we got about half-way up, when, just as we were resting for a moment to take breath, we heard a tremendous roar, followed by a splintering crash just above our heads, and had the pleasure of seeing the fragments of some half-a-ton of ice, which had fallen from the glacier above, fly out from the shelf of rock under which we were resting, and spin down the rugged path we had just ascended.
Thinking that this was quite near enough to be pleasant, and "calculating" that by every doctrine of chances the same thing would not happen twice in the same half-hour, we scrambled up as fast as we could before the next instalment became due, and at last reached safely the top of the precipice.
We certainly had not much to boast of as far as walking went, when we got there, for the snow and rocks were tumbled about in a very wild manner. If we slipped off a rock, we tumbled waist-deep into the soft, melting snow-drifts, and when we tumbled on the snow, there was always some lurking rock ready to remind us of his presence by a hearty thump; however, as we were fairly above the chamois, our excitement carried us on. I do not think that Joseph swore once; we found afterwards indeed, to our cost, that in one of his involuntary summersets, he had broken the bottle, and narrowly escaped being bayoneted by the fragments: however, we did not know it then, and so scrambled on in contented ignorance, until we reached the spot on the cliffs to our right, which we had marked as being above our prey. Here, however, we found that it was impossible to get near enough to the edge to look over, as the fresh-fallen snow threatened to part company from the rock and carry us with it, on the slightest indiscretion on our parts. Crouching down in the snow, we listened for some hint of our friend's whereabouts, and had not waited more than a minute, when the faint clatter of a stone far below convinced us that he was on the move: keeping low, we wallowed along till we came to where the crest of the cliff showing a little above the snow, gave us a tolerable shelter; carefully crawling to the edge, we peeped over, and saw, as we expected, that the gems had shifted his quarters, and as luck would have it, was standing on the snow-bed half-way up the cliff, immediately below us.
Trembling, partly with excitement, and partly from the under-waistcoat of half-melted snow we had unconsciously assumed in our serpentine wrigglings, we lay and watched the graceful animal below us. He evidently had a presentiment that there was something "no canny" about the mountain-side; some eddy had perhaps reached his delicate nostrils, laden with the taint of an intruder. With his head high in the air, and his ears pointed forwards, he stood examining—as wiser brutes than he sometimes do—every point of the compass but the right. One foot was advanced; one moment more, and he would have gone; when crack! close to my ear, jut as I was screwing up my nerves for a long shot, went Joseph's heavy rifle. With a sinking heart I saw the brute take a tremendous bound, all four hoofs together, and then, like a rifle-ball glancing over the bosom of a calm lake, bound after bound carried him away and away over the snow-field, and round the corner to our right, before I had recovered my senses sufficiently to take a desperate snap at him.
What we said, or felt, or how we got over the face of that cliff, I know not. A dim recollection of falling stones and dust showering round us—pieces of treacherous rock giving way in our hands and under our feet, bruising slides, and one desperate jump over the chasm between the cliff and the snow,—and there we were both, standing pale and breathless, straining our eyes for some scarcely expected trace of blood to give us hope.
Not a drop tinged the unsullied snow at the place where he had made his first mad bound, nor at the second, nor at the third; but a few paces further on, one ruby-tinged hole showed where the hot blood had sunk through the melting snow.
Too excited to feel any uprising of envy, hatred, or malice against my more fortunate companion, I raced along the white incline, leaving him behind reloading his rifle,—which was always a sort of solemn rite with him,—and following, without difficulty, the deep indentations of the animal's hoofs, I came to where the cliff receded into a sort of small bay, with its patch of snow on the same plane with the one I was on, but separated from it by a rugged promontory of cliff and broken rock. Cautiously I scrambled round the point, removing many a stone that seemed inclined to fall and give the alarm to the watchful chamois, and peeping cautiously round the last mass of rock that separated me from the snow-patch, I saw the poor brute, standing not more than sixty yards from me, his hoofs drawn close together under him, ready for a desperate rush at the cliff at the first sound that reached him; his neck stretched out, and his muzzle nearly touching the snow, straining every sense to catch some inkling of the whereabouts of the mischief he felt was near him.
With my face glowing as if it had been freshly blistered, a dryness and lumping in my throat, as if I had just escaped from an unsuccessful display of Mr. Calcraft's professional powers, and my heart thud-thudding against my ribs at such a rate that I really thought the gems must hear it in the stillness, I raised my carbine. Once, at the neck just behind the ear, I saw the brown hide clear at the end of the barrel, but I dared not risk such a chance; and so, straining my nerves, I shifted my aim to just behind the shoulder,—one touch of the cold trigger, and as the thin gases streamed off, rejoicing at their liberation, I saw the chamois shrink convulsively when the ball struck him, and then fall heavily on the snow, shot right through the heart. With a who-whoop! that might have been heard half-way to Innspruck, I rushed up to him;—one sweep of the knife—the red blood bubbled out on to the snow that shrunk and wasted before its hot touch, as if it felt itself polluted, and there lay stretched out in all its beauty before me the first gems I ever killed—just as Joseph came up, panting, yelling, and jödling, and rejoicing at my success, without a shade of envy in his honest heart.
Now I believe, in all propriety, we ought to have been melancholy, and moralized over the slain. That rich, soft black eye, filming over with the frosty breath of death, and that last convulsive kick of the hind legs, ought perhaps to have made us feel that we had done rather a brutal and selfish thing; but they did not. This is a truthful narrative, and I must confess that our only feeling was one of unmixed rejoicing.
I have occasionally moralized over a trout, flopping about amongst the daisies and buttercups, and dying that horrible suffocation death of my causing; but it was never, if I remember right, the first trout I had killed that day. My feelings always get finer as my pannier gets fuller, particularly if it be a warm afternoon, and I have lunched.
But as for the unfortunate gems, we rejoiced over him exceedingly; we shook hands over him; we sat beside him, and on him; we examined him, carefully, minutely, scientifically, from stem to stem. I firmly believe that I could pick him out at this moment from the thousand ghosts that attend the silver-horned Gemsen König, if I had but the good luck to fall in with his majesty and his charmed suite.
Joseph's ball had struck him high up on the neck, but had not inflicted any thing like a severe wound. Had we fired on him from below, he would have scaled the cliffs in a moment, and been no more seen, at least by us; but as he knew that the mischief was above him, he dared not ascend—to descend was impossible; and so, getting to a certain extent pounded, he gave me the rare chance of a second shot.
Long we sat and gazed at the chamois; and the wild scene before us—never shall I forget it!—shut in on three sides by steep and frowning cliffs, in front the precipice, and far, far down, the wild rocky valleys, divided by shivered ridges, rising higher and higher till they mounted up into the calm, pure snow range, set in the frame of the jutting promontories on each side of us—looking the brighter and the "holier" from the comparative shade in which we were. Not a sound but the occasional faint "swish" of the waterfall that drained from the snow-bed,—not a living thing now but our two selves standing side by side on the snow. We had killed the third, and there he lay stiffening between us!
But, hillo! Joseph! we are nearly getting sentimental, after all, over this brute, (that I should say so!) who has all but broken our necks already, and who in all human probability will do so entirely before we have done with him. Fish up the decanter, and let us have a schnaps over our quarry; my throat and lips are burning, as if I had lunched off quicklime. Well, what are you fumbling at? Oh, horror! Joseph's hand returns empty from the bag, with a large cut on one of the fingers—weeping tears of blood! The bottle is smashed!—smashed to atoms! and the unconscious Joseph has had the celestial liquor trickling down his back—how long he know not, and care not; it is "gone, and for ever!"
Like the summer-dried fountain,
When our need is the sorest!
But it is of no use blaspheming in that manner, Joseph; not one of those ten hundred and fifty millions of bad spirits you are invoking so freely, will bring us back one drop of our good ones; so we must e'en "girn and bide." But still it is as bad as bad can be,—not a drop of water for hours to come, perhaps.
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Munching snow only chars one's lips like hot cinders, and the cool "swish" of the waterfall there below us only makes one the more thirsty. Let us be off out of ear-shot of it, at any rate. Take up the gems, and let us dream of cool, bubbling runlets and iced sour milk as we go.
Dream! quotha! we must dream of how we are to go at all, first, and a very nightmarey sort of dream it promises to be; we are regularly pounded; not a vestige of a crack or crevice up which to worm ourselves in the whole face of the semicircular range of cliffs beneath which we stand; and moreover, they are all of that upside down, overhanging style, that precludes all climbing. We must retrace our steps as we best can, and try where we descended.
"Well, Joseph, where did we come down—eh?" Not there! Nonsense!—impossible! Yes! too true; there it was; there are our tracks in the snow, and the dust and stones that were so obliging as to accompany us to the bottom, and be hanged to them! But the cliff has surely grown since then. It looks as high as Gallantry Bower, in dear old North Devon.—I wish I were at the top or bottom either of that, instead of where I am! There is not a hundred feet difference between them. Three hundred feet, the cliff is, if an inch! We can never do it! Let us make a cast round by the screes, and see if we cannot get down that way.
We did so, but found that they were quite impassable. What looked like a continuous shoot when seen from below, we found to be divided by two or three ledges of rock, and the angle at which they lay, rendered it impossible for any thing heavier footed than a gems to pass them. We must up the cliff! We had no choice.
Now, to begin, it was no easy thing to get at the cliff at all. That confounded gap between the snow and the rock was bad enough to get across from above; but to jump up from the sloping snow slap against the face of the rock was ten times worse. However, Joseph having uncoiled a few yards of line from his waist, and made it fast to the gems, tightened his belt, and took the crack gallantly, lighting on a narrow ledge, with his nose almost touching the rock, to which he stuck like a limpet for a moment, and then, having steadied himself, turned round and seated himself, with his legs dangling over the chasm. Now came my turn. Having thrown the end of the line to Joseph—after vainly looking for a promising ledge to land on, I yielded to his entreaties, and swung myself right at him. We grasped each other pretty tight, you may be assured, gentle reader; and after swaying for a moment or two over the abyss, I climbed up him, and getting my feet on his shoulders, I managed to draw myself up to a ledge a few feet higher. Now came my turn to turn, and a most unpleasant piece of gymnastics it was. The ledge was not an inch too broad, and the rock below only rough enough to scratch against, not to give any firm foot-hold. However, I at last got my back against the rock pretty firmly; and Joseph, who had dragged the gems up from the snow, threw me the end of the line, which, after one or two unsuccessful grabs, that nearly toppled me over from my "bad eminence," I caught, and with his assistance, got the gems up to me, and rested it across my knees. Joseph now turned his face to the rock, and getting up to me, placed one of his iron-soled shoes on my thigh, and the other on my shoulder, and climbed over and past me. As soon as he was firmly fixed, I threw him up the end of the line, and, felt much relieved of the weight of the chamois, whose rough hide rubbed lovingly over my face as it passed me, and turning round, and standing upon my ledge, laid hold of Joseph by the ankle, and again climbed up him and past him, to be climbed up and over in my turn. Over and over we had to repeat the same manœuvre, varied occasionally by our being unable to turn or to sit down from the narrowness of the ledges, and then the strain was terrible. If we had not come sometimes to a broader ledge than usual, which allowed us to lie down and get an easier hold of the line, as it dangled like a plummet over the cliff, we, or at least I, could never have reached the top of the cliff with the gems, and I very much doubt whether either of us would have cared much to have done so without it. What was before me I hardly knew. Imitating as well as I could the happy insouciance of a snail "sliming" up the side of the Parthenon, I tried to restrict my range of vision to points immediately near me. I never felt giddy in my life; but I felt that it would be running a terrible risk to look into the immensity that lay stretched out below me, like another world.
However, every thing in this world must have at least one end, even an Alpine cliff. And at last, as I drew myself up, I found myself face to face with the snow. The last step was by no means the easiest or safest; but in a few moments all three of us, Joseph, the chamois, and myself, were lying on the snow-bed, one hardly more alive than the other.
As soon as we had recovered a little, we stumbled back amongst the sloppy snow, and the half-hidden rocks, one of which had doubtless caused the untimely emptying of our spirit bottle, till we arrived at the cheminée up which we had scrambled in the morning. Now scrambling up is one thing, and scrambling down is another—decidedly more difficult, particularly with the addition of a "beastie" twice as large as a well-grown fawn. So we decided to return over the small glacier which had so nearly knocked our brains out in our ascent, not without a lurking hope of finding some water in its delicate green chalices.
The small ice-stream on which we pursued our thirsty search, flowed down from the upper snow-beds through a chasm in the cliffs, and lay right across our path. The crevasses were small and easy to traverse, though had they been ten times the breadth, we should have welcomed them for the prospect of water they held out. We soon discovered what we wanted, and throwing ourselves on the ice, from which the sun had long since melted the last night's snow, leaving nothing but the pure water crystal, revelled in long draughts of ice-cold water, regardless of the consequences.
We lay there resting ourselves, and peering down the crevasses for some time. How deliciously refreshing was that cool green light, filtered through the translucent ice, to our eyes, wearied by the eternal glare of the snow-fields! I have often wondered why no poet had ever chosen one of these same crevasses, with its tinkling stream, and fairy bridges and battlements of pure green ice, bathing in a strange unearthly phosphorescent light, for the home of some glacier Undine. Where could one find a fitter palace for some delicate Ariel than such places as the moulins of the Mer de Glace, the ice-grottoes of the Grindenwald, or the Rhone glacier, or even the commonest crack in the most insignificant sheet of frozen snow. How exquisitely beautiful are those little emerald basins, fit baths for Titania, filled with water so pure and clear that one almost doubts its presence, till its exquisite coolness touches one's parched lips! I never wondered at the excitement of that enthusiastic Frenchman, who being held by the legs to prevent him throwing himself into the arms of the ice-nymph, whom he doubtless saw beckoning to him from below, hurled his hat into the moulin, and then raced down to the source of the Arveiron to see it appear, hoping, doubtless, that it would bring him some tidings of fairyland. But the nymph answered not: perhaps she was cold, and retained the chapeau for her own private wearing. At all events, M. le Baron never got it again, as far as I could learn.
Our labor was now nearly over; we quickly traversed two or three small snow-fields, and after a little trouble in hauling ourselves and the gems up and down the ridges that separated them, we reached a smooth declivity of snow, down which we shot merrily, getting many a roll, it is true, but merely laughing thereat, as every tumble carried us all the faster downwards, and at last reached safe and sound the region of rocks and gravel we had left so long.
How deliciously refreshing to the wearied eye was the first patch of green turf!—how brightly glowed the alpen-rosen amongst the rocks! And—yes! there is actually a honey-bee droning about that orchis, singing his welcome song of home, and fire-sides, and kindly greetings!
Happy as two school-boys, we marched on, carrying our quarry alternately, yodling, and shouting, and playing all sorts of practical jokes on each other, rejoicing at the success of our expedition, caring nothing now for the frowns of the grim old giants around us, caring nothing for the bitter blasts and swirling snow-squalls that swept past us; and at last, as night closed in, we found ourselves once more in the little cabin, that seemed quite home-like to us, and which we had fancied more than once in the course of the day that we should never see again, with Catchins gyrating pound us, "making a tail" at the chamois, and welcoming us as old friends. We did not dawdle long over our supper, which consisted principally of the rat-like marmot, broiled on the embers, and a draught from the neighboring torrent, and turned into our hay beds, wet and wearied enough, with our brains in a whirl from the strange excitements of the day, and slept, too done up to care for tickling straws or feline impertinences.
When I woke in the morning, I lay for some time trying to collect my thoughts, half fearing that all was but a dream, and that we had still our work before us; but on scrambling down, the sight of the gems reassured me, and was an agreeable balm for the intolerable aching I felt from head to heel. Joseph I must say groaned quite as much as myself, and we hobbled about in the dark to find bits of wood for our fire, like a couple of unfortunates just escaped from the rack. The skin of our faces and necks was peeling off, as if we had been washing them in oil of vitriol, and using sand-paper for a towel; but we were used to that, and had been as badly burnt many a time before; but we ached!—ye gods, how we did ache! It took a long warming and some mutually administered friction, to get us at all in walking trim. As soon as we become "lissom" again, having nothing to detain us, and very little to eat, we wended on our way, one bearing Catchins in the now empty bag, and the other with the gems, down towards the pines, covered with last night's snow, and following the course of the torrent, strode on as merrily, or perchance more so, as the first morning we started. The sun soon shone out bright and warm, the snow began to drip from the boughs, and every step we took showed the black mould and the decaying needle leaves of the pines. We heard the rustling of several black-cock, and it being my turn to carry Catchins' light weight, I shot one villanously, as he sat on a pine branch, and stuck his tail in my hat, after the fashion of all true yägers.
Soon we left the melting snow and dripping woods behind us, and reached the bright meadows glowing beneath an Italian sky. Strange sounded the shrill chirping of the red and green grasshoppers in our ears, kindly each herdsman's yodle and maiden's laugh rang to our hearts, and palace-like seemed the little cabin that received us after our sojourn amongst the ice and snow, now seeming more like uneasy dreams than realities which we had undergone but a day before. Bright smiles greeted us, bright brown eyes laughed a welcome to us, and many a sturdy hand was clasped in ours as we sat resting ourselves on the bench before the door.
But we tarried not long; we burned to show our trophy "at home;" and we sped down the Oetzthal, and reached Dumpfen early in the afternoon, to be cheered and complimented, and welcomed back with all the warmth of the honest Tyrolese heart. The people had been in great distress about us—about me, at least—as they supposed that I must, of necessity, have broken my neck. I suspect, indeed, that they never thought that I would really go, and were rather astonished when they woke, and found me gone. As for Joseph, it was his certain fate—if not now, another time. But they rejoiced in their mistake, and with my hat crowned with flowers by many a rosy finger, and my hands tingling from many a giant squeeze, and perhaps my heart, too, a little, from more than one gentle one, I hung my gems on a nail outside the door for inspection, and seated myself once again in the little chamber, looking out upon the torrent and the cliff.
I cannot linger over the simple pleasures of that evening; as Shallow says, "the heart is all." "Jenkins of the Post" may love to record his reminiscences of a ball at Almack's, or an "æsthetic tea" at the Comtesse of Cruche Cassé's; but such remembrances always bring as much pain as pleasure to me, making me yearn for those free days spent amongst the mountains, and the torrents, and the happy single-hearted mountaineers, far from the cares, troubles, and tribulations of "our highly civilized society."
And now, most patient reader,—are you there still? Farewell! I have tried to give you some faint description of the indescribable, and have, of course, failed. But take at least my advice, and a knapsack, and a thick pair of shoes, and eschewing hackneyed Switzerland, leave for once the old bellwether, and try one summer in the Norischer Alpen; and if you are disappointed—I can only say, that you richly deserve to be!