As we wound along the road towards Villeneuve, beneath the old walnut trees, we turned to see it and the prisoners’ isle, till D——, who accuses me of always admiring scenery backwards, cricked his neck. The tiny habitation has no business on the island; the mountain breeze should only blow over the three tall trees and the flowers of gentle hue.
Villeneuve is an abominable hole: its inns of the Croix Blanche and Lion d’Or looking equally uninviting. Bidding here good-bye to the lake, we enter the valley of the Rhone, wild and muddy, with his eighty-four tributary streams, already received in his passage through the mountains. L’Aigle is a charming village, hid in the hills. Bex is not, in my opinion, situated quite so prettily, but the inn has a prepossessing appearance.
A peasant pointed out the way to the Salines, which lie in the mountain behind, but of them you must ask descriptions elsewhere, for it just then began to rain heavily, and we put on our cloaks, bound for Martigny. St. Maurice stands, its castle on the crag, above the road from Geneva, where a fine bridge crosses the wild Rhone, its one arch flung from the Dent de Morcles on the further side, to the Dent du Midi on ours. Before us was a little fort, thrown up by the Swiss in 1832, to defend this already well closed pass. I thought it one of the most striking spots I had seen in Switzerland. You know the legend, that here in the year 302, the Theban legion was massacred by command of the Emperor Maximilian, and the place called St. Maurice, from the name of the chief of these martyrs, who refused to abjure Christianity. When we had crossed the bridge, the grandeur and the beauty merged in the muddy street of this most filthy town; the contrast between the Vaud we had left and the Valais we had just entered, marvellous, considering that the separation is a bridge seventy feet long. Manure heaps before the doors, and pigs revelling in them once more; and the hideous goitre, and more hideous cretin, telling at every step their tale of unwholesome filth and misery. One passed us with the usual vacant grin and dead eye, and uttered a yell which startled the horses; the wretched object wore a petticoat, and we could not tell whether it were male or female.
Leaving the Rhone to our right, and now again passing numerous crosses and chapels, and votive offerings, which deprecate its fury, we came at no great distance to a most desolate spot, where the road for a considerable way crosses a tract covered only with gravel and crags, in melancholy disorder. Among the rubbish is a roofless cottage, almost buried. We were told that the bursting of a glacier in 1835 caused this desolation; a torrent of mud descended from the Dent du Midi, floating on its surface the blocks of stone which ruined the valley, sacrificing no lives, as its progress was slow, but overwhelming fields, orchards, and houses. It skirts the road for the length of nine hundred feet, and is the saddest sight imaginable; we were glad to exchange it even for the low barberry bushes which, with their pendent fruit, like coral branches, cover a soil which seems to produce little beside.
Shortly before reaching the waterfall of the Sallenche, we found that the Rhone had broken his usual bounds, and overflowed the narrow valley, more muddy in his rapid course than ever. The rain had ceased falling, but the mists lingered and deepened, and the clouds lay ominously low on the dark bare mountains. The fall is the finest I have seen, from the volume of its foaming water, and the violence with which it leaps from crag to crag through the ravine it has hollowed till it makes its last bound of one hundred and twenty feet, and from the basin which receives it, the spray mounts like steam. As, excepting the elevated causeway on which we stood, the whole expanse was here inundated, the broad sheet of water under it, and blackness of the crags surrounding, with a rare tuft of green here and there, but mostly naked and shattered, added to the grand melancholy of the scene, the vale of the Rhone might form a fit picture of the valley of the shadow of death.
Farther on a covered bridge, we crossed the Trient, a narrow but wild torrent, descending from the Tête Noire, and issuing from the black mouth of the stony gorge which opens barely enough to vomit it forth.
The rain recommenced, and we saw through the mist the round tower of the castle of La Batie, once a stronghold of the bishops of Sion, built on the summit of a solitary rock, not far from Martigny; between it and the town we crossed the Dranse, where it flows to swell the Rhone.
Arrived at the hotel de la Poste we were kept waiting a long time for the worst of all meals, served up in a picturesque vaulted hall, where fire and candles only made darkness visible. We cut up the doubtful meat only in mercy to the next comers. I imagine this has been a convent, from the open pillared galleries which run round the old house, and the corridors and private stairs, and rooms like cells.
A black line drawn along the outer wall of several houses in Martigny recalls the height to which the waters rose in the inundation of 1818, when the masses fallen from the glaciers of Getroz into the valley first formed an obstacle, behind which the waters of the Dranse, stopped in their flow, accumulated to a lake, and at last yielding to the mighty pressure, gave passage to the scourge, which in an hour and a half had swept over the eight leagues which divided it from Martigny, having borne away all that stood in its path; the bridge of Mauvoisin, ninety feet above its ordinary course, three hundred habitations, and a forest.
It is wonderful that its column rushed, without touching, past the village of Bauvernier, emitting a vapour like the smoke of a conflagration. It went on to tear from their foundations eighty houses at Martigny; its surface covered with the bodies of drowned cattle, and human beings, despite their warning, taken unawares.