On the 1st of August I left my companions at Chamounix to make the circuit of Mont Blanc, but the weather was horrible, and most of the time the mountain-tops were hidden in swirl and mists; the paths were watercourses, and the châlets where I slept with my guide, Edouard Carrier, were piercingly cold and miserable—especially that of Motets, where there was nothing to eat but potatoes; no furniture whatever, nothing but some rotten straw to lie upon; no glass and no shutter to the window, through which an icy blast blew all night from the glacier, though the air of the filthy room was quite dense with fleas. Travelling in these parts is quite different now, but I have a most wretched recollection of the long walks in the cold mist, no sound but the cry of the marmots—yet one always had a wish to go on, not back.
Delightful was the change as we descended upon Courmayeur, with its valleys of chestnut-treesnoble view of Mont Blanc, and Aosta with its Roman ruins. In returning, I was overtaken by a tremendous snowstorm at the top of the St. Bernard, and detained the whole of a most tedious day in the company of the kind priests (monks they are not) and their dogs. During this time sixty travellers arrived in turn and took refuge. We all dined together, and saw the hospice and the Morgue, which is a very awful sight: the snow has so perfectly embalmed the bodies, that they retain all their features, though quite black; the hair also remains. In one corner was a woman hugging her baby to her breast as the death silence overtook her. We all went down through the snow in a regular caravan, and I joined my mother at Villeneuve and went with her to Clarens.
Railways make travelling in Switzerland, as elsewhere, so easy now, that it is difficult to realise how long and tedious the journey to Visp was when I next left my mother to go to Zermatt. On my way I visited the old mountain-perched cathedral of Sion, then one of the most entirely beautiful and romantic churches in the world, now utterly destroyed by a "restoration," from which one might have hoped its precipitous situation would have preserved it. I walked in one day from Visp to Zermatt, and thence made all the excursions, and always alone. The Gorner Grat is much the finest view, all the others being only bits of the same. It is a bleak rock, bare of vegetation, far from humanity. Thence you look down, first by a great precipice upon a wilderness of glaciers, and beyond, upon a still greater wilderness of mountains all covered with snow. They tell you one is Monte Rosa, another the Weiss Horn, and so on, but they all look very much alike, except the great awful Matterhorn, tossing back the clouds from its twisted peak. It is a grand view, but I could never care for it. The snow hides the forms of the mountains altogether, and none of them especially strike you except the Matterhorn. There is no beauty, as at Chamounix or Courmayeur: all is awful, bleak desolation. In memory I fully echo the sentiment I find in my journal—"I am very glad to have seen it, but, if I can help it, nothing shall ever induce me to see it again."
It was a long walk from the Riffel Berg to Visp (34 miles), whence I proceeded to the Baths of Leuk, where the immense tanks, in which a crowd of people, men, women, and children, lead an every-day life like ducks, up to their chins in water, were a most ridiculous sight. Sometimes you might find a sick and solitary old lady sitting alone in the water on a bench in the corner, with her hands and feet stretched out before her; but for the most part the patients were full of activity, laughter, and conversation. They held in the water the sort of society which once characterised the pump-room at Bath: the old people gossipped in groups, the young people flirted across their little tables. Each person possessed a tiny floating table, on which he or she placed handkerchief, gloves, flowers, smelling-bottle, newspaper, or breakfast. In one of the tanks some nuns were devoutly responding to a priest who was reciting the litany; but generally all the people were mingled together during their eight hours of daily simmering—sallow priests, fat young ladies, old men with grey beards, and young officers with jaunty little velvet caps stuck on the back of their heads. Generally they sate quite still, but sometimes there was a commotion as a whole family migrated to the other side of the bath, pushing their little tables before them; and sometimes introductions took place, and there was a great bowing and curtseying. The advent of strangers was a matter of great excitement, and you saw whole rows of heads in different head-dresses all uniformly staring at the new-comer: but woe betide him if he came upon the causeways between the tanks with his hat on his head. I had been warned of this, however, by the conducteur of the omnibus. "Oh! qu'ils crient! qu'ils crient! qu'ils crient!"
I left Leuk on the 18th of August to cross the Gemmi Pass, with a boy carrying my knapsack. It was very early morning. The Gemmi is a grass mountain with a perpendicular wall of rock overhanging it, up which the narrow path winds like a corkscrew, without railing or parapet—at least it had none then—and an appalling precipice below. On this path it is most unnecessary to take a false step, but a false step must be fatal. It was an exquisitely clear, beautiful morning, and high up on the mountain-side a large party might be seen descending towards us. I did not see them, but I believe the boy did. We had just reached the top of the grassy hill and were at the foot of the precipice when there was a prolonged shouting. The whole mountain seemed to have broken out into screams, which were echoed from the hills on every side. I said, "Is it a hunt?"—"Nein, nein," said the boy with great excitement, "es ist ein Pferd—ein Pferd muss übergefallen sein." But then, in a moment, came one long, bitter, appalling, agonising shriek, which could be uttered for no fall of a horse—there was a sudden flash—not more—of something between the light and the precipice, and a crash amid the stones and bushes beside us—and "Oh, ein Mensch—ein Mensch!" cried the boy, as he sank fainting on the ground.
Another moment, and a French gentleman rushed wildly past, his face white as a sheet, his expression fixed in voiceless horror. I eagerly asked what had happened (though I knew too well), but he rushed on as before. And directly afterwards came a number of peasants—guides probably. The two first looked bloodless, stricken aghast: it is the only time I ever saw a person's hair stand on end, but then I did, though they neither cried nor spoke. Then came one who sobbed, and another who wrung his hands, but who only said as he passed, "Ein Mensch—ein Mensch!" One of the peasants threw a cloak over the remains, and two guides cried bitterly over it. Strange to say, the body was that of a "garçon des bains" serving as a guide: he had jumped over a little stone in his descent, had jumped a little too far, and fallen over. For one awful moment he clung to the only fir-tree in the way—the moment of the screams—then the tree gave way, and all was ended.
I knew that if I did not go on at once the news would arrive at Thun before me and terrify my mother; but it was terrible, with the death-shriek ringing in one's ears, to follow the narrow unprotected path, and to pass the place where trampled turf and the broken fir-tree bore witness to the last struggle. An old German professor and his wife had left Leuk before us, and had heard nothing of what had happened. When I told them at the top of the mountain, they knelt on the grass, and touchingly and solemnly returned thanks for their safety. Then I met Theodora de Bunsen with Sir Fowell and Lady Buxton going down, and was obliged to tell them also. Awfully in sympathy with our sensations is the ghastly scenery at the top of the Gemmi—the black lake, which is frozen all the year round, and the dismal, miserable inn beside it, which is the scene of Werther's horrible tragedy, of which I have so often since told the foundation-story.
My Uncle Penrhyn paid us a visit at Thun, with his daughter Emmie and a cousin, and I afterwards joined them at Lucerne, and was their guest in a most happy excursion to Andermatt. Afterwards I went alone to Engelberg, the village and great Benedictine convent in the green Alps under the Tetlis mountains. Thence I made my way to Stanz, and penetrated into the valleys connected with the strange story of the Swiss pilgrim-saint, Nicholas von der Flue, ending in the great church of Sachselen, which contained his hideous skeleton, with diamond eyes and jewel-hung bones. Thence it was a very long walk over the Brunig (there was then no carriage-road) to Meyringen, and thence, the same day, over the Scheideck to Gründelwald; for my mother was expecting me there, and if I did not appear by the promised day, she might have been anxious; and in those days I was far too poor to have a mule: if I had money enough to pay for some luncheon, my utmost ambition was fulfilled.
In returning to England, we went to Freiburg in Breisgau, and visited the Bunsens at Heidelberg, greatly delighting in their beautifully situated villa of Charlottenberg, and the view of the castle and bridge from their terrace, with its oleanders and pomegranates. Afterwards we saw Meaux and its relics of Bossuet.
