In the Val d’Anniviers.
There are few more beautiful and romantic scenes than the lower end of the Val d’Anniviers as, having after a long and tedious ascent by very abrupt zig-zags reached Niouc, you leave the Rhone Valley with its broad, snake-like river and numberless watch-towers, its villages and whitewashed churches, and Sion with its cathedral and dominated by its castled rock in the distance—you leave all this behind and turn your face mountainwards.
Far below, glimpsed like a thread from the road, the churning waters of the Navigenze course through their rocky channel with a sullen roar, their hoarse raving, now loud, now deadened, as a bend of the steep mountain-side opens or shuts out the view beneath, and with it the sound. From the river the slopes shoot skyward in one grand sweep—abrupt, unbroken, well-nigh precipitous. Pine forests, their dark-green featheriness looking at that height like a different growth of grass upon the lighter hue of the pastures—huge rocks and boulders lying in heaped-up profusion even as when first hurled from the mountain-side above, seeming mere pebble heaps—châlets, too, in brown groups like toy chocolate houses or standing alone perched on some dizzy eyrie among their tiny patches of yellow cornland—all testify to the stupendous vastness of Nature’s scale. And at the head of the valley the forking cone of the Besso, and beyond it, rising from its amphitheatre of snow, the white crest of the Rothhorn soaring as it were to the very heavens in its far-away altitude. And the air! It is impossible to exaggerate its clear exhilaration. It is like drinking in the glow of sunshine even as golden wine—it is like bathing in the entrancing blue of the firmament above.
“Alma, you have treated me shockingly,” Philip was saying, while they two were seated by the roadside to rest and await the arrival of the others, who might be seen toiling up the zig-zags aforesaid, but yet a little way off. “Shockingly, do you hear. You never wrote me a line, as you promised, and but that by great good luck we happened to be in the same train I should never have known you were coming here at all.”
“That’s odd. Is the place we are going to of such enormous extent that we could both be in it without knowing of each other’s proximity?” she said innocently, but with a mischievous gleam lurking in her eyes.
“No—er—why?”
Alma laughed—long and merrily. “You are a very poor schemer, Phil. Your friend would have had his answer ready—but you have regularly—er—‘given yourself away’—isn’t that the expression? Confess now—and remember that it is only a full and unreserved confession that gains forgiveness. You were not going to Zinal at all—and you have hoodwinked my uncle shamefully?”
“What a magician you are!” was the somewhat vexed answer. And then he joined in her laugh.
“Am I? Well I thought at first that the coincidence was too striking to be a coincidence. Where were you going?”
“To Zermatt. But what a blessed piece of luck it was that I happened to put my head out of the window at that poky little station. But for that only think what we should have missed. Heavens! It’s enough to make a fellow drop over the cliff there to think of it.”