The most approved form of evening entertainment is a round of calls among friends scattered over the broad lawns of the hotels, when one may divert himself with summer orchestras or itinerant bands of Italian singers in crimson sashes, or revel in a rare profusion of beautiful flowers; and, from time to time, look gladly up at a crisp sky splendid with great luminous stars whose tremulous ardor, in Walter Pater’s famous phrase, “burns like a gem.” It is a capital place to gather impressions of what life at Interlaken means and what goes forward each day among its votaries. It is perfectly plain that this must be a great place; everybody is so bubblingly cheerful and so devoutly grateful for being just here and no possible spot else. You will hear them insisting that Interlaken, being halfway between, is an admirable combination of the complacent “prettiness” of Geneva and the austere solemnity of the vaunted Engadine Valley. Or there will be fragments of conversation reaching you about tennis matches on the Höhenmatte, lake bathing in Brienz, motor-bus runs from the golf links of Bönigen, where the residents plant a fruit tree whenever a baby is born, or of desperate scrambles up the zigzag trails of the Harder beloved of Weber, Mendelssohn, and Wagner, with rapturous accounts of the inspiring view from the Kulm. Some, you will gather, have passed the day uneventfully among the park walks of the Rugen, gazing down on Lake Brienz from the Trinkhalle Café, or on Lake Thun from the Scheffel Pavilion, or on both from farther up on the belvedere of the Heimwehfluh. Others again, it seems, have actually crossed the mild Wagner Ravine and ascended the lofty Abendberg of the Grosser Rugen; and for this pitiful adventure you hear them pose as veteran mountain conquerors who will carry their alpenstocks home with them and forever after speak familiarly of edelweiss and the flora of the summits. There even appear to have been romantic souls, familiar with Madame de Staël’s accounts of St. Berchtold festivals, who have spent the hours in dreams of Byron’s “Manfred” down by the old round tower of the dilapidated wreckage of Unspunnen Castle—in truth, the most abject of ruins, and quite as forlorn as Mariana’s Moated Grange. Not a few will have the courage to confess that they have done nothing more heroic than stroll by the shaded Goldei promenades along the Aare until they came to Unterseen, where they deliberately sat down and gazed to satiety at the curious toy houses with the long carved balconies and amazing roofs that project beyond all belief.
INTERLAKEN, ON THE HOTEL LAWN
Thus, by merely catching flying ends of talk, a stranger may imbibe the proper amount of enthusiasm and gather some rambling notion of the fine things Interlaken has in store for him.
But the real evening-heroes must be looked for at the Kursaal. That is where you hear the great champion talkers of the world! What was the amiable Tartarin to such as these? Or Baron Munchausen? Or Sir John Mandeville? On such deaf ears fell the warning ignored of “Excelsior”:—
“Beware the pine-tree’s withered branch!
Beware the awful avalanche!”
Behold them at their ease in wicker chairs in the lounging-room, stretching the weary limbs that have borne them in safety through a hundred Alpine perils. For all who will listen, what tales may be heard of desperate daring amid the imminent deadly breach of crevasse and avalanche! Under the vivid hand of the actual participant one fairly sees the progress of the proud mountain-queller—follows with bated breath the slow and tedious early stages, the hazardous upward advance, the surmounting of final barriers by dint of ice-axe and life-rope, and so enters into the joy of the ultimate conquest of the wild, bleak, wind-swept summit. Who would have the hardihood in such a presence to speak a word of such contemptible contrivances as mountain tramways and funicular railroads! It is enough that the uninitiated should realize in the shuddering depths of his soul that there still remains terra incognita to the listless, the fat, and the asthmatic. Later on, of course, we come to view these hardy characters in a somewhat truer perspective; but that will be after we have talked with their guides, or ourselves turned heroes and bluffed at like hazards.
All the same, there is no denying the satisfaction a newcomer has, in the beginning, in attending the impressive conversation of these desperate and intrepid Kursaal adventurers. He certainly feels that he has at last reached a region of hardy men and genuine mountain hand-to-hand struggles. He hears, with popping eyes, of the lofty little hamlet of Mürren, away up in cloudland, whose tiny cottages stagger under broad, stone-freighted roofs and where vast, sublime Titans scowl awfully from inaccessible heights. They tell him it is a region of eternal dazzling whiteness, with patches of black here and there that are really forests half buried in snow, and where the air is stifling with the constant odor of ice and frost. A truly shuddering place, they say, where men cannot hear themselves talk for the incessant thundering of plunging avalanches, and where the herdsman seldom ventures and the sunrise is never heralded by the alphorn of the hardy Senn. Later on, to be sure, we journey luxuriously to this same Mürren in a comfortable mountain railway and with considerably less of peril than attends going to office by elevator in a sky-scraper at home; and we find it a green and peaceful retreat, well supplied with hotels and gratefully affected by delicate old ladies with weak lungs. Just the same, we would not have missed the thrills of that first Kursaal account. Alas for all disillusionment, anyway! Most of the beautiful white, velvety edelweiss these rocking-chair climbers produce from their pockets in proof of their presence in frightful and remote ravines has really been bought for a franc on the Höheweg, and the chamois they stalked in summit passes generally dwindle down to the little ivory ones you find in the shops of Jungfraustrasse.
The truth of the Kursaal, when you get it, is stranger than its fiction; as when the talk turns to the progress of the construction work on the Jungfrau Railway, that imperishable monument to the genius and patience of the late Adolf Guyer-Zeller, of Zurich. It is then you hear of the loftiest tunnels in the world, eight and ten miles long, through icy mountain shoulders ten thousand feet above the sea; of gradients of one in four; of squirrel locomotives so ingeniously contrived that if the electric power were suddenly to fail they could generate enough by their own weight to clap on brakes and come down in safety; of searchlights in the stations on the peaks so strong that a man can read by them away over at Thun; of powerful telescopes, free to patrons, through which you may observe the occupations of the crowds on the Rigi and Mount Pilatus at remote Lucerne; of roomy and luxurious stations blasted out of the depths of the mountains, whose floors are parquetry and whose light and heat are electricity, with twenty-foot windows piercing the rock and appearing, even from across the neighboring abyss, like tiny pin-pricks in the perpendicular cliff; of the highest post-office on earth, from whose windows you look out on twenty glaciers. Of the truth of all this you are to learn later on when you make the unforgettable run to Eismeer—“sea of ice”—the farthest point so far attained in the steady progress of this marvelous railway toward the summit of the Jungfrau, now only a mile or two beyond, and which had been the despair of mountain climbers of all time until the Meyer brothers conquered it, one hundred years ago.