The Tyrol is, perhaps, the only part of Europe where any portion of romance still dwells—where the little incidents of daily life are tinctured with customs that derive from long ago—where facts of bygone days, traditions of their fathers’ time, are interwoven with the passing hour—and where primitive habits and tastes are believed to carry with them a blessing, as to those who honour their fathers’ memories. National gratitude is far more closely allied with individual gratitude than is usually believed. Under the shade of the great tree the little plant is often nurtured. It is easy to imagine well of the individual, where the masses are moved by noble aspirations.
Scarcely a valley, not a single defile here, is without Us historic glories—many of them as of yesterday, and yet, in their simple heroism, recalling a time when personal valour was of greater worth than strategic skill and science. I always regret that Scott, who understood mountains and those who dwell thereon so thoroughly, should never have made the Tyrol the scene of a romance.
Even among the “simple annals of the poor” here are little incidents eminently romantic in their character, while so distinctly national that they tell, in every detail, the mind of the people who enacted them.
How I should like once more to be young of heart and limb, and able to travel these winding glens and climb these mountain steeps as once I could have done! Even now, as I sit here in this little “Wirth’s-Haus,” how the old spirit of wandering comes back ‘again as I watch the peasant, with his long staff in hand, braving the mountain side, or standing for a second on some rocky peak, to gaze down into the steep depth below—that narrow valley filled by road and river.
“Gott hat sein plan Für Jedenmann.”
What a road is that from Landeck to Meran!—at once the most beautiful and the grandest of all the Tyrol passes. The gorge is so narrow, that it seems rather like a deep channel cut by the river itself; where, on either side, hundreds of feet in height, rise the rocks—not straight, but actually impending above the head, leaving, in some places, the ravine narrower above than beneath.
Escarped in this rock, the road winds on, protected by a little parapet along the edge of the precipice. Beneath, at a depth to make the head dizzy to gaze at, is seen the river, whose waters are of a pale sky-blue, the most delicate and beautiful colour I ever beheld. As the necessities of the road require, you have to cross the river; more than once, on wooden bridges, which in themselves are curious for their ingenuity of construction, if one could think of aught save the grandeur of the scene around them.
At the second of these bridges, called the Pontlatzer
Brücke, the ravine grows wider, and open, a distant prospect of the “Kaunser-Thal,” backed by the tremendous glacier of Gebatsch. A glorious valley is it, with its grouped cottages and village spires studded along the plain, through which the Inn winds its rapid stream, its surface still ruffled and eddying from the deep descent of the Fünstermünze.
Above the Pontlatzer Brücke, high upon a little table-land of the mountain, stands a small village—if even that humble name be not too dignified for the little group of peasant-houses here assembled. This, called the “Kletscher,” derives its title from a mountain torrent which, leaping from cliff to cliff, actually divides the village into two portions, over each of which, with pretty fair equality, it distributes its spray and foam, and then plunges madly down, till, by a succession of bounds and springs, it reaches the river Inn beneath. The Kletscher, it must be owned, deserves its name: it is at once the most boisterous and foam-covered torrent of the whole region, and, as frequently in its course it pierces the soft rock of the mountain, the roaring stream echoes more loudly still beneath these natural bridges. These, however, are not the only sounds which greet the ear on nearing the spot: the whole air is tremulous with the thumping and crashing noise of saw-mills, every second cottage having one of these ingenious contrivances at work; and thus, between the roaring torrent itself and its forced labour, such a tremendous uproar is created, that the uninitiated are completely stunned.