An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

On leaving Imhof we invested in bread, cheese, and chocolate for luncheon (the only articles of food the village store afforded) and started lazily up the Hasli valley. Everybody passed us, but we didn’t care. We were not making records and had plenty of time. It is a narrow valley, pretty rather than imposing, with the Infant Aar running down the bottom of it and the road occupying a ledge just above. Baedeker calls it the Infant Aar. It is so seldom that matter-of-fact condenser of useful information indulges in descriptive epithets that his occasional poetic flights always filled us with joy, and none of us, I am sure, will ever think of the tempestuous mountain torrent we followed all that day upwards towards its cradle, except as the Infant Aar.

We took refuge during one shower under a ledge of rock and were lucky enough to strike a roadside refreshment house for another, where we regaled ourselves with hot milk—a surprisingly restful and thirst-quenching beverage when one is “on the road,” and, in Switzerland, almost invariably good.

We discovered a lovely bosky spot for our luncheon, where the valley floor spread out a bit and the Infant split itself into streamlets, forming little wooded, ferny, rocky islets. A profusion of huckleberries were growing in this sequestered region, and we found they made an excellent dessert (though somewhat soured by the rain) after our dry and not too substantial luncheon.

It was here that we lost Antonio. He wandered off with his camera while we were resting after luncheon and did not come back. We called him and hunted for him till Frater said he must have gone on ahead and would doubtless be waiting for us at the next turn of the road. He knew Antonio better than the rest of us did, and claimed that this would be a highly characteristic procedure—that it would never occur to him we did not know where he was. So we went on with rather forced cheerfulness. I confess to feeling uneasy. The Aar was a lusty and distinctly rapid Infant, and if, in jumping across to one of those islets to take a picture, he had lost his footing?——Frater jeered at my forebodings and brazenly took a photograph of our late picnic grounds, labeling it “last place where Antonio was seen alive” and saying I could send it to his mother. But Antonio was not at the first turn of the road nor the next, nor the next, and we sat down to take counsel.

We were engaged in a mournfully jocular manner in composing a letter to his family to announce his mysterious disappearance, when we heard a delightfully unghostlike halloa from the road behind us, and presently the strayed lamb came into sight. He had actually fallen asleep among the huckleberry bushes which had concealed him from our view, and had not heard us call him, but having found the note we left among the cheese rinds (we always left notes for each other when separated) he had started along at a rapid gait to overtake us—and he would never have dreamed of such a thing as going ahead without telling us.... It’s all well that ends well, and the reunited family proceeded happily.

The Handegg Falls were the chief incident of the afternoon. A person familiar with Niagara and Yosemite is not going to burst his heart with rapture over any of the Swiss waterfalls. Some are beautiful, some are wild, but all are on a small scale.

The Handegg, though, is among the most satisfactory. The Infant Aar furnishes a respectable volume of water and takes a plunge here of two hundred and forty feet. Moreover, there is an admirable place to view it from, an overhanging ledge on a level with the top of the falls. And the rainbow in the spray is charming.

Along about sunset, after we had risen above timber line, we came upon a tiny road-house kept by an old man and his daughter. Here, on a little table just outside the door we decided to take our supper of what the house afforded—hot milk, bread and soft-boiled eggs. We absorbed large quantities of this simple but nourishing fare, moved our chairs inside when the rain began, and tried to persuade our hosts to put us up for the night. They had absolutely no sleeping accommodations, however, except for themselves, so perforce, when the rain let up, we continued along the chilly, desolate and rapidly darkening road to the Grimsel Hospice.

That is surely one of the barrenest spots on God’s earth. There is a bowl-shaped hollow full of stones. There is a lake at the bottom, when we first saw it, inky black. There is a one-story building whose stone walls, some three feet thick, were built to withstand winter storms. This used to be a hospice kept for travelers by monks like the famous one of St. Bernard, but now it its a hotel run for profit and patronized by Alpinists and passing tourists. The snow peaks rise up all around the bowl, and Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain of the Oberland, dwarfed from Grindelwald by nearer giants, here shows up more nearly in its true proportions. But Finsteraarhorn is really a climber’s peak, and we were not to know it intimately till much later.