An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

Grimsel Hospice

Our three-franc-apiece sleeping accommodations seemed quite sophisticated after the one-fifty lodgings of the night before, and the reading-room in which we gathered to discuss maps and plans for the morrow, quite a model of luxury. We wrote some letters, too, not knowing when we should have so good a chance again. It was quite a cosmopolitan bunch of envelopes we put into the mail-box—one for the Mother in Grindelwald, of course, one to the Husband in the Philippines, two or three addressed to the United States, and one to Antonio’s parents in Brazil.

Have I mentioned that Antonio is a Brazilian? He is not, however, the undiluted article. He had an English grandfather who transmitted to his descendant quite a number of easily recognizable Anglo-Saxon traits.

In case he should take exception to my manner of stating this, let me tell him a little parable. One summer when I was in Korea I met a native woman at the home of a missionary. We were not able to talk with each other except through our interpreter, but we had quite a friendly time smiling, and after she had left, the missionary said to me, “She thinks you are perfectly charming. She says if it wasn’t for the clothes, you would look exactly like a Korean.” Now, I had never been conscious of any special yearning to look like a Korean, but I considered the source of the remark and decided it was one of the most thoroughgoing compliments I had ever received!

The gods were good to us next day. There was not a cloud in the sky and the air was like champagne. Our muscles had become disciplined, our languor was shaken off. After an excellent breakfast of coffee, rolls and honey, we started out gayly from the grim stone hospice that had lodged us, past the twin lakes, blue as sapphires in the bottom of a cold gray cup, and up the steep footpath that cuts off the long loops of the diligence road.

The summit of the pass, just a little over seven thousand feet high, was soon reached, and we paused to get our bearings and enjoy the view. We were on the boundary between Canton Berne and the Valais, between Protestant and Catholic Switzerland. But the difference between the two is more than theological. Berne, founded by a prince to stand for freedom, proud and prosperous from the start, one of the first to join the Forest Cantons in their Confederation, typifies all that is sturdy and successful in Switzerland. Poor Valais, on the other hand, crushed under the heel of Savoie and harassed by petty local lordlings, passed through centuries of civil war and uprisings in the struggle for liberty, and when at last snatched from her oppressors and joined to the Swiss Bund, it was in the poor-relation capacity of “subject canton.” It is only in recent years that this humiliation has been removed. The effects still show. All we saw of Valais seemed poorer, dirtier, less intelligent and enterprising than the canton we had left.

These peculiarities were not, however, visible from the top of the pass. We gazed first of all at the huge Rhone glacier, from which the river takes its rise—vast, dirty, ungainly, not to be compared in picturesqueness with our Grindelwald glaciers. We saw the river meandering away down the valley, the chains of snow mountains on the other side, and the zigzag road from the opposite bank of the glacier over the Furka Pass, which we were to travel later in the season. Near at hand was the somber little Lake of the Dead, so called from the number of bodies thrown into it after the fight between the Austrians and French in 1799.

With an affectionate backward glance at Finsteraarhorn and all the other Bernese snow peaks we were leaving, we plunged down the steep incline into the Rhone valley. The hotel is at the juncture of three great diligence routes—those of the Furka, the Grimsel, and the Rhone valley. We found ourselves in a whirl of arriving and departing tourists and had a sophisticated lunch in their midst, then shook the dust of Philistia from our feet and resumed our staffs and knapsacks. We had been up to the foot of the glacier before luncheon, scorned its bareness and dirt and haughtily declined the invitations of the ice-grotto man, and we were now free to continue our way down the valley.

A few turns of the road restored us to our lost Arcadia. The first few miles of the road led through a wild and picturesque region, with woods and ravines, and the Infant Rhone brawling as loudly at the Infant Aar had done the day before. But this infant was pursuing a steep-grade downward path, and before long we found ourselves in a flat open valley, full of cultivated fields and villages, distinctly warm in the mid-afternoon sunshine and growing more so. The infant had become quiet to the verge of placidity. It might almost have been a canal. The mountain ridges along each side of the valley were, comparatively speaking, tame. We had intended keeping on down the valley to Brieg, where the railroad begins, but we began to chafe at the thought of thirty-one miles of this.

The village of Oberwald impressed itself on my memory for several things. First, for the turnip-shaped, almost Mohammedan-looking spire on its church, which we found to be typical of this end of the valley. Next for the extreme difficulty with which we purchased the simple substance of our supper, which we intended to take al fresco an hour or so later. There seemed to be no provision stores at all. After looking all around we made inquiries and were directed to a house which seemed to be merely a dwelling. No one was in sight, nor was there anything to indicate mercantile pursuits. We opened the door and found ourselves in an ill-lighted, ill-kept hallway. The nearest door, on investigation, proved to open into an almost dark room, where a deaf old woman rather unwillingly sold us some hard bread and a big slice of cheese.