Belle Soeur and I tried to reduce our bulk by half and share the single bed, but before long she slipped off the edge without waking me and betook herself with the crocheted coverlet to the sofa.
IX
We were called in the gray dawn, and I remember the chill of the bathing water. This proved to be the most economical lodging any of us had ever had, for the charge was a franc and a half for each bed, so each individual share was fifteen cents!
We took breakfast at the hotel and had them put up a lunch for us, but nearly broke their hearts by declining to take a guide or even a porter. The faithful Baedeker had said “guide unnecessary in fine weather” (which it was), and we had no notion of putting ourselves in bondage to an attendant unless it was absolutely unavoidable.
After we turned aside from the Rhone valley, laid out like a patchwork quilt in cultivated fields, we saw no human being or habitation or trace of man’s labor, save an empty cow-hut or so and the path we were following, till late in the afternoon. The Eginenbach, whose course we were following, drained as wild and desolate a valley as could be imagined. It seemed to have been a great place for landslides, and every once in a while we had to pick our way over masses of fallen rock and débris. We felt like discoverers and rejoiced accordingly.
After some hours’ walking we found ourselves at the end of the valley and simultaneously lost every trace of our path. Now this was too much of a good thing, and our rejoicing was suspended.
The end of the valley was closed by a wall of rock about fifteen hundred feet high, which it was our business to surmount. On top of it was the Gries Glacier, which we were to cross, and which spilled over into our valley in an ice-fall from the base of which issued the Eginenbach. Somewhere there was a path, which at need a pack-horse could follow. But where on earth did it start from?
The land between us and the foot of the rock wall was a steep meadow covered with bowlders and broken cliff-fragments. It had been subjected to some sort of seismic disturbance, leaving fissures here and there, some of them of great depth and quite too wide to jump. We lost a lot of time retracing our steps and hunting for a way around, when we found one of these things in front of us. We understood now why Baedeker considered a guide advisable in foggy weather.
At last we all agreed that we had located the path about half-way up the wall where it crossed some snow. But how to get to it? Antonio announced his intention of making a bee-line scramble for that point, and, if necessary, following the path down to show us the beginning of it. The rest of us made a detour to the left (having already pretty well canvassed the possibilities to the right as far as the ice-fall), and were rewarded by finding the end of a really, truly, unmistakable bridle-path, hacked out of the rock in ledges and built up with masonry, which we followed steeply upward. Belle Soeur got a touch of the mountain sickness and had to lie down for a while. And I nearly slid into perdition when we crossed the hard-frozen snow gully, because I had trodden my heels over and the nails had worn smooth and my alpenstock had no iron point! Antonio was waiting for us on the other bank, and we continued upward together.