I thought we would be less uncomfortable if we did something, so I pointed out the towers and spires of what appeared to be a very picturesque castle on a hill in the center of the town and dragged off the reluctant family to visit it. It turned out to be an optical illusion produced by two churches in line, neither of which was in the least interesting, but our united temperature had been raised several degrees in learning this. I must say that the family took the matter very amiably.
Finally the Zermatt train got ready to start. I wouldn’t like to say how many hours it took us to travel the twenty-two and a half miles of this road, but we spent the remainder of the afternoon on it. It is true that we ascended more than three thousand feet on the way, but the speed of our train was certainly not excessive.
Zermatt is the highest of the big tourist resorts, its altitude being five thousand three hundred and fifteen feet. Its season is short, but very crowded. The town in itself is exceedingly ugly—all hotels and tourist shops and the mushroom air of an American boom-town born over-night. But the surrounding mountains are glorious. The Matterhorn, which is close at hand, we were all gazing at, spellbound, for the first time. We had never before quite believed its pictures. Nobody ever does. I don’t suppose there is such another peak in the world—bizarre, incredible, rankly impossible, like the acute-angled mountains children draw on their slates. It made one shiver to think of human beings climbing up those all-but-vertical smooth rock sides to the needle peak nine thousand feet above us, and it was hardly surprising to hear that the local graveyard is filled with the bodies of tourists from many lands who have attempted it unsuccessfully.
The climbers’ tragedies, repeated each summer, are tragic enough, the more so for their utter uselessness. But the poetry which these have inspired, having missed the sublime, has fallen into the ridiculous.
One choice bit, taken from one of the local guides obligingly gotten up by the Swiss government in all languages and distributed free at the Bureaus of Information in the principal cities, filled us with especial glee:
“No dread crevasse, no rugged steep,
No crag on the dizzy height,
But knows the crash of a human heap
Thudding into the night.
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