Bright and early next morning we went to the post-office and got the first mail we had had since leaving home. Very delightful it was to hear that the Babes and the Mother were flourishing, the household machinery running smoothly and that we were to stay away as long as we liked!
The next thing I did, while other members of the party were renewing kodak supplies, was to buy a pair of shoes and have the soles well studded with nails. And what a heavenly relief it was to get proper footgear again on my poor feet!
These preliminary errands attended to, we took the mountain railroad to the Riffelberg and walked from there to the summit of the Gornergrat. The railroad goes within a fifteen-minute walk of the top, but both economy and pleasure counseled us to get out at the earlier station.
I recall the fellow-citizen from Keokuk or Kokomo, I forget which, who sat opposite to us in the open car going up. He thirsted for some statistical information, which Antonio, who is the soul of courtesy, supplied. Whereupon he fastened like a leech on the poor boy and began plying him with questions till the rest of us had to plunge in to rescue him and keep a few tattered shreds of our personal history from that relentless cross-examiner! We were glad to leave him at the Riffelberg.
The view from the Gornergrat is certainly one of the grandest on God’s earth. Here, as nowhere else, can the average person, without danger or fatigue, get into the very heart of the glacier world. One stands on a rocky ledge, the Gornergrat, and all around and below sweep and swirl the great frozen rivers. From their far brink rise the bare jagged peak of the Matterhorn and the round snow-clad shoulders of the Breithorn and Monta Rosa. Way down below lies the green valley with Zermatt in its hollow, and away as far as the eye can reach are ranges upon ranges of snow mountains.
If we could have had it all to ourselves without the tourists! But then we should have had to work very much harder for it. It is better to take the gifts which the gods provide and be thankful.
It did not seem to me as if I could ever come to love the Valais mountains as I did those of the Oberland, but they were magnificent.
We had reached our maximum altitude thus far for the summer, 10,290 feet. The air was very thin, and we watched Belle Soeur carefully for signs of the mountain sickness. But thanks, I suppose, to our having made all but eighteen hundred feet of the ascent by rail and the careful slowness with which we had climbed the remainder, she escaped this time entirely.
We ate our lunch on a rock overlooking the great Gorner glacier, just as far from the tourists and the summit restaurant as we could get. Then, when we had looked our fill and tried to store our minds with enough glacier pictures to last the rest of our lives, we began the long but delightful descent afoot to Zermatt. All the way down we kept getting beautiful views, and I think the Matterhorn never looked finer than seen between the fir trees of the lower slopes in the pink glow of sunset.
Who would have guessed that our harmonious little party was going to be disrupted on the morrow—and by me, its shepherd and chaperon!