An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

Going over the Tête Noire is another of the things that everybody does, and like most things that are so easy, hardly worth while. I do not mean that there is no good scenery on the road, but there is nothing that quickens the pulse or sets one to breathing deep.

Perhaps I may do less than justice to the Tête Noire road because of my bodily sensations while passing over it. I certainly was not happy that day. The beast in my throat had downed me. I had a headache and a fever, a cold in the head, and an unpleasant sense of collapsibility in the legs.

Every few miles I stopped at some wayside inn or refreshment booth and ordered a liqueur glass of kirsch (which is a local form of liquid fire) and a few lumps of sugar, and, by dipping the sugar in the nostrum, was able little by little to absorb its fieriness, whereby the legs afore-mentioned acquired an artificial stiffening that carried them a few miles farther.

Antonio was greatly distressed at this immoral method by which I kept going. I think he had visions of my becoming a dipsomaniac in consequence of that day’s tippling. If he had only known how unpleasant the kirsch was, he would have been less alarmed.

The day passed somehow. There were showers here and there to add to the rawness of my throat. We passed back into Switzerland about noon. At dinner-time we began arriving at Martignys. There are an indefinite number of them spread out for miles—old town, new town, and railroad station. The last named was our destination. After dinner at the Hotel de la Gare (a function in which I was not personally interested, though I took another kirsch), we boarded a crowded train for Sion. I have seldom been so glad to get anywhere as I was to get to bed in the Sion hotel that night. I was sorry for poor Belle Soeur having to share my room, for I was well aware of the infectious character of the microbe I was harboring, but as they had no more vacant ones (or said they hadn’t), there seemed to be no help for it.

The next day I felt worse. Belle Soeur nobly offered to stay with me at Sion till I got well and let the boys continue the trip without us. But I did not want to break up the party, and knowing I was bound to be miserable that day anywhere, decided it might as well be on the road. So Frater filled his pocket flask with kirsch instead of cognac, and off we started over the Rawyl.

Now, the Rawyl is one of the least traveled passes in Switzerland. Baedeker, who takes it in the reverse direction from ours, gives a very inadequate description of the path, and says it takes ten and a half hours from Lenk to Sion, and that a guide is desirable. We ought to have taken warning from that ten and a half hours, for Baedeker’s times allow for no stops and assume a pretty swinging gait. But we wanted to go home that way, and we trusted to luck.

We did not get such an early start as we intended, and we took the wrong road out of Sion and walked an extra mile or so before we got set right. Those of us who had been brave enough to dig through the Swiss histories were mildly interested in the roofless, windowless, grinning skulls of castles that crowned the hill-tops over the town, the Bishop’s and the Baron’s. They used to have such lively times in Sion between their two sets of tyrants!