Not far from here was the scene of a fight during the Napoleonic wars, and a monument with an inscription in exotic characters is dedicated to the Russians who fell there.
At Andermatt quite a large detachment of troops is stationed, and indeed we met members of the Swiss citizen soldiery all along this road.
It was our intention to go to the summit of the pass and then return to Hospenthal for the night, but a thick snow-storm shut in around us, and at the fork, which we afterwards learned was only about a mile from the Hospice at the summit, we evidently took the wrong branch, and arriving nowhere, grew discouraged and turned back. We lost nothing in the way of scenery, as it was impossible to see ten feet in any direction.
At a considerably lower level we came upon a little road-house and entered to get thawed out. Frater and I called for hot milk, but Belle Soeur rashly ordered coffee. I do not know of what strange herb this drink was brewed. Certainly not the coffee bean. We suspected catnip mixed with a decoction of hay. The color was green and the flavor incredibly unattractive. Belle Soeur decided that she also preferred milk.
We put up that night at the Hotel de la Poste in Hospenthal, than which I never saw a cleaner nor more severely plain little inn. The postmaster’s wife ran it, and we found her a most admirable Hausfrau. The postmaster was, I don’t doubt, a most worthy character also, but he and I had a battle royal over my mail because I had no passport to claim it with. I told him a visiting card was enough at Geneva or Lucerne, and he said the postal authorities there must be very lax. I showed him Frater’s passport, which he said was all right for him, but no good for me. However, he handed me out my letters after a while, but declined to turn over a package which Anna, in a characteristic spasm of caution, had had the unhappy thought of registering. I knew just what articles it contained and told him in detail, even to the darns, requesting him to open the package if he wished to verify my statement. This suggestion seemed to alarm the old man, and he turned it over to me intact, fortifying himself only by taking my signature and address in a dozen or so different places. But he regarded me with strong disapproval, and frowned when we met, and I suspect his kind old wife put an extra egg or so into the omelet to make up!
Hospenthal is a rather quaint little village dominated by a robber baron’s castle—at least, I think he was a robber baron. Anyhow it makes a good photograph, and we took several next morning as we started out, rejoicing in sunshine and blue sky.
We bought some black bread and cheese to carry along for luncheon (all we could get, but it turned out delicious—no hardship at all), had the village shoemaker drive some new nails into our soles, and swung off gayly to the right on the Furka Pass road. This, with the Grimsel, is one of the most interesting of the carriage-road passes, the scenery toward the end being quite wild and Alpine. The sparklingly clear and bracing atmosphere added much of course to our enjoyment.
At a road-house where we stopped to get something liquid after the dryness of our admirable bread and cheese, we found the wall adorned by a charcoal cartoon of slightly bibulous aspect, left probably by some traveling artist in lieu of paying his bill, and the following ingenious poem:
“Das Wasser ist von jeder Zeit
Die Best von aller Menschengaben.