A month in Switzerland

by F. Barham Zincke

September 15.—It was Sunday. We went twice to the English service. On both occasions the preacher was extemporary. He was fluent and imaginative. Fluency, and imaginative power (I say this without intending a reference to the sermons we heard this day), if entirely trusted to at the moment of speaking, and not kept under the control of previously matured thought, will generally run away with a preacher, and lead him into making inconsequential, and unguarded statements. And if he is, besides, a man of some miscellaneous reading, it is not improbable that much of it will be presented to his audience in an undigested form, and not unfrequently rather incongruously. In short, all that he says is likely to be what Shakespeare calls unproportioned speaking.

While we were at Interlaken, the moon was approaching the full. Both evenings we watched it passing over the peaks of the Jungfrau. The snow, however, had none of the deadly white, I had expected it would have had when seen by moonlight. But the moon was beyond the mountain, and so almost all the snow on our side was in the shade.

September 16.—Were to have started at 6 A.M. for the Valley of the Kander, on our way to the Gemmi: through the dilatoriness, however, of the voiturier we had some difficulty in getting off by 6.25. And this was not his only lapse; for, an hour after a forty minutes’ halt for breakfast, he insisted on halting again, for two hours more, at a roadside inn, where he, and his horse, were baited; both probably at our expense, for he had brought nothing with him for either. As these stoppages are, sometimes, not so much needed for the horse, as the result of arrangements between innkeepers and drivers, which become profitable to them through what is extracted from you, it would, perhaps, not be a bad plan to make it understood beforehand, that your payments will, to some extent, depend on the time at which the driver may bring you to your destination.

The road is, at first, along the lake. At the place, where it makes an angle, and turns its back upon the lake, we breakfasted. The inn looks upon the lake. The house itself is not bad; but what is best about it is the feeling it gives rise to that you have escaped from the crowding, the bad smells (the Jungfrau was free from these), and the pretensions, of a monster hotel, where everything is in disagreeable contrast to surrounding nature; the effects of life in the former at every turn counteracting and marring the effects of the latter.

A geologist should follow the new channel by which the Kander 150 years ago was taken into the lake. He will be interested by an inspection of the large delta, at the mouth of its new outlet, formed by the vast amount of débris the torrent-stream has since brought down. Formerly it ran parallel to the lake; and joined the Aar below it, in this part of its course keeping a great deal of land in a marshy condition. All this has now been reclaimed.

The scenery of the valley is interesting. From Frutigen—it was here that our two hours’ halt had been called—to Kandersteg, at the foot of the Gemmi, is eight miles. The last half of this my wife and I walked.

At Kandersteg we dined; and having placed the little man, and the baggage, on horses, we began the ascent at 3.30. The road is in excellent repair. For the first hour and a half it is stiff walking through a pine forest. The views of the valley of the Kander, and of the mountains, are good. The road is then, for some distance, taken horizontally along the side of the mountain, again through the pine forest. Between the clean stems of the trees you look down, on your left, into the barren, and truly Alpine, Valley of Gasteren. At first it is a rocky gorge; and then it opens into an expanse of level, pale grey sand, and small shingle, through which you can make out, from above, the glacier stream passing in several small channels. The forest is succeeded by an open level of poor mountain pasture and rocky ground. On the left of this are the peaks of the Altels, and of the Rinderhorn, with snow-fields and glacier. You then begin to ascend again through a scene that is the very grandeur of desolation. There is no vegetation; nothing that has life. It appears as if the mighty fragments of dark rock, with which the whole is covered, had been rained down from heaven in its wrath, and had completely buried out of sight everything that might once have struggled up here for life, and even whatever could have supported life. This mountain in ruins, this wrack of rocks, brings you to the Schwarenbach inn. It stands on the edge of a crateriform depression, in what appears at the time, and from the spot, to be the summit of the mountain. This depression terminates, on the right, in a grand mountain amphitheatre.

The inn is precisely what it ought to be; small, without any pretension, and without any artificial entourage. The people, too, who keep it are most ready, and obliging. This is just the sort of place one would like to make one’s head-quarters, for a few days, for excursions from it among the surrounding summits, and for familiarising oneself with the spirit of the mountains.

September 17.—Started a little after 5 A.M., that we might see the sun rise from the summit of the pass. Overnight I had been roused out of my first sleep by a loud, hurried knocking against the thin partition, that separated my room from my wife’s, accompanied by repeated calls to get up at once. I lighted a match, and looked at my watch. It was just 11 o’clock. At 4.30 A.M. the knocking was again heard: but this time it came from the opposite side of the partition.

The morning was very cold. The blue boy, and the luggage, were on horseback; my wife, and I, on foot. The ascent continued for about two miles further. For the first mile the path takes you by two or three more crater-like depressions, similar to the one on the edge of which the inn stands. You then come to a dark mountain lake, fed by the glacier of the Wildstrubel, at the southern end of it. It is another scene of awful desolation. You are surprised at observing that the detrital matter, neither of the glacier, nor of the environing mountains, has in the least degree diminished the size of the lake. It seems to-day to be just the same, in size and form, that it must have been thousands of years ago. The crest of the ridge is reached a little beyond the lake. The sight that here bursts upon you is grand indeed. The eye passes over the valley of the Rhone—that, however, is not yet visible—and rests on the long series of snowy peaks, which you know are the finials of the barrier ridges that separate Switzerland from Italy—the Michabel, the Weisshorn, the Matterhorn, the Dent d’Heréns, the Dent Blanche. On this morning they all stood clear of cloud. While close, on our left, just to show us how near we were to losing the view, a dense mist was streaming over the mountains, like a turbid, aerial river, flowing uphill Nothing could be grander; the rocky peaks around us, the snowy peaks before us, and the river of cloud rolling by us. We had reached the right point at the right moment.