Having impressed the view on our minds, as ‘a possession for ever,’ we began the descent. The little man got off his horse, for the descent can only be made on foot; at all events it always has been, since the fatal accident, caused by the stumbling of her horse, which here befell the Comtesse d’Arlincourt in 1861. The luggage, too, was now readjusted, and more tightly braced up on the baggage horse.
Among those who keep to beaten paths the descent of the Gemmi is the crowning glory of their excursion. This it is that awakens within them most the sensations of awe and wonder. And there is much to justify these feelings. As you come down the pass, you cannot but be surprised at the boldness, ingenuity, and perseverance of those who projected, and made it. And, perhaps, your surprise will be heightened when, on getting to the bottom, and looking up at the sheer precipice of some thousands of feet of hard rock, you find that you are unable to make out a trace of the path you have just been descending. A fissure in the perpendicular face of the mountain just made it conceivable that a series of zig-zags might be carried up to the top. And this was what the engineer attempted, and succeeded in doing. Originally, many of the zig-zags were nothing more than grooves in the face of the rock, just sufficient to give foothold to a pedestrian. During the last century, however, they have been widened into grooves that admit, with perfect safety, the passage of a packhorse with his burden. The external wall of a house may be ascended by a staircase applied to it; and so may the perpendicular face of a mountain, two or three thousand feet high. And it will come to the same thing if the staircase is, in some places, let into the face either of the house, or of the mountain wall. The motive of the formation of the pass was to save a détour of some days in getting from the neighbourhood of Thun and Interlaken to the Valais. I suppose it was worth making as a saving of time and labour. But, be that as it may, it impresses itself on the mind as a never-to-be-forgotten passage of one’s Alpine travel. The blue boy skipped down it, like a chamois, far in advance of everybody; a guide, of course, being with him. My wife insisted on going down at the head of the rest of the party, on the plea that she was incapable of going behind. I took the position assigned me, with a little hug of myself at the conceit, the benefit of which, however, at the time I kept to myself, that those, who can go as well behind as before, must be twice as clever as those who can go before only.
CHAPTER XII.
LEUKABAD—AIGLE
The life of man is as the life of leaves,
Which, green to-day, to-morrow sears, and then
Another race unfolds itself to run
Again the course of growth and of decay:
So waxes, and so wanes the race of man.—Homer.
At a little after 8 A.M. we entered Leukabad, having been out three hours from Schwarenbach. I was content that both our personnel and our matériel were safe, plus the ineffaceable impression on our minds of the pass itself.