On the opposite side of the road to the hotel Condrau de la Poste, is, to the left of the fountain, the hotel Condrau de la Couronne. The latter Condrau is the editor of the Romansch newspaper which is published at Dissentis. I was told that he was a well-educated man, had for some time been tutor in a French family, and was entitled to write himself Professor. I took away with me a copy of that week’s impression of his paper. I found that it was not difficult by the aid of Latin and Italian to make out the meaning of the printed Romansch of Dissentis, though probably, if I had heard it read, I should not have understood one word in ten.
At 10.30 was under weigh for Coire. The day was fine, and the conductor arranged a seat for me on the roof upon the luggage. The drive was pleasant and interesting. I can, however, only give of it such generalities as might have been seen from my seat on the roof. Of course the mountains most obtrude themselves on the eye. They vary much. Some are grassed, some are wooded to the top; some show much naked rock; of these some terminate in jagged points, some in rounded domes; some that you see through gaps in the bounding ridges gleam with sun-lit snowfields. As a rule the valley is wide, and so its bounding ranges stand back to such a distance that they can be well taken in by the eye from bottom to top, and in combination with their neighbours. They can be leisurely and sufficiently seen.
Another point observable in this grand long valley is the regular improvement in the vegetation which accompanies your descent. This has been already noted as far as Dissentis. In reaching that place yesterday afternoon we had passed from the treeless Alpine zone of altitude down to that of late maturing wheat. When you reach Coire, thirty-eight miles lower down, wheat has been superseded by maize, and you are among vineyards, which had begun to show themselves seven miles higher up at Reichenau. Between Dissentis and Reichenau different kinds of fruit trees, and of garden vegetables successively appeared on the scene. As the fruit trees began to come in, the frames for drying wheat, and other kinds of grain, began to die out. Above Reichenau are some naked glaring ravines cut deep into the white calcareous soil. Here the bottom land has so widened out as to give space for knolls and hills, some in wood, some in grass. As you descend an improvement, corresponding to that in the vegetation, is simultaneously observable in the houses and villages. As nature becomes more kindly and bountiful, human life becomes more varied, more easy, and more embellished. Long before you reach Reichenau good roomy substantial houses begin to appear in the small towns. Many of these are surrounded with gardens, of which you see nothing in the higher part of the valley, but which after they have become possible continue to improve all the way down. At last at Coire there is about the main street an air of something that gives it a not quite unfamiliar aspect. It seems as if a third-rate piece of Paris had been transported to the valley, and there dropped between the mountains.
At Coire, if you have some time before you, and nothing else to do, you will perhaps go to the Cathedral. You will there hear the old story of Saints and wonders, as if there had been better men and greater wonders a thousand years ago than there are now. Here the Saint was a British king, of a date when there were no kings in Britain. You will have met with British and Irish Saints elsewhere. You ask why these legends of British and Irish Saints of that day, but no Saints now? Have we degenerated so much from our fathers? I trow not. We are not worse than were they. We may, perhaps, be somewhat better. How, then, has it come to pass that these islands have ceased to be a factory of Saints? Is it because other people have at last come to know us? No longer are we so separated from them by the sea as to be in their eyes almost another world; and as they have come to know us they have arrived at the discovery that we are very much like themselves, at all events in not being more productive of Saints than themselves. In those times people wanted the idea of a nation of Saints. This they could not imagine of their wicked selves, or of any of their still more wicked neighbours, for they very well knew of themselves and of their neighbours, that they were always trying to overreach, and plunder, and knock on the head, and oppress each other; and so they localized this idea beyond sea, and the British Isles became a kind of realized Christian Atlantis. Tacitus, because the Romans were vicious, invested the distant Germans with a halo of rude virtues. For much the same kind of reason did the ages of ignorance and violence go to the British Isles for so many of their Saints.
CHAPTER III.
THE SCHANFIGGTHAL—PEIST—THE STRELA—DAVOS AM PLATZ.
Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where rolled the ocean thereon was his home;
Where a blue sky, and glowing clime extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam;
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker’s foam