A walk in the Grisons

by F. Barham Zincke

Were unto him companionship.—Byron.

August 4.—My Grison circumnavigator—for he had gone to Sydney by the Cape, and returned by the Horn—had been due at Coire last night at 9.30. A violent storm, however, on the Albula, and which had extended to Coire, had delayed the post till past midnight, and so I had gone to bed before his arrival. At 6 o’clock this morning he introduced himself to me. The first impression was not quite what he intended it to be. His general get-up was elaborate, and far in advance of mine. Everything upon him was new, from his stylish billycock hat, which afterwards he told me he had bought in Paris, to his boots which were fitter for the carpet than for the road. His outer apparel was of good broadcloth. His umbrella was of silk. As I was noting these particulars at the first glance, he improved their effect by telling me that he considered the 10 francs a day, for which he had agreed to carry my sac, insufficient. This I at once cut short by assuring him that I was of a different opinion; and that, if he had any intention of accompanying me, he must be ready to start for the Strela as soon as it ceased to rain. At 10.30 the sun burst through the previously unbroken canopy of dripping cloud, which withdrew with a magical rapidity that made one wonder what had become of it, and where it had gone. There was no corresponding promptitude in the appearance of the circumnavigator, for the sun had been shining half an hour when he again presented himself at my hotel (I had not seen him since the interview at 6 o’clock), and with overdone complaints of the cost of his breakfast, and with a bad grace, having taken my sac in one hand, his silk umbrella being in the other, we were off.

It is a good practical rule to be prepared for the worst, without at all taking it for granted that it will come to that, for things need seldom turn out as bad as they may be made to look, or as they may be forced into becoming. So I began by assuming that all was just as it should be, and would so continue. Our road was at first up hill, and the sun was full on our side of the valley. This, and the moisture with which the air was laden, for the wet on the surface of the ground, and on every dripping object, was being rapidly evaporated, made it unusually warm walking. I foresaw the good effect this might have, for I anticipated that it would bring my circumnavigator to a consciousness of his unfitness for his work, and so probably would lead him to correct the estimate he had lately been setting forth of the value of his prospective services. What I had anticipated was not long in coming. He soon had to take off his broadcloth coat. Within an hour he called a halt. Before the second hour was out his boots had become so pinching and galling that he had begun to limp. He never again was so beaten as on this day; indeed, he continued to improve during the whole of the time he remained with me, though to the last he was far from having acquired the power of doing well an ordinary day’s work; and this often obliged me, as it did to-day, to end the day’s march short of the point to which I should have been glad to have extended it; but from this time nothing more was heard of his having underrated the value of his services.

From Coire to the Strela my road this day lay along the Schanfiggthal. As to the road itself it was still in process of construction. The first moiety had for some time been completed, but not much used, as was evident from the metal not yet having been compacted together. Here the construction had been easy. The latter moiety was in a very incomplete state, for here the difficulties in the way of constructing a road had been great; and, as we saw to-day, there will be still greater difficulties in the way of its maintenance. The heavy rains of last night, and of the foregoing week, had made this manifest to the contractors, for in some places, where the new road had been merely gouged out of the flank of the mountain, it had been entirely swept away; and this had been so done that it would be far more difficult to replace it than it had been to form it in the first instance. The mountain side is here composed of small incoherent slaty débris, inclined at the greatest angle at which such materials, when aided by the turf and forest upon them, are capable of withstanding the wash of the rain torrents. In forming the road the turf, or forest, had been cut through, and the angle above and below the road enlarged. Both the angle, therefore, and the retaining conditions had been made less favourable. Of this it was a necessary consequence that when the rain torrent came down it should in many places cut through the road, as it would through so much sand; indeed more easily, for the small incoherent slaty débris is more pervious to water; and should leave incipient ravines sometimes across, sometimes even in the direction of the road. In some places, too, where the road had been built up, the substructions had been swept away. All this which was disastrous to the contractors was not without some interest for those who now had to pass over it, for it presented good opportunities for observing the nature of the soil, and the action of running water upon it, and so made clear what it was that gave to the valley its peculiar character. On a long new slope where the road, in consequence of the removal of the turf, had been completely carried away, and the whole mountain side set in motion, I had to find my way across the steep, loose débris, where if I had stumbled upon it, or it had slipped beneath my weight, I should probably have rolled down many hundred feet to the valley below. Again in a ravine, where a bridge was to be built, the late flood had so cut away the further side as to leave a perpendicular face of some twenty feet in height. From the left corner of the bottom of this to the right corner of the top I had to walk up a diagonal ledge, nowhere wider than the width of the foot, this being all that the workmen had for the present thought it necessary to make for themselves. If I had slipped from this ledge, or if it had given way under me, I should have fallen on the rocks of the torrent: of its giving way, however, I had no fear, for I saw that some of the workmen must have tried it with two or three more stones weight than I had to place upon it. Of this road one may say further that not only will it be very costly to maintain, but that the population of the valley is so small, that if it is not carried over the Strela to the Davosthal, it can never be much used. We may, however, be sure that if maintained as far as Langwies, to which point it will soon be completed, it will not be allowed permanently to terminate there; for the Swiss are very wisely, and with much skill and cost, rapidly opening up to the traveller every valley that can be taken in hand by the engineer. This is one of the conditions of the continued growth of their prosperity. Every valley that is opened soon has its hotels; and the increase of travellers the hotels attract, and the concomitant increase in the value of the land of the valley, before long many times recoup the cost of the road. No people understand so distinctly as the Swiss that to improve means of communication, whether footpaths, post roads, or railways, is to improve the most indispensable of the material conditions of progress.

And now a word about the Schanfiggthal itself. If not unique in its character, still it exhibits so interestingly the characteristics of the class of valleys to which it belongs as to make it well worth a visit. What you first notice is that the new road, it was so with the old horse path, is always at a great height, perhaps never less than 1,000 feet, above the bottom of the valley. A little observation soon reveals why you have here, and must have, a high-level road. The valley is formed on each side by a long precipitous talus of the loose débris already mentioned. These slant from their respective ridges down to the channel of the Plessur, in which they meet. The question then arises, Why is not the road here, as in other valleys, on the banks of the stream? The answer is that it is impossible to carry it along the bottom, or anywhere near the bottom, because every small affluent, or torrent, that descends from the lofty ridges on the north or south side, has cut in its rapid course down to the Plessur a deep ravine. Some of these ravines are of an extraordinary depth, and they all become wider and deeper the nearer they approach to the bottom. A road, therefore, is only possible at such a height as will enable it to turn, or cross, these ravines, where they have not yet become of an impracticable depth and width, and where it will not be liable to be carried away every spring, or at any time by any storm that may occur even at midsummer. Hence the necessity of the high-level road. That it is something peculiar is forced on your attention by the scenery throughout the valley being presented to you from an unusual point of view. The Plessur is generally quite out of sight and hearing. You are always looking down slopes of prairie or forest, which are seldom open to the bottom. And the point blank of the opposite ridge is always its middle height. All this is new to you; and will give in your memory a character of its own to the green, well wooded, ravine-seamed Schanfiggthal.

Another particular of interest the Schanfiggthal supplies is an instance of what geologists call earth-pillars. Some of these I saw by the wayside in the last ravine before entering Castiel, or St. Peter’s, I forget which: the locality, however, may be so described as to be readily identified. They are to be seen from the new road about 200 yards beyond the chief ravine it crosses in its whole course. It had just made a bend to the left to cross this ravine, and then had faced to the south to recover the line of its general eastward direction. Just before it resumes this direction, that is to say just as it is about to leave the left side of the ravine, there are visible, some way below you, on the opposite side of the ravine, several of these earth pillars. Some appeared thirty feet, or more, in height. Some had still on their tops the boulders which had led to their formation. Of course they are situated so high above the torrent of the ravine as to be quite out of its reach, even at the times of its greatest rise; for had it ever touched them it must have undermined and washed them away. Obviously their formation is due exclusively to the action of rain. It must commence the work on the side of a ravine, above high torrent mark, by washing away the soil around a boulder. A beginning having thus been made, the storms of centuries continue the work; the water of every rainfall runs off the boulder, and cuts down a little deeper into the soil beneath, carrying down into the torrent below what has been cut away. This action does not cut down the soil beneath the boulder-cap quite perpendicularly, so that as the height of the pillar increases, or rather as the soil is more cut into, the base of the pillar becomes somewhat enlarged. Its form, therefore, is that of an exceedingly steep-sided cone. The interest of these earth pillars is not confined to the fact that they are a result of so long a continuance of rain action, for as we look at them we cannot but be reminded of some other conditions that were requisite for their formation, such as suitableness of situation, and soil of the requisite texture. Other instances of the formation are to be found in Switzerland elsewhere, and there may be some others even in this valley; I believe, however, that nowhere in Europe is it exhibited on so large a scale, and with such lofty and perfectly formed specimens as in the Tyrol, in the neighbourhood of Botzen.

To one coming from Coire the first village of the Schanfiggthal is Maladers. The maps letter the name conspicuously to indicate the importance of the place. We, however, passed through it, or by it, without seeing a house. We now, in the afternoon, passed through Peist from end to end without seeing a soul. It was now the height of the busy season, and all the people were up or down the mountain making hay, and the shutters of all the houses were closed. As to the little inn, or châlet which occasionally does duty for one, it, as is frequently the case in the Grisons, had no name or sign; and so we had looked at it, as at the other houses of the place, without observing in it any indications of likelihood for the discharge of this function. At last an old woman, who had heard our shouts, put her head out of an upper window, and gave us the information we needed. This unobtrusive inn was on the old road parallel to, and a few paces below, the new road. We were admitted by a young woman who had been left in charge of the house. The room into which she showed us was small, low, and square, with two very small square windows in the Grison, that is to say the embrasure, style. The little light they might have admitted was lessened by the favourite branching carnation, and a plant of ivy, in pots. Our first question was what could she give us to eat? Her reply was, ‘meagre cheese and dried beef.’

‘Of course you have milk.’

‘No.’

‘Can you get some?’