A walk in the Grisons

by F. Barham Zincke

Living things, and things inanimate,

Do speak at heaven’s command to eyes and ears,

And speak to social reason’s inner sense

With inarticulate language.—Wordsworth.

August 7.—As I foresaw that I should not to-day get beyond Andeer, I breakfasted in a leisurely style at seven o’clock, without at all feeling that my loins were girded, and my staff in my hand. The head waiter, a very incarnation of good nature and harmless vanity, availed himself of the opportunity for trying to persuade me to delay my departure till the evening, or still better till to-morrow, that I might see General von Göben, who, as he impressively informed me, was to arrive to-day with a party of seven, and had taken the whole of the first floor. At Dissentis I was told that Von Moltke had been there; and at Pontresina, and elsewhere, I heard of other German celebrities. At the places where we ourselves most do congregate we find many Germans; but as they do not much desire our society, and do not go to Switzerland for precisely the same objects as ourselves, we must not judge by the proportion of them we find in these places of the number of them who are travelling in Switzerland. The elders and middle-aged among them much affect Bads. At such places as Davos am Platz and Tarasp they may be counted by the hundred. But even at these places we do not see their largest contingent. That is composed of the young and active, who wish to see the mountains, and who do all their work on foot. These are dispersed, like an army of skirmishers, over the whole country. In my excursion of this year, which took me on foot over between three and four hundred miles, and fifteen so called Passes, I nowhere met on the road a single Englishman, (had the Passes been difficult ones my experience, perhaps, would have been different,) but I seldom, if ever, passed a day without meeting several Germans, generally in parties of three, without a porter. We may to some extent judge of the degree to which Alpinism has penetrated the German mind by the fact, that, while our Alpine Club numbers 300 members, theirs numbers 3,000. I have no means of verifying these figures. I only give them as I found them in a Swiss newspaper. The same authority informed me that the Swiss Alpine Club now counts 1,700 members. Still what there may be of fact in the above statements indicates that mountaineering is not only a more accessible, but also a more popular, pursuit with them than with us. There must be some reason for this. Can the reason be that among them culture is both broader in itself, and more widely diffused than among ourselves? These people, too, are more gregarious and sociable than we are; perhaps some causes of repulsion that are operative here may not be felt among them; and so they may travel in larger parties than are common with us.

At 7.30 started for the Via Mala. A cloudless morning. The freshness of the air, the clearness of the light, the depth of the blue combined to stimulate the nerves both of body and mind, and prepared me for feeling all the effects of the expected wonders of the scene; or as it is unwise ever to expect anything, for appreciating highly whatever the walk might present to me. As I walked along, looking down precipices between lofty pine stems, as straight and round as if they had been turned in a lathe, to the broken foamy thread of the Hinter Rhein in the bottom, and then up 1,600 feet of opposite black precipice, on the summit of which, here and there, a lofty pine broke the sky-line, but showing at that height no bigger than a hop-pole, the circumnavigator, understanding how my mind was engaged, and perhaps himself a little touched by the scene, propounded the only remark he made on the scenery during the eight days he was with me. ‘If a man,’ quoth he, ‘Sydney-way, had this gully on his run, he might make any amount of money by showing it. Any amount!’ For the moment I was a little taken by surprise; but it was no more than an unexpected application of his governing idea—which I had already had served up in many forms, and those not always quite à propos to what was before us—that the only good of anything in the world was its capacity for being turned into money. Having been brought up to work at his trade from 5 A.M. to 8 P.M. for seven francs a week, (the wages paid at Poschiavo in those days,) he had come to hate and despise labour; and his Australian experiences, acting on a Swiss substratum, had made him an ideologist, but of one idea, that one being that the one sure way to the one great object was to buy cheap, and to sell dear. Again and again he had repeated to me that this was the way in which all the money in the world that had been made honestly had been made. But he never could explain how the money that was given in the good price had been made, except by the same process of selling dear. Those, he maintained, who had been most pre-eminently successful in life were those who had most thoroughly carried out the rule, perhaps without an undeviating regard for honesty. He had not succeeded at Sydney, because ice was so dear there; that is to say because ices could not be made without ice. The liquor trade had great capacities, because there are other things in the barrel besides liquor. The world, and its money-making inhabitants were to him only an enlarged edition of the two American lads, who during their journey in a railway car, without leaving their seats, made each of them a large fortune by an incessant repetition of the process of swapping what they had about them. I had little to say just now to his remarks, for what of the world was before me indisposed me to transfer my thoughts to the antipodes, or even to say anything on behalf of labour and thrift, and of honesty, in reply to his narrow and unfavourable experiences of life.

The Via Mala though of the same character as the Schyn is both more diversified and more astonishing. The roadway itself is wider, and of more solid construction than that of its neighbour; nor is it all on one general level, for, as you advance along it, you are generally ascending or descending. It also crosses from side to side, being carried over the stream by bridges, which here it has been necessary to build at a great height above the stream. The ravine, too, is not so uniformly wedge-shaped, but in places the opposite side will appear to be almost, or perhaps will be quite, perpendicular. There is indeed one instance of its actually leaning towards you. The hammers and chisels of the old world would never have made this road. Gunpowder it was that rendered its construction possible, and we may almost say that made the want of it felt. It first made the old castles indefensible, and the man-at-arms as good a man in the field as the armoured knight; in other words it first helped to sweep away such impediments to production, freedom of exchange, and accumulation as the Hohen Rhätiens of mediæval Europe; and when they were gone, and in consequence production had increased, and facilities for communication became necessary, what had aided in abolishing the castles was found capable also of aiding in the construction of the road. We may suppose that the inventors of this explosive, as has been the case with most inventions, had no glimpse of the good work it would accomplish. They could have had no anticipations of its disestablishing feudalism, and constructing roads through the Alps. And even now we seem to be only feeling our way to some guesses of what will be the kind of work it will do in any future war, that is to say what effect it will have on the history of the future.

I observed as I was advancing along this Via Mala, in what good keeping with the sombreness of the ravines was the monotonous form of the pines. Were its trees of the kinds that are spreading in limb, and varied in form and foliage, it would imply that nature was more benignant than the other features of the scene suggest. But as it is, you find that only one kind of tree can live here, and that a little thought shows you is so constructed as to enable it to withstand the heavy snowfalls and violent gales of winter. Its branches are so short, perhaps somewhat shorter than they would be with us, and, too, so constructed, that they never can be called upon to sustain any great weight of snow, and the trunk tapers so regularly, like a well-made fishing rod, as to enable it to sustain the most sudden and violent storm blasts. The top yields to the pressure, but does not snap, because the stiffness of the stem is gradually increasing; and this, before the bottom has been reached, has increased to such a degree as to prevent any strain being felt by the roots. As you observe this adaptation of form and structure, the hardness of the conditions of the station that are inferred deepens the effect upon your thought of the hardness of the conditions that are seen.

At Thusis we had been told that the storm of the previous Sunday night had so swollen the Hinter Rhein as to have raised the water to within a few feet of the crown of the arch of the bridge. At the other extremity of the Via Mala—the place is called Reischen—we found that a bridge had been swept away. This had interrupted the traffic for twenty-four hours, when those who had charge of the road succeeded in laying some pine trunks across the chasm, and forming upon them a roadway of transverse squared slabs. We stopped a few minutes to see the diligence pass this improvised structure. The three leaders were taken out, as there was some chance that the dancing and rattling of the loose slabs might scare them. With this precaution the passage was effected easily.

I have already mentioned that on the first afternoon of this excursion I inspected the deep perpendicular channel of the Aare on the eastern side of the Kirchet to see if it presented any indications of its having been formed by any other agency than that of the stream that is now running through it. Every indication seemed to imply that the channel had been eroded by the stream, and by it alone. Every deep channel I passed, throughout this excursion, I looked at with the same thought in my mind, and I nowhere saw anything to suggest the operation of any other agent. And in this ravine, the most perpendicular and deepest of them all, I saw nothing that pointed to a different conclusion. Here a single arch is sufficient to carry you over the stream at a height of 300 feet above it. It is impossible to suppose but that the whole of these 300 feet were excavated by the stream that is now fretting at the bottom of them. If, then, you are certain that it cut out the 300 feet below you, what, except your niggardly ideas about the extent of past time, is there to prevent your supposing that it cut out the 1,300 feet above you? Believe the evidence of your eyes in this matter, and it will add a hundredfold to the interest with which you will contemplate this grand example of the method in which nature makes a stream cut a channel for itself through a mountain of solid rock. You will think how long she has been engaged in the work, and that she is now carrying it on with the same instrument, and applied in the same fashion, as thousands and thousands of years ago. The reason why in these gorges the rock is cut with comparative rapidity is that in them the stream is always both rapid and confined. Because it is rapid it is working with the greatest possible power, and because it is narrow that greatest power is applied at the greatest possible advantage, that is to say it is confined to the central straight line of the narrow bottom, for all the sand and stones are turned in from each side to that central line. Hence the rapidity, narrowness, and directness of the cutting action. When, however, the stream has passed out of the gorge into more level ground, it becomes diffused: it cannot, therefore, cut any longer at the bottom; and for its former tendency to directness of course is substituted a tendency to meandering.