A walk in the Grisons

by F. Barham Zincke

In Switzerland you read much of the past and present life of this terraqueous globe. So indeed you may on the alluvial flats of our eastern counties, if it is there that your lot has been cast; but with this difference, that in them the characters of the writing are small and indistinct, while in Switzerland they are in Roman text, and are held up before you, as it were on a signboard, to attract your attention. The life of the globe, like that of a plant or animal, is the result of the forces that have acted, and are acting within it, and upon it. In Switzerland you behold what was their action in past times in the mighty mountains they have upheaved; and in the stratification of these mountains you behold what preceded their upheaval; and then you go on of yourself to consider what preceded the deposition of those strata. You are reading nature backwards, as you might a Hebrew volume. In the igneous rocks that you see have been intruded you read another chapter that reveals to you the action of other forces. The shivering of mountain pinnacles tells you something about lightning, storms, and frosts. Excavated valleys, and lakes, polished rocks, and striated mountain flanks, and old moraine mounds are a lesson to you upon glacier action, and its greater activity in former epochs. Excised ravines, filled-up lakes, avalanches of débris, mountainside slips, burying villages and blocking up valleys, roads you are traversing cut through, and bridges you were to have crossed carried away, fields buried, or washed away, or lately formed, are chapters on the action of running water. Forests flourishing on all but naked rock, greenest prairies on a soil but an inch or two deep, earth-pillars, threads of water on every mountain side, and a glancing stream in every valley, oblige you to think of the relation of oceans, clouds, winds, the varying capacity of the atmosphere for retaining moisture, and of rain, to the vegetable and animal life of the land. Fragments of mountains hurled into valleys may remind you of earthquakes. And the interest of all this is intensified by thinking how it has shaped the life of man, and is at this moment, while you are reading the lesson before you, affecting its every day. Manifestly it is these operations of nature which have provided him with his station here, and manifestly he must conform his life to the conditions of the station he inhabits. It is so, of course, everywhere. But here in Switzerland it is more readily seen and felt that it is so.

On emerging from the ravine of the Via Mala the transformation of scene has some resemblance to that on the St. Gothard route, when one passes from the Devil’s Bridge by a few steps through the Urner Loch into the Urserenthal. In the case of the latter the transformation is more sudden and complete. There the change of form from pointed ruggedness to wavy smoothness, and of colour from gray and black to soft green is so instantaneous that the feeling produced is almost that of being transferred in a moment from darkness to light. Here the change, though complete, is not instantaneous. You are prepared for the valley of Schams, its fields, chiefly of green, but with some gold, its villages, its churches, its scattered châlets, its busy inhabitants by a mile, or so, of intermediate improvement. The scenes are not shifted, or reversed, before you know what is being done, but one melts into the other. It is a diorama in which the valley of Schams takes the place of the ravine of the Via Mala. Still, if you are at all susceptible to effects of this kind, the change in the nature of the impressions will be felt to be great. My feeling was that I was a musical instrument possessed of consciousness, but not of free agency; and that nature was playing on me what, and as, she pleased: first something rude, simple, and clangorous; then something soft, soothing, and varied.

From Zillis, the first village of the valley, where we stopped at the hotel de la Poste for half an hour, I counted five villages over the grassy slopes around me, and seven churches, generally on more or less conspicuous knolls. I was seated outside in the sun on a bench against the wall. The presence of a stranger soon attracted the curiosity of some children that were playing about in the street. A few cents secured their attention. I asked them why they were not at school. The schools here were not open, they told me, except in winter. During the four months of summer they are closed, in order that the children of these industrious peasants may learn to labour, as well as to read and write; and that the schoolmaster, too, may have as well as other people, time to get in his hay, or in some way or other to earn what will enable him to buy hay, for in this part of the world none can live without a cow.

And as it is with attendance at school, so is it to a great extent in these valleys with attendance at church: it is affected by times and seasons. I once asked a woman who was describing to me the rigour of the winter in one of these high valleys, whether she was speaking from experience? Did she live up here in winter? Of course she did. Where else had poor people to go?

‘What do you do to pass the time?’

‘In winter we go every day to church.’

‘Why do you not go every day now?’

‘Because we have now something else to do.’

The custom, then, of going to church, as I have often suspected is the case with prayer three times a day in the East, does not owe its existence and its maintenance exclusively to motives of a religious kind. It in some degree rests upon its giving people something to do, who otherwise would at the time have nothing to do, and upon its enabling them to indulge their sense of gregariousness. There is nothing mischievous, or reprehensible in this. Quite the contrary; for why in our efforts to keep alive our sense of the Unseen, and our moral sense, should we reject what aid may be obtained from the action of motives which, though not religious in the ordinary meaning of the word, are quite natural and very beneficial?

I found that in this valley, as is the case in most others, there are very few families who do not reside in houses of their own, and very few owners of houses who are without a bit of land of their own. This very much increased the interest with which I regarded the seven villages, and the multitude of little patches of green, and of gold, which tesselated the area around me of about a mile and a half in diameter, walled in by its amphitheatre of rugged mountains. To live in a house that is your own makes life pleasanter, and to cultivate a field that is your own makes labour lighter. The thoughts, the feelings, the lives of peasants who live in their own houses, and cultivate their own land are of a higher order than the thoughts, the feelings, the lives of those who do not; and where this underlies the picture, the scene is a pleasanter one to contemplate.