Having loitered much by the way it was midday when I entered Andeer. This is the chief place in the valley. It possesses many roomy substantially built houses, and is quite a little town. From its extent you would suppose that its population must exceed the 600 it is said to contain. All these towns, however, cover more ground than towns of equal population would with us from the fact that almost all the dwelling houses have annexed to them cow-houses with the hayloft in an upper story: and these cow-houses with haylofts over them are not readily distinguishable from dwelling houses. The hotel Fravi, at which I put up—I do not know whether there is another in the place—rehorses the diligences and carriages, which go to and fro over the Splügen. It is therefore a large establishment, making up many beds, and having stabling for about forty horses. The thickness of the walls of the hotel, nearly three feet on the third story, reminded me of the severity of the winter these 600 people have to get through, somehow or other, with their scanty means and humble appliances, when their houses are for months together half buried in snow, and they are walled in, as it were in a prison, with mountain-high snow barriers right and left, and every breath of air that reaches them is charged with most benumbing cold.
On this day, however, there was nothing to suggest the severities of an Alpine winter, except the preparations these good people were making for its advent. The depth of colour in the blue abyss, unflecked by cloud, and undimmed by a suspicion of mistiness, was such as we can know little of here in England. It was one of a succession of sunny days, that was following a spell of wet; and so every man, woman, and child was out making, or bringing in, hay. The shutters of almost every house in the town were up, indicating where their inmates were, and what they were about. Later in the day the results of the work of the day, and of the few fine ones that had preceded it, began to be seen in the streets. There was a constant succession of little trucks drawn by oxen, some on wheels, and some on runners, loaded high with fragrant hay. Those who could not afford oxen drew these trucks themselves, the mother and the little people often pulling it along together; and, to go a step still lower, those who could not afford the trucks, carried their hay in large bundles on their own backs. The sun was at the bottom of all this life and successful labour; and the warmth he was pouring down into the valley to-day would keep these industrious families alive in the winter. The amount of air, too, was just what was enough for their haymaking. To one sitting outside the hotel, close by its row of poplars, watching the arrival of the hay harvest, the breeze appealed to four senses at once. You felt the contact of its crisp freshness; you heard the rustling, and saw the quivering of the aspen leaves as it moved by them; and it brought to you the fragrance of the new hay. Later in the day when the hay was housed, and the fields were wet with dew, you heard the blacksmith’s hammer repairing the damages the good people’s tools had sustained, and the wood-cleaver’s axe preparing to-morrow’s fuel. For in this part of the world all trades work till 8 P.M., having begun at 5 A.M.; two hours in the middle of the day being appropriated to rest—two sacred hours, the sabbath of each day—which are most religiously observed everywhere, even at the post-office bureau. And these men who were now working on till eight, had been at work all day in the hay-field, from which they had only been driven by the heavy dew of such an evening, following such a day, at such a height.
CHAPTER VI.
AVERSTHAL.
Will Fortune never come with both hands full?
She either gives a stomach and no food—
Such are the poor, in health; or else a feast
And takes away the stomach—such are the rich
That have abundance, and enjoy it not.—Shakespeare.
August 8.—By the stratagem of inviting the circumnavigator to breakfast with me this morning at 4.40 was enabled to get off at five. As we passed down the main street of the little town—the hotel Fravi is at its northern end—I again heard, as I had up to eight yesterday evening, the blacksmith’s hammer and the wood-river’s axe; for there was at this early hour too much dew on the grass for their hay-making. If, as the monkish saying tells us, to labour is to pray, then the life of these poor peasants, at all events in summer, is both continuous and earnest prayer. It is prayer in deed, in support of the prayer in word of their long winters, about which we were told something in the last chapter. Their prayer in deed must have a good moral effect upon them, for it is doing their utmost under such conditions as oblige them to feel that the success of their efforts will after all depend on unseen causes over which they have no direct control. It is also through a dumb, yet still a most eloquent appeal to those unseen causes.
Above Andeer our valley, which is now approaching the Splügen, begins to close in. The Splügen, however, was not my destination. The aspect of things in, as we are told, the highest inhabited valley in Europe, and a glimpse of the life of its inhabitants, had more attraction for me; and so my route to-day was to be up the Aversthal, debouching, whenever the time might come for that, at Casaccia at the foot of the Maloja, on the road from Chievenna to the Engadin. My plan was to get as far as I conveniently could in the first half of the day, and to spend the remainder of it in looking at whatever there might be to see at whatever place I might then have reached. I did not expect much encouragement in my efforts to push on from my companion. Still I would not begin by anticipating difficulties and disappointments: at all events I had yesterday given him very little to do, and plenty of time to rest; and some of that little to do he had shuffled off by entrusting my sac to a return carriage, and some of that plenty of time for rest he had turned to account by sleeping through the greater part of the afternoon in an empty diligence in the coach-house of the hotel. At about two miles above Andeer the stream of the Aversthal falls into that of the Hinter Rhein. Immediately beyond the point of junction the path for the Aversthal starts from the right bank of the Hinter Rhein, and takes the left bank of the Averser Bach. There is no mistaking it, for at first, and for some two or three miles up the valley, as far as an abandoned smelting-house, it is an old cart track. After this it becomes a horse path. In some places between the binonymous hamlet of Inner Ferrera or Canicül and Campsut it has of late been so damaged as to be for the present available for pedestrians only. But these good people have so much of the wisdom of the ant and of the bee in repairing damages, that we may be sure that the road will soon again be made practicable for horse traffic.