A walk in the Grisons

by F. Barham Zincke

Here it was necessary that we should halt for dinner. Designedly I had taken nothing with us, in order that we might be thrown entirely on the resources of people who live at an elevation of 6,900 feet, that is to say 500 feet above Cresta. The châlet we chanced to enter was that of the shoemaker of Juf. At first we found in it only an ancient dame. Before, however, we left we had to receive a levée of some ten, or a dozen of the inhabitants of the place. The ancient dame would gladly do for us anything in her power. Milk, of course, she could supply; but she insisted on our having it warm: for who ever offered any one cold milk when sleet was falling? For this it was necessary that a fire should be lighted. She also had some black rye-bread, and two kinds of cheese: a piece of last year’s fat cheese, and plenty of this year’s meagre cheese. This was all. I, however, was quite satisfied. Was it not the best these good people had to offer? and was it not what they had themselves to be satisfied with? The sitting-room was very low—hardly more than six feet in height. This was, first, to economize the wood of which the house was built throughout, and all of which had to be brought from below Cresta; and then to make the most of the heat of the stove, the fuel for which, whether wood or turf, was very costly to them; every piece of the latter having been paid for with so much of the precious time of their brief summer, and of the former with very large demands upon the muscular tissues of their own bodies, while cutting it in winter, and getting it across the ravine opposite to Cresta. The stove was a large structure, and filled about a fourth part of the room. The object of its size was that it might have as much heat-radiating surface as possible. It was fed by an opening not in our sitting room, but in the kitchen behind it. At last the milk was warmed, brought in, and placed on the table in a large bowl. In this was placed a wooden ladle to dip out the milk with. The bowl was flanked on one side with the loaf of black rye-bread, which, as it was moist and fresh, was preferable to the desiccated wheaten bread of the Pasteur’s establishment; and on the other side with the two kinds of cheese. Of these the fat variety was so old as to have almost lost its consistency, and with its consistency had almost gone its goaty flavour; the meagre variety had the texture of new soap, while its flavour was that which may be imagined of soap which has somehow or other become somewhat insipid. I asked for a knife to cut the loaf and the cheese. Had not the Herr a knife of his own in his pocket? No other kind of knife was used at Juf. This being their practice with respect to knives, of course forks were altogether unknown. The Herr happened to have a knife in his pocket, and was not sorry that his not having thought of using it had thrown some light on the table arrangements of Juf, which do not admit of anything that would require a fork, or any kind of knife, except that which is carried in the pocket. These particulars do not seem inviting, but it must be remembered where we were, what was the entourage, and what the conditions of the situation, and it will then become intelligible how it could have been that this Juf dinner, if that word may be used for what was before us, would not have been left, if one had been called on to make a choice between the two, for a Lord Mayor’s banquet in the Egyptian Hall.

We, and our ways, appeared as interesting to the Juffians, as they and their ways to us, if we might judge by the attention with which we were observed by the levée of old men and old women, and young women too, who came in, and took possession of the benches fastened against the wall, which surrounded the room, except in the stove corner. The room contained no other seats than these benches. Among our visitors was a poor fellow who had broken his leg on the mountains; and, the fracture not having been properly reduced, he was now sadly crippled, and complained of the pains he felt at moving, and at every change of the weather. He never then, I thought, can be long together up here, at all events at midsummer, without having his sufferings aggravated by the latter cause. From what I understood of what we now had to do, I was sure that my porter would be quite unequal to his work, I, therefore, made inquiries for one who would act as guide and porter across the Pass. A venerable senior among the company had a son, who, he assured me, was exactly the man I was in want of; and so he went to fetch him.

I paid five francs for our entertainment. I estimated its fair price rather by the satisfaction it had given to myself, than by what it had cost my hostess; that satisfaction was heightened at seeing how her old weather-beaten, stove-dried features relaxed and brightened as she took into her withered hand the little flake of gold, which perhaps was the easiest earned payment she had ever received in her long hard life. The balance between the services rendered and the value of them to their recipient, having been thus adjusted to the contentment of both parties, and the youth who was to accompany us over the Pass having arrived, we recommenced our march at one o’clock. There was nothing about him to indicate that he had been cradled in so rude a climate. He was tall and slim, yet well and strongly built. His features were fine and regular, and his complexion fair, almost to girlishness.

Before us was the long cul de sac of the head of the valley. We had to ascend the left mountain diagonally almost from Juf to the visible summit, about two miles off. For the most part there was no path at all, or our young guide could do better than following it. His long, sure, smooth stride, as he glided up the slant of the mountain, seemed like some new kind of pace; it was hardly walking. We found it no easy task to keep up with him, which we only did, in Irish style, by following him as well as we could. When we left Juf the sun was bright, but as we ascended higher we saw a dark storm advancing towards us from the direction of Cresta. It might not, however, reach us; and for the present we had the sun, in the warmth of which even the marmots were rejoicing, for we frequently heard the shrill cries of their sentinels announcing the presence of an enemy, and saw those that had taken the alarm scrambling back to their earths. When we were approaching the summit, the diagonal direction of the ascent ceased for a time, and we had for three or four hundred feet to go straight up the mountain. This was the only bit of the Pass which at all required attention to what we were about. It was something like walking up one of the angles of the tower of York Minster, supposing that angle to have become so dilapidated as to give from bottom to top an almost perpendicular, irregular staircase. This is, I believe, what is called in mountaineering phraseology an arête, that is the edge of a mountain rib, or shoulder. Here the rib, or shoulder, was not far from perpendicular, and could not be crossed. It had, therefore, to be ascended, and its edge had been nicked into steps all the way up, partly by nature, and partly by the pickaxe. As I was going up this mountain staircase, and saw the storm below me, no great way off now, I hoped it would not catch me upon it. In that case I thought there will be some chance of my being blown off. We were, however, soon over this bit, which also proved almost too high for the storm, for not much of it reached up to where we were, about 1,700 feet above Juf.

This Pass presents a scene of solid, rugged desolation, of dreary grandeur, as approached from the Juf side. The way to the summit lies across one of the crateriform depressions, which are not uncommon in such situations, between two mighty peaks, with torn and shattered pinnacles. The whole scene is hereabouts so storm-beaten, and frost-bitten, as to be apparently incapable of supporting even a lichen. Everything on which the eye rests is in character—rocks protruded, and rocks shivered, of a dull dark colour, pools of water equally dark, and patches of new summer snow; the whole made more forbidding to-day by icy gusts and pelting sleet.

And now that we have traversed the whole valley from the junction of the Averser with the Hinter Rhein to the summit of the Pass, upon which we are about to step, we are able to understand how its Oberland comes to be the highest inhabited valley in Europe. But we will review the whole of it. Our way up has been through three well defined stages. It began with the Ferrerathal, the first stage. That is comparatively low ground; in respect of altitude it has no special interest. It possesses only the ordinary Swiss interest of being bounded by mountains more or less rocky and precipitous, of maintaining forests more or less shady and vigorous, interspersed at the mouths of lateral valleys with small pieces of grass-land, which give space for the support of their respective little villages. So, too, with the second stage from Canicül to Campsut. The difference here is that the forest has become far more damp and mossy, and the mountains, especially at the triple watersmeet, more precipitous and iron-faced, and the stream more impetuous, and that there is an entire absence of prairies, indeed even of margin. From Campsut, the third stage, the particular of inhabited altitude becomes interesting. This portion is divided into two parts, that from Campsut to Cresta, and that from Cresta to Juf. In the first the mountain ranges begin to recede from each other; and as the forest has been made to confine itself to the rocky mountain side, there is in the middle a good expanse of grass land, capable of supporting many cattle. But as to the cultivation of anything else we have now got too high for that. At Cresta, which is over against the last trees, there is for about a mile a narrowing in again of the valley. It then spreads out once more, and continues wide all the way up to Juf. In this last part lies its chief interest, for under ordinary Alpine conditions, though the grass might still be available in summer, so elevated a valley would be unfit for human habitation. What, then, is there here to counteract the ordinary conditions? The answer is the height and direction of the ranges. They run from east to west, closing in completely at the eastern end. The broad valley, therefore, is thoroughly protected from the cold winds of the north and east, completely open to the south, and no ray of sunlight with its accompanying warmth is intercepted. Still, notwithstanding, there might be a condition which would neutralize these advantages; for instance, if the valley were closed with a glacier, or had glaciers from either of the bounding ranges descending into it, the place would probably be unfit for human residence. There is, however, nothing of the kind; the head of the valley and the bounding ranges are not of such a height as to support snowfields and their glaciers. It is, therefore, the presence of the favourable conditions that have been mentioned, and the absence of the unfavourable ones, which make the grassy expanse of Oberland Aversthal the highest inhabited ground in Europe.

As you begin the descent of the Forcellina on its northern side you come upon two or three pieces of old snow. Beneath these—it may be about 700 feet from the summit—flowers suddenly become abundant; among many others the charming little Alpine forget-me-not, a purple pansy as large as a shilling, and a clear dark-blue little gentian. About 400 feet more of descent bring you to a grassy bottom—there are no trees in sight—which is in reality the summit of the Septimer Pass from Casaccia at the head of the Bregaglia to Stalla on the Julier. In calculating the day’s work I had supposed that, as the books spoke of the Septimer being a Pass on this route in the same sense as the Forcellina, we should have had to descend so much from the Forcellina as to have had to ascend somewhat on the Septimer. This expectation was wholly unfounded: for to those who take it from the direction we did every step upon it is downhill: to them it is only the descent of the Forcellina. To those, however, who take it reversely and who are also going on by Stalla to the Julier, and not by the Forcellina to Juf, it is a Pass, and one with a stiff ascent of at least two hours.

The way to Casaccia was now along an old paved road, said to have been constructed by the Romans. The pavement consists of blocks of gneiss, and is generally in good preservation. On the summit it is lost, either because it is now buried beneath the turf, or because in this part of it its stones were taken up to build the hospice the ruins of which you pass, and the wall that enclosed some space around it. There are some places, in which you would have expected to find it buried, or carried away by storm-torrents, but in which it is still in good order, and much in the same state as I will not say its first, because it is safer to say its last, constructors left it. For as we are told that German as well as Roman Emperors used it for the transit of their armies, we must infer that those who last used it for this purpose repaired whatever damages time had done to it. I saw pieces of it on the very edge of the stream, where it must sweep over it with great force, but which were still quite uninjured. I was surprised at its general width, as well as at the size of the stones with which it is paved. I say general width, because there are some interesting exceptions. These occur at points where the roadway could not have been enlarged to its general width without cutting through a projecting rock. That on a great military road the inconvenience—very great to an army on the march—of these narrow places was submitted to shows that it would have been very costly in old times to have cut away such rocks; a work which a few handfuls of some explosive would now effect in a morning. It also shows that if wheeled carriages were ever used on this road their gauge must have been very small. Some five miles of the old pavement still remain. I have seen very similar bits of Roman road on Judæan hills. The sight of this drew from the circumnavigator the sceptical remark, that it was a very good road (he meant too good an one) for those times.

In descending this old historical, but now deserted route, on which even a centrifugal tourist is seldom seen, I could not but think of its older and better days. Those granite blocks, on which I was treading, had felt the tramp of Roman armies marching, it might have been, to the Danube, to secure that threatened frontier of the Empire against barbarian aggression. The couriers who brought the intelligence of victories from which much was hoped, and of disasters from which much was feared, had traversed it with quicker steps than those with which I was then descending it. At Rome, and in the cities and villas of northern Italy, the despatches of which they were the bearers had been anxiously looked for. After a time the mind’s eye could see hordes of barbarians swarming down its steep pavement to plunder, and to overthrow, the civilization, to aid in the protection of which it had been constructed. Time had turned the tables.

But probably there had been an earlier, and unrecorded chapter in its history. We know that there had been in almost prehistoric times an Etruscan Dodecapolis established in the plain of the Po, and which reached down to the Adriatic, an offset of the original Dodecapolis between the Apennines and the Tyrrhenian sea. The inhabitants of these confederations of cities were the earliest known organizers of commerce in Europe. That they were great in maritime commerce implies this, for maritime commerce presupposes inland and overland trade. Now in those times tin and copper must have been among the most coveted articles of European commerce, because it was from a combination of them that the best tools and weapons then procurable were formed; and there is a very high degree of probability in favour of the supposition that Britain was even in those early days the chief source for the indispensable tin, and if of the tin, then almost necessarily of some of the copper at that time so abundantly used; and as we can hardly suppose that the way to Britain through the Pillars of Hercules was then used as a highway of commerce, we are almost driven to the conclusion that they were brought down to the shores of the Mediterranean by overland carriage. Some of the traffic may have centred at some port on the Gulf of Lyons, perhaps at the point which afterwards became Massilia, for of course it was an inland trade that supported the maritime commerce of Massilia, and made it rich and populous, and powerful. That part, however, of the traffic, of which the Etruscan Dodecapolis of the plain of the Po and of the Adriatic was the entrepôt, in all probability came over the Julier and the Septimer. In thinking of those remote times the necessity of the existence of a very considerable inland traffic has been almost entirely lost sight of. This was far the most potent agency then at work among the barbarians of Europe, precisely in the same manner as ocean commerce is in these days of ours far the most potent agency now at work over the whole world. We have many indications of it in the trade in gold as well as in that of tin and copper. These commodities were widely carried about, and very generally dispersed. This active and continuous traffic implies the existence of certain well-established, and regularly used routes. And all this reached far back beyond any historical traditions. The traffic in the bulky article of salt also must needs have been of equal antiquity. That the inhabitants of northern and central Europe were tribes of barbarians is no argument against the existence of these kinds of traffic. They did exist. And as to the people who carried them on being barbarians, whatever that might have amounted to, they were not such savages as the negroes of central Africa now are; and we know that they can appreciate the value of the ivory trade, and of that in ostrich feathers, and gold dust, which commodities, under the guidance of Arab, and Banian, and Nubian traders, they collect at stations and marts in the interior, to be furthered to the coast, and thence to be dispersed over the world. And this they did also in the time of the Pharaohs, three and four thousand years ago, as we know from still existing Egyptian sculptures and paintings. The ivory that was expended in the decoration of the palace of Ahab and of the kings of Assyria was doubtless procured from this source, and in this fashion. The barbarians, then, of central Europe, aided and instructed by Etruscan merchants, might, though perhaps we ought to use a stronger auxiliary, and say must, have done the same by the tin, and perhaps the copper, of Cornwall. And this way of the Septimer was in all probability the route a part of their trade in these articles took. If so it cannot have been but that Etruscan traders were in those times to be seen every year in Britain. They had landed at Dover. They had trafficked at the British entrepôt of Londinium. They must have had some kind of establishment there. They had not stopped there. They had gone on to the mines from which the tin was extracted, and had looked out on the western ocean from the Land’s End.