The altitude of the house is 4,580 feet. This, as it faces to the south, ought to admit of its having a pretty good summer climate, though I suppose considerable deductions must be made, particularly in the first part of the summer, for the contiguity of the vast snowfields of the Ortler, and for the other snowy eminences behind it. Its immediate entourage has a bleak, starved, naked aspect, the ground being poor, and only partially clothed with vegetation. This might at first be wearisome, and then repulsive, to one who was obliged to remain a week or more at the place, though it is just what gives it its character, and makes it interesting to the passing pedestrian, who only sees what can be seen in coming and going, and whose stay is limited to the time that is requisite for his dinner within doors, and his cigar on the terrace outside. He notes only with satisfaction the poverty of the immediate neighbourhood, the grand contiguous mountain masses, and the rich colouring of the long valley below open to the midday sun; and, before this source of satisfaction has been exhausted, is on his way to other scenes, full of pleasant anticipations for himself, seasoned perhaps a little with the commiseration he feels for those he leaves in quarantine, at all events at anchor, at Bormio. If you are to stay at a place, I almost think it preferable to be low down (of course not quite in the valley bottom) than to be high up. In the latter case you have a feeling that you have already seen everything. At all events you have no desire to go down into the valley: that is what, as a matter of fact and practice, no one does. But if your station is low down, you always feel an impulse on you to climb up some mountain, or to go somewhere or other to get a view, or to see something more of the country. We must except from this remark those cases where the height and the view are just what one has come for.
At 1 P.M., that is to say after a stay of two hours, which is about the right time for a midday halt, which is to include one’s dinner, and which, too, seemed time enough for Bormio, we began the ascent to the Stelvio. As soon as you face up towards the Pass its distinctive character begins to display itself. The first mile brings you to the old Baths, constructed on a lofty cliff-niche, like an eagle’s nest, high above the gloomy gorge of the Adda. As you pass the waste overflow of the hot spring, you feel that the air by its side has received some of its warmth. But this hardly withdraws your attention for a moment from the gray ravine, and the gray mountain, below steep and deep, and above steep and high. Beyond this the road, still carried high up on the right hand mountain flank, becomes more impressive. On the left, beyond the point at which the Adda enters the Pass from the Val Fraele, the road bends somewhat to the right, and you enter a still more impressive stage of the Pass. You are now in the gorge of the Braulio. The mighty Braulio is on your left, and the south-western buttresses of the still mightier Monte Cristallo are on your right. The Braulio has here, and for some miles on, been cut down in mountain-high perpendicular precipices of a yellowish-brown, for the rock is dolomitic. On that side no road could have been constructed; but so much the better, for it is very grand as looked at from the road on the opposite side. On your side, the road side, the mountains are not mountain walls, but mountain scarps. The scarps, however, are so steep, and so seamed with couloirs, that there was the utmost difficulty in making the road, as there still is, and ever will continue to be in maintaining it. As you look up the mountain side from the road, you see, above, masses of detached rock, as big as barns, temporarily arrested in their descent, and ready on the slightest provocation to crash down on the road. Sooner or later they all must come. At the couloirs is the great danger and the great difficulty. In them there is no solid foundation for the road that must be carried across them. Its foundation, therefore, had to be formed of masonry. And when it had thus been carried across them, it was always exposed to be swept away at any time by a storm, which for the nonce makes the couloir the channel of a raging torrent of commingled water and rocks. It, therefore, became necessary first to put the road in a masonry tunnel, and then to fill the couloir immediately above it with solid masonry, in order that the commingled torrent of water and rocks might not dash upon it, but rush down over it. And, again, in places where there was not a couloir, but still, where rocks in bad weather might fall upon the road, or avalanches in spring, similar precautions became necessary: in such places the road must be either an excavated tunnel, or a constructed culvert. These precautions are indispensable both for the maintenance of the road, and for the protection of travellers in bad weather. And however strongly the work may be done, it has frequently to be renewed, for it is frequently broken in, or swept away. In several places we saw men at work repairing the damages of this kind of last spring. In some places the rocks that had fallen on the roof of the tunnels and galleries had done them more or less injury; in others it was the torrents that had dilapidated the masonry. Everything here is impressive: the deep gorge with the angry stream far below the road; the iron-faced mountain precipices opposite to you; the steep mountain side above you, which you see is only waiting for a storm to mobilize it; and which storm, as you look up at the great rocks caught on the loose débris, you think can hardly be needed for bringing them down; because, indeed, for anything you can see, there is nothing to keep them from falling upon you while you are observing their massiveness and position. If you look down into the gorge your flesh creeps; if you look across it, your mind is solemnized by a sense of the grandeur of those sheer mountain-high precipices; if you look up at the rocks ready to fall upon you, your mind is awed by a sense of the inexorableness of nature.
Beyond this stage, which had been, pretty generally, for some miles, more or less on a level along the mountain flank, the scene changes. You now by a steep ascent cut off several zigzags, and reach a higher level, at the further end of which, some three miles on, is the fourth cantoniera, that of Santa Maria, where your day’s work will end, and you will take up your quarters for the night. On this higher level we again encountered the snow. The day had been bright, and the snow-plough had not been used here, and so for the last three kilometres of this distance we had to walk through sloppy snow slush. In three hours and a half from the new Baths of Bormio, that is to say at 4.30 P.M., we reached our destination. It is a large building, for it contains a barrack, a custom-house, an inn, and lodgings for the people who keep the road open and in repair. It is well situated in a sheltered bend of the mountain basin, which lies below, and on the south side of, the summit of the Pass.
We found half-a-dozen Germans in the house: some of them had come up that morning from the Munsterthal. A little later, a dozen more arrived from the Tyrol side, in a light omnibus-like diligence, and its supplement. Of the whole number only three slept here: all the rest went down to Bormio. I was the only Englishman in the house, and in the visitors’ book the proportion of English names was small; which, however, implies not so much that few English parties cross the Pass, as that few stay here for the night, or have any reason for entering their names in the book. Scarcely a French name was to be found in it. The sun was still bright, and as it was full on the verandah, it was pleasant to sit in and feel its warmth, while everything around on which the eye could rest was buried in snow.
I reminded Christian of how varied, and full of interest, our day had been. In the early morning Livigno, and the broad snowy ridges of M. della Neve, where nothing but snow had been seen, then the long green Val di Dentro with its meadows, cornfields, towns, and churches, then Bormio, then the awe-inspiring Braulio, and now a return to the snow world as complete as what we had crossed in the early morning. ‘Yes,’ he said, for I knew that I was talking to a man who had a sense of the elements of interest in mountain scenery, ‘yes, but we have not done wisely. We should have stopped at Bormio for the night. We might in some way or other have found this too much, and then the pleasure of the rest of our walk might have been much diminished.’ I had myself not been without this thought, and, therefore, as he had to carry the load, I had at Bormio left it to him to decide whether we should go on from that point or not. But being a good and true man, because he knew what was my wish, and because it was left to him to decide, he had raised no objection to going further. Now, however, when the work was done, and there could be no suspicion of a wish to shirk, he could say what he really thought. I could only reply that the imprudence was all my fault: and that, as it was I who had nothing to carry, I ought not to have thrown the decision on him.
When those who were to pass the night at Bormio or elsewhere than at Santa Maria, had cleared out, and the sun was setting, the buxom and rather boisterous damsel, who had charge of the guests, brought in a large basketful of wood, and announced her intention of giving us a fire, which she forthwith kindled in a smaller room off the salle-à-manger, where there was an open fire-place. As the wood was cembra, in five minutes we had a blazing fire, and together with the three Germans, who were full of good-nature and talk, we spent a pleasant evening at an elevation of 8,317 feet in the highest house, the books say, in Europe, with, though it was the 16th of August, a sharp frost outside, which had lost no time in reasserting its dominion so soon as the sun retired from the scene.
The buxom boisterous damsel assigned to me for the night a large room with three beds. One of these I invited Christian to occupy. He had spent the evening with us, and as we sat round the blazing cembra fire had taken part in the conversation, for he had in youth, as is the custom with so many of his countrymen, gone abroad, where he had learnt French and German. This bedroom had double windows, which appeared to be never opened: and this probably is the case from fear of letting in the cold. If so the room can only be aired, or rather dried, on the occasions when the stove is heated. The bedding, and everything in the room appeared damp. This I was told was a result of the snow being continuous throughout almost all the year, which keeps the roof and walls permanently chilled through. One cannot but suppose that dampness, as well as cold, must be a consequence of such conditions: at all events I could not but believe that my hempen sheets, three heavy blankets, and heavy coverlet, owed some of their weight, I might almost say of their adhesiveness, to this cause. In the morning, however, we found that whatever had been the hygrometric state of the beds, and of the room, in which we had slept, we were ourselves none the worse. I believe that when you are taking a great deal of exercise you can resist the bad effects of a damp bed far more effectually than you can when your manner of life is sedentary. Your system is acting more vigorously, and giving off a greater amount of animal heat, which enables you to repel the damp, and saves you from becoming its victim. In fact, you do yourself air your bed before it can do you any harm. Be the cause, however, what it may, we suffered not from cold or damp that night, while sleeping high above all the other sleepers of Europe.
August 17.—As we were to have an easy day—only to Trafoi at the foot of Ortler—we were not off till 6 A.M. The sun was not yet on our path, and the morning was arctic. If there were such things as summer mornings at the pole, such might a fine one be there. Everything was hard bound in frost, and everything was deep buried in snow, except the black streak along the centre of the road, from which the snow from Santa Maria to the summit had been cleared off by the snow-plough. Of course overcoats, gloves, and scarfs are unknown on these excursions, so on first emerging from the hotel I felt as if I were thinly clad, and my ungloved hands were soon pocketed. But as our way was at first all up hill, and the air quite still, the chill of the first contact with the frost was soon lost, which, however, had indeed not been much more than the chilliness of the interior of the house in the early morning without a fire. By the time we had reached the summit (somewhat under an hour) we were ready to blunder through the knee-deep new snow up to a little eminence on the left of the road, from which there is a commanding view. The path to it leaves the road just alongside of the road-mender’s quarters on the summit of the Pass, at the point of junction of the Austrian and Italian frontiers. It is ascended in twenty minutes; or if there be less snow than there was to-day, then in a little less time. To the north-east, in which direction you can see furthest, the view is very extensive. To the west it is grandly intercepted by the contiguous mighty masses of Umbrail and Braulio. Of these the former is in Switzerland, the latter in Italy. To the south are the still mightier masses of Monte Cristallo, and of the dome-topped Ortler, which send down towards you two mighty and strangely contrasted glaciers; that on the right is long and broad, has a gentle descent, and had on this day a surface that was white and smooth from the lately fallen snow; its neighbour to the left, and which is only separated from it by a narrow rocky ridge, is most unlike it in every one of the above respects. As seen from our point of observation it appeared of no great length; it was not spread out into a large field, but jammed into a narrow ravine between two mountains. It was not in the form of a stream, but of a cataract, of ice; its surface, too, was much rent and fissured; and to complete the contrast, for some reason which did not appear, the lately fallen snow had not rested upon it. As to the general effect of this extensive view, it seemed to me to be more than half lost by the covering of snow that had been laid over everything. If form is the first element of interest in a wide mountain scene, colour undoubtedly is the second; for colour it is that gives distinctiveness, and the suggestion of life, to the forms you are looking at. It not only enables you to distinguish more readily between the forms, but also to make out the peculiarities, and interpret the character of each. Meadows, cornfields, forests, villages, rocks, Alpine pastures, lakes, glaciers, as well as the snowfields, are all signalized and understood by their colour. But when colour is obliterated, and every object made white, the power of distinguishing mere form, even that of great masses, is greatly diminished, while all minor objects become pretty generally effaced. All nature has then but one aspect. The scene before us supplied us with a proof of this value of colour. The only exception to the universal white were two enormous black holes by the side of Mount Umbrail. These were points at which we could look down into the Munsterthal to somewhat below the line up to which the snow had been melted. As the sun was not yet touching these depths, they looked almost completely black by the side of the otherwise universal white. Of course the eye went back to them again and again, for they were more suggestive, and so more interesting, than anything else that could be seen. These two, as they appeared, black bottomless pits were just the two places in the world around us where the deep valley opened out most, and the sun had most power. They were, then, the most favoured spots; and we could translate their blackness into scenes of industry and village life. If the snow had been suddenly removed from the whole scene, with the exception of those summits it, on account of their height, legitimately occupies, then they would have been distinguishable from their lesser brethren. We should have known that they were the highest tops, however far off in the view they might have been, and so we should have regarded them with the respect that was their due. And in like manner with all the rest of the scene: every object, having been interpreted by its colour, would have become interesting. We should have been given to understand what it was, and should have known what to think of it. While as things were, the whole scene, because deprived of colour, was dumb. Nothing could give us any account of itself except the glaciers. Vegetation, which is the garb of nature, and which to so large an extent puts nature into relation to man, was lost to sight. Another proof of the value of colour is that, when it has been effaced by snow from an extensive view, the eye soon wearies of the view, and to such a degree as to refuse to attend to it any longer.
The descent was now commenced. As is usual in Alpine Passes, there was no resemblance between the two sides. That by which we had ascended to the top was long, and had been formed by nature into several distinct stages, each possessing features and a character of its own. This presented nothing that at all corresponded to the upper crateriform stage on the other side, nor anything at all like the awe-inspiring V. di Braulio. The descent was very rapid, by an innumerable series of zigzags, constructed on so steep a face, that it was a long time, at all events now that the mountain side was covered with snow, before a cut-off could be made. The road continued steep, though the gradient was being eased all the way down to Trafoi, in reaching which we diminished our altitude by 4,000 feet. We could not but observe that the Austrian side was not so well cared for as the Italian. Here, for instance, the snow-plough had not been used at all. We had, therefore, as the sun was now well up, to walk through some miles of sloppy snow. On this side, too, there were no refuges. Probably, however, this omission arose from the fact that the whole of the first two or three miles is equally exposed to snow avalanches; there was, therefore, no more reason for protecting one part than another, and it would have cost too much to have protected the whole. We saw to-day evidence of this general exposure, for even the late midsummer fall of snow had yielded some half dozen avalanches; some small, but others of sufficient mass to have blocked the road; these, therefore, it had been necessary to remove, in order to make a way for the traffic: they would, probably, have upset a carriage had they fallen upon it.