At Andermatt a telegram from his wife was awaiting my good guide, to tell him that if he wished ever again to see her alive, he must immediately return home. As he showed it to me tears rose to his eyes. Within five minutes of our arrival at Andermatt he was on his way back to Hof. Poor fellow! In his solitary walk home he would have reason and opportunity enough for recalling what he had yesterday said to me of the place domestic happiness occupied, in his estimation, among the constituents of the true riches. Though he had been with me only two days, I had already come to regard him very favourably, and would have trusted him farther than I could have seen him.
CHAPTER II.
DISSENTIS—COIRE.
He looks around,
And seeks for good, and finds the good he seeks.
Wordsworth.
My first business now was to look for some one to take Leuthold’s place. Among the candidates who offered themselves I did not find one whose appearance and style of talk suggested the probability of his proving somewhat of a companion. I, therefore, despatched a telegram to my wife, who was at Portresina, to send me by to-morrow’s post a Poschiavo man, of whom some weeks back I had heard that he was desirous of acting as my porter. I was not unwilling to try him, because he was one of the class—a large and characteristic one in the Grisons—which goes abroad to seek fortune. He had sought his for ten years, but not with complete success, at the antipodes; and now having returned, somewhat disappointed at the result of his quest, was for the present open to any engagement that required only unskilled labour. Their own country being too poor to find them employment, temporary emigration, as most of us are aware, is resorted to by a large proportion of the youth of the Grisons. This is the national tradition. In all the capitals of the old and new world these temporary emigrants are found engaged in the production and sale of pastry and confectionery, of loaf-sugar and sugar-plums, of liqueurs and lemonade. My acquaintance had endeavoured to amass the competency on which he might return home, and which would entitle him to a place among the aristocracy of Poschiavo, by the concoction of lemonade and ices at Sydney, and at several of the New South Wales diggings. But what with fires, bad debts, and bad building ventures at speculative diggings, which had soon been deserted, he had not met with the success which generally crowns Grison ambition; and so it had come about that he was now maintaining himself, as chance enabled him, till he might recover heart for a new effort. Having despatched the telegram for him to meet me to-morrow evening at Coire, I went on in the afternoon by diligence to Dissentis.
As we slowly ascended the zigzags which carry the road through the carefully kept prairies immediately above Andermatt, the picture presented to us was full of interest to an English eye. I went over this ground in my ‘Month in Switzerland’ of last year, and in my narrative of the scenes and incidents of that excursion I said something of the history of the Oberalp alpe which we are now entering on, and of the various ways in which it is at present turned to account. I now again read the scene with undiminished interest. It was thoroughly Swiss. The mountain side was so steep that skilful engineering had been required to construct the road. With the exception of two or three small patches of potatoes on the lower part, nothing but grass could be grown. But how carefully had the grass been cultivated! Though on the mountain flanks, which must originally have been strewn with stones and rocks, not a stone was to be seen, and only a few protruding rocks remained, which were so large as to defy removal. Nowhere was there a noxious weed, or a bush. The smooth emerald-green felt of turf was spread out everywhere, frowned upon by overhanging craggy summits, whose work of centuries had now been all undone; or rather what was obstructive in that work had been undone, and what might be made serviceable had been turned to account. The showers of stones they had been sending down through all those long ages to bury the little soil they had helped to form, had by the labour of successive generations of peasant proprietors been all removed. There was nothing now that could obstruct the stroke of the scythe, or the possible growth of a blade of grass. Some of the summits were still streaked and patched with snow, which suggested that the frost, which rends the rocks, was up there seldom idle. Along the grassy slopes were no walls or hedges. Only where a boundary mark might be required, a stake had been driven into the ground. These rose but a few inches above the surface. Here and there might be seen a hay grange; but not many of them, for in the winter the people hereabouts are all collected into the little town. This, from the first rise, shows as a cluster of sombre gray houses, amongst which two churches stand pre-eminent. The season was late this year, and so on the grassy slopes, some of them very steep, were to be seen busily employed in spreading, or in collecting the hay several women. They were unshod, for here people are too chary of whatever costs money, to wear shoes when they can do without them. On their heads they had orange kerchiefs. The men at this season are most of them dispersed far and wide in their different summer employments, by which they will earn a great part of what will support their families in the long winter; and so the haymaking devolves in some places almost entirely on the women. To-day as they stirred it about they made the air fragrant with its scent, that air, which around us was so purely translucent, but which above our heads seemed to solidify into a firmament of indigo.
The effect of the scene upon you is enhanced by the sense of your being so many thousand feet above your ordinary level. You are, however, still going up, and the mown sward is shrinking into Alpine pasture. The haymakers now at a distance below show like pigmies. The little town is now no longer sombre gray, but has in the sunlight, and by the distance, become gleaming white.
As we approached the lake on the summit of the Pass we saw that much turf had lately been cut for the long cold winter. Up here nature gives no wood for fuel. Fortunately, however, the climate is not unfavourable to the growth of plants that in suitable situations produce peat; though there is considerable difficulty in drying the peat sufficiently to render it combustible. To effect this we found it set up on rocks, or, where these could not be found, on inclined banks from which the rain would quickly run off. I was sorry to see that there was much soil and sand in this peat, and that, therefore, it was not of the best kind for producing heat. Still it is the only fuel the locality supplies; and without it, such even as it is, fewer people could live at Andermatt, because in that case the cost of a prime necessary of life would be much increased.
At the head of the lake you are on the top of the Pass, and enter the Grisons. At first, for some distance, you descend rapidly; and may think, as you often have occasion to think on Alpine roads, and, too, with far more reason than here, that the traveller has some need of faith in the skill of the driver, in the excellence of the materials of the carriage and harness, and in the training and sure-footedness of the horses. For some time the road is down rather poor Alpine pastures, meagre, steep, and rocky: but as we are not looking at the scene with the eye of a Lincolnshire grazier, we are glad to think that these meagre-looking steep and rocky pastures will supply many a family with good milk and cheese, a part of the latter being convertible into such of the necessaries of their humble lives as they cannot produce themselves. And are there not grand mountain summits around you? And is not the valley before you the cradle of the famous Rhine? And are not all these mountains sending down affluents to the already vigorous infant? These are the thoughts with which you begin the descent.