Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

The Inn at Klus is quite of the village kind. The ground and first floor appear to be intended only for the accommodation of peasant visitors. The upper chambers are the guest-chambers. They consist of a small sitting-room, and three good bed-rooms. Everything in this part of the house was clean. The people, too, themselves, we found good-natured and attentive. We had intended to have had a baggage horse for the Surenen, as the distance to Engelberg is great for porters. No horse, however, of any kind, or of any degree of badness, could be had. Anticipating the possibility of this, we had tried to get one at Am Stag; but ineffectually, for every animal that could be brought into the valley, and kept on its legs, was wanted for the traffic of the road. We were, therefore, obliged to have recourse to porters; and having engaged two, ordered coffee for 4.40 A.M. next morning.

August 15.—Were under weigh at 5 A.M. A fine bright morning. At Erstfeld, half a mile from Klus, you cross the Reuss. At Rübshausen, a mile and a half further on, you begin the ascent of the mountain. All mountain ascents are pleasant in the fresh morning. You enter the forest at once, the breadth of the bottom land of the valley being hereabouts on the other bank of the Reuss. We found the forest on the mountain side frequently broken with little prairies, and enlivened here and there with châlets. Occasionally we got a good view down the valley, and of the opposite range.

Having climbed to the upper limits of the forest, you reach a place called Bocketobel. You have now earned something, and will be well paid. You are about to enter the upland valley of Waldnacht: but it is not yet in sight. The path is a mere groove along the top of the precipitous talus of the cliffs that rise on your left. You turn your back on these cliffs to make out the particulars of the scene. It is thoroughly Alpine. If you look first to your left there is before you a very fine rock-bound ravine, into which is falling, in a good cascade, the waters that drain into the Waldnacht valley from the heights around it. The opposite side of this ravine is a sheer wall of rock. This is crowned with an upsloping wood. Then a broad expanse of upsloping prairie. Then wood again to the top of the ridge. You then turn to your right. You there have a long sharply shelving talus from the heights above, in part forest, in part grass. Behind, and above all this, at the point at which you are standing, facing south-east, are the rugged snow-streaked tops of the Uri Rothstock. If you are fortunate, as we were, all these objects, and their minutest details, will meet your eye in full sunlight, through the diaphanous sunlit mountain atmosphere. It will, however, be very different when you look down the mountain, you have been ascending, to the deep broad valley, and to the opposite range. It is still early morning, and there is a light haze in the valley; and the sun, which is all about you, above you, and for some way below you, cannot yet reach the valley, or touch a point on the eastern side. The haze, therefore, that fills the valley below, is equally on the side of the opposite range. This haze is of a pale grey, almost white, with a suspicion of blue. It is of the tint of a glass of water into which has been stirred a drop or two of milk. This is but dimly diaphanous. The opposite mountain, therefore, and the works of man in the valley, in contrast to the clear definition of all that is immediately before you, and on either side, appear to be unsubstantial—like objects in a vision that is fading away—the mere spectres of villages and mountains. It is a scene of much variety, and of good contrasts.

Having given to it sufficient attention, and time, to allow it to form its image in your memory, you turn your back upon it, and enter the valley of Waldnacht. This, as L’Industrie Alpestre de la Suisse tells us, is an alpe lying within the Commune of Attinghausen, in which Altorf is situated. It now grazes 116 cows, and 16 pigs. It is nearly 6,000 feet above the sea; is available for 107 days; is worth 7,324 francs a year; and belongs to six co-proprietors. What is visible of it, as you enter it, is a long grassy oval, bounded on the south by precipitous mountains; on the north by a long grassy mountain slope, with, here and there, tufts of dwarfed alders on its side; on the east it contracts to the narrow passage by which you have just entered it, and on the west to the Surenen Pass. What is visible may be three miles long, and in the best part one mile broad. You will understand from these particulars how completely above, and out of the world it is. The herdsmen who milk the cows, and make the cheese, even with the occasional diversion of the few travellers the Pass brings to them, must have plenty of opportunity for studying each others’ character, and the characters of their 116 cows and 16 pigs.

Here we took on one of the herdsmen to assist the little man up to the top of the Pass, for in the ascent of the mountain from Klus to Waldnacht his strength, for climbing, had begun to fail. The path lies along the bottom of the grassy vale by the side of the flower-margined stream; at the western end of the grassy bottom it crosses the stream; and then the ascent begins again. In the valley you had been on level ground. This second stage of the ascent is without trees; rough and rocky, but full of flowers between the rocks. Here a part of the herd of cows was grazing. Many were on the path in preference to the rugged mountain side, though there was not much to choose between the two. The sun was hot. The way was steep. After a time we came to the end of the first stage. It was a kind of landing place in the mountain staircase we had been toiling up. On this was a field of snow about 100 yards across. The very dog, who had accompanied the herdsman, took a mouthful from it. Then climbing again. In this bit was an ice-cold spring which bursts out from beneath a rock, a yard or so from the path. I might have passed it without observing it, and so lost a rare draught, but Ammer and the porters saved me from that loss. We then came to a second ice-field about 200 yards wide. After this the ascent was sharp and toilsome for a warm day, with the sun—at that hour it is on the face of the mountain—on your back. As you near the top the path is steep, loose, and shingly.

When we had climbed to within three or four hundred feet of the top, vegetation almost entirely died out. The surface was everywhere strewn with small slaty débris, from which uprose, at intervals, large masses of harder rock, not yet disintegrated. Here, between these larger and harder fragments, on the scaly, leaden-coloured ground, which otherwise would have been quite naked, was a natural garden of most charming little Forget-me-nots. They stood an inch, or two, apart, as if the soil were too poor to admit of closer proximity. But, even with this amplitude of space, each plant could form no more than a single stem, without branches, perhaps two inches high, with two or three little lateral leaves. This little stem supported a single truss of pale blue flowers, with pale golden eyes. Such soft tints, and amid such hardness! Like pearls upon an Ethiop’s arm. They can do little at this height, and on such a soil. Nothing else can do anything. But this frail little plant bravely holds up to the light its gem-like flowerets in the midst of cold and barrenness. The little it can do it does passing well. The slender stem is stretched up to you as far as it can reach. The little flowers, too, do not droop, but are erect also; nor are they half-closed, but each is expanded out quite level. It looks up to you with the open eye of confiding innocence, and says, ‘If you are pleased with me, look at me. Take me into your eye. Forget me not.’

‘No! gentle little suppliant, never! No cares, nor pleasures, of the world shall ever dim your image in the eye of memory. To recall it will be always pleasant, and at times may charm away care. May sky and sun, whose liveries you meekly wear, smile on what remains of your short day.’

As is the case with many Swiss Passes, the Surenen, looked at from below, appears to be very much less than it proves to be in the ascent. The eye takes the air line to the top, and because it sees none of the depressions, and few of the windings the path is obliged to make, naturally ignores them, till experience has taught the necessity of making due allowances. While you are in the inexperienced stage you will often mock yourself, you may do it here, with the complaint that you have got a long way from the bottom, without getting any nearer to the top. As you advance, the way only lengthens. The more you do, the more there remains to be done.

At last the summit was reached, and with something akin to disappointment, at finding that what we had been so long in toiling up to, from five in the morning till past eleven, was crossed literally in two steps, for the top is only a hog’s back ridge.

Half a dozen steps beyond the summit, inclining to the left, is a little stream, with its channel cut in the short turf, which you had left behind you a long way down on the other side, but which at once reappears on the western slope. This little stream must take its rise, perhaps by some subterranean duct, from the lower stages of the Schlossberg, which is here on your left. The Blackenstock, a lower stage of the Uri Rothstock, is on your immediate right. The depression between these rugged, craggy mountains forms the Pass. Here, on the grassy marge of the little runnel on the summit, was called a halt. From this point you look down on the Surenen alpe, falling away immediately below your feet, with, on its southern side, the grand summit snow-field of the Titlis, in the distance, full before you. Between it and you are several iron-cased, iron-hearted, inaccessible-looking mountains on each side of the valley. All this will feed the eye, as you lie on the smooth short turf by the side of the glancing blithesome little runnel.