It is pleasant, very pleasant, with so much that is grand and unwonted before you—such huge masses, such dark, unpitying, unchanging hardness, pinnacles, precipices, ravines, and snow-fields—to rest on the smooth turf by the side of the cool sparkling streamlet. Your hard work is now done. The strain of the long climb—and it was sharpest at the last—has come to an end suddenly. You feel that your lungs, your heart, your muscles, are rapidly resuming their normal condition. The cigar you have earned is unusually soothing. You notice that a little puff of white vapour is incessantly curling up from the summit of the Blackenstock, hard by on your right. He, then, too, to keep you in countenance, to associate himself with you, has, by the aid of the sun, lighted his pipe. That ‘chartered libertine, the air’ is quiet, with only just enough movement in it to make its Alpine freshness perceptibly restorative. Your draughts of claret, mixed with the water of the lively streamlet, seem to be replacing the moisture of the bodily organism, which the effort and sun-heat of the climb had abstracted; and the sensation of the replacement is contenting. Your camp-followers, too, a few paces off, are, you notice, rejoicing in the sense of release from their burdens, which they have placed, erect in their wooden back-frames, before them, as if they wished to see, as well as feel, that they are no longer upon their backs. You pass the claret to them. They do not dilute it from the stream. To them, undiluted, it is a thin potation.
Half an hour is soon gone. Another quarter is added. And then the words en route are again heard, and the descent commences. You are fresher than when you rose with the sun, though a life seems to have passed since then; and you can hardly bring yourself to believe that that was the morning of to-day. Le petit Caporal—for the blue boy of last year now wears two stripes in the battalion of the Aigle Cantonal College—takes the lead, and keeps it all the way, till at 4.30 p.m. we enter Engelberg. But that is yet a long way off. The descent has many well-defined stages. First comes the topmost pasture—the most exposed, and with the shortest turf. Here are flocks of sheep, and the cows that are out of milk. They will not stray, for right and left they are walled in with mountainous precipices; and over the Pass they would find nothing to eat. In the next stage is a deeply sunk pasture, protected on the north by a semicircle of mighty precipices. Here are some horses and pigs, and the cows in milk, with a châlet for making cheese, from the chimney of which the blue smoke of the wood fire is rising vertically in the quiet air of the sheltered bottom. The third stage is composed of a long green mountain slope on the north, the successor of the semicircle of precipices, which are now transferred, mountain-high, to the opposite, the south side, but not in a semicircle. At one spot in this southern range you may count as many as six torrents, close together, streaming and tumbling down from the summits, which are needles of granite rising out of ravines of snow. In the fourth stage the valley has become narrow. The mountains on each side are naked cliffs; the only green being the narrow grass-clothed talus at the foot of each range. The last stage, which brings you to Engelberg, is one of woods and mown meadows. Two objects accompany you all the way, the brawling Aa at your feet, and the vast expanse of snow on the summit of the Titlis. To one descending the valley, the distinguishing feature of this grand mountain is that its upper stage rises in sheer black rock above the mountain in front of it; and then on this sheer precipice of rock is superimposed a sheer precipice of snow. It seems as if one might stand on the edge of the snow, and let down a plumb-line against the face of the snow, for some hundreds of feet, and then let it fall for some hundreds of feet more, against the face of the underlying rock. You are able, too, at the same time to see that this is not a mere ridge of snow, but that it is the edge of a vast field of snow on the flat crown of this mountain giant’s head, which only gradually slopes off north, south, and west; and which is, in the fashion just described, cut through perpendicularly on the eastern side, which is the one that faces you as you come down the Pass.
As there is no telegraph over the Surenen, we had, after our halt on the summit, sent on Ammer to engage rooms for us at Engelberg. It was fortunate that we had taken this precaution, for he was only just in time to procure them for us in the last hotel at which he applied—the large new hotel of the Titlis, on the further side of the town. The books say that the Surenen requires nine or ten hours. We were out eleven hours and a half. But then we were a family party, recruited from the drawing-room, the junior department of the schoolroom, and the study; and we did our work in family fashion, which, as far as I know, is, taken in its turn, as good a fashion as any other. At all events it is satisfactory to find that you are disposed to think so; for this will justify you in supposing that you are not one of those impetuous souls who have no idea of any pleasure in a Swiss excursion, except what they can extract from the fact that they got over a certain distance in less time than the books allow for it, or than their friends did it in: as if the merit of a book were to be measured by the rate at which it was written, or of a dinner by the rate at which it was eaten. Fair scenes and wondrous scenes are not to be scampered over, and toiled through. They have to be done with the eye and the mind as well as with the legs. What is fair and wondrous should be noted and understood. These are books which those that run cannot read. And they must be read carefully and rightly in order that they may be understood. Otherwise we cannot make them our own, so as to carry them away with us, and have them to look at (mentally) afterwards, whenever we please.
As we passed through the town we found that Engelberg was that day holding high festival. The bells were ringing; everybody was in the streets. The men were in their holiday costume, and of course the women too: each of the latter, if married, had two spatula-headed silver pins in her back hair—a local fashion, confined to the dames of Unterwalden—or, if unmarried, only one pin, the head of which was sometimes a disk, sometimes a globe about the size of an orange, formed of a kind of open filagree work. I asked one of those who was keeping the day with this festal adornment, what it was all about. The answer I received was, that it was in honour of God’s Mother.
In the evening I went to the church of the Monastery for Evening Song. All the day long I had been looking on the face of nature, one of the aids allowed us for the construction of our idea of God; I would now draw near to Him, as He is presented to us in another fashion—the old accustomed human fashion. The shades of evening were beginning to come down on the valley; and the hour, now that work was over, and the day coming to its close, disposed to quiet reverence, to religious reverie. I would go for a time to the house where the sights and the thoughts of the world are excluded. But I did not find what I went for. The chanting of the monks was loud and harsh; and I could not make out a syllable of what they were chanting. And this was the more forced upon me because, they being behind a screen impervious to sight, the ear only was appealed to. The influence of the hour having been thus dispelled, I looked at the people before me. There were among them three men. All the rest were women. Neither, then, the untutored peasants of Engelberg, nor one of the many hundreds of people from many nations, who had such culture as the world now gives, were there. How did they regard the fête and the occasion of it? Here were the old world and the world of to-day face to face. I remained till the end of the service, and then, returning to the hotel, took a place on the seat in front of it.
The day was now gone by. The last traces of light were fast fading away. Darkness was deepening in the valley. In the west, in which direction I was looking, the black silhouette of the mountains was projected from the now silver-white western evening sky. One bright planet alone was seen overhead. A few remaining flecks of cloud were being fast absorbed, and were soon quite lost. The loiterers from many countries and the mediæval Engelbergers were fast disappearing from the streets. And now the last white traces of the dying day are gone from the western heavens; and unnumbered worlds, gleaming from illimitable space, are discoursing of the glory and of the mystery of the Universe. And nothing else is seen and all is still, that their discourse may be heeded.
CHAPTER VIII.
STANZ-BECKENRIED—SCHWYZ—THE HACKEN PASS—EINSIEDLN.
Silence is only commendable
In a neat’s tongue dried.—Shakespeare.