Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

Now up to the Todensee: but this year not taking the left side for the mephitic, fly-plagued Rhone Glacier Hotel, but the right side, straight on to Obergesteln. This, just beyond the Todensee, and for some little way on, is for the pedestrian a very good bit of Switzerland. You are at a height of not far from 7,000 feet, with a grand and varied feast for the eye in every direction. Of course you look first for the great Rhone glacier. That you see, from an admirable point of view, in a grand Alpine picture. Mountains and glaciers have souls; still there can be no Landseer for them. They are too vast and too simple, and the scene, though its objects are so few, is too expanded for the canvas. In the foreground is the dark Todensee, surrounded with its scanty, yellowish, sober herbage, interspersed with granite slabs and rocks. In the middle distance the central object is the great glacier, majestically descending from between the Gerstener snow-fields and rock ridges on the left, and the snow-capped summits of the Galenstock on the right. This majestic descent suddenly passes into the broad, and lofty ice-fall of the glacier—not quite a Niagara of ice, but still very grand and imposing; and the more so to those, who remember that it is, while they are looking at it, in motion—an actual ice-fall; and that the majestic descent, too, above it, is flowing—an actual ice-river.

At the point where this is best seen, you get also, by reversing your position, the best view of the Zermatt Alps. There before you, in the south-west, are their multiform summits—Monte Rosa, Weisshorn, Matterhorn, &c. You, who know the whole ground-plan and mountain architecture of that region, recall the relation in which they stand to each other.

Looking straight across the Valais you have a third great sight. Up against the sky, in a gap through the range on the opposite side, is the great glacier over which lies the Pass from the Upper Valais to Domo d’Ossola.

To your right, all along, are the mountain-high cliffs, topped with snow-fields, of the Great and Little Sidelhorn.

It is a glorious panorama. Memorable to you, ever after, will be the day, on which you saw it, with a sense of its grandeur and power.

As we went along we made out, with our glasses, a party of Englishmen on the snow of the Sidelhorn, and another party on the Gerstener snow-field, who were searching, as we were told, for the brother of the manager of the Grimsel Hospice, who that morning, while looking for crystals, had fallen into a crevasse. This, by engendering a feeling of awe, added to the interest of the scene. The next day we heard that the poor man having, on the afternoon of this day, been tracked to the point from which he had slipped, had been recovered in a state of insensibility, but not so far gone as not to be brought round again.

The descent to Obergesteln is down mountain pastures, over thymy turf, by hurrying streams, and through a wood of ancient larch. To see this wood to advantage you must go straight down it by a sentier de speculation, which will carry you by and under some fine trees.

It had been a part of our original plan for the day to take a char at Obergesteln. But, as might have been expected in the height of the season, nothing of the kind was to be had at such a place; every horse and vehicle being on the road, making pecuniary hay whilst the tourist sun was shining. This we thought rather a gain, as there was some good walking in us still; and so, having baited the little man’s horse and our porter at Obergesteln, we carried ourselves on to Munster, which we reached at 5.30 P.M. We had been out, including halts, twelve and a half hours: and had done, I suppose, over thirty miles.

Having been from early days something of a pedestrian, and, during this month’s tramp, never having once felt fatigued, or had a battered, blistered, or swollen foot, I will venture to say a word here on the great question of walking in Switzerland. A combination of walking with chars, when the latter are advisable, of which you must judge yourself, with reference to your own power and objects, and the amount of time at your disposal, is the pleasantest way of conducting an excursion in such a country. To keep yourself in training for a walking expedition, you will find eight miles a day at home quite sufficient. If you are accustomed to this it will be as easy for you to do three times that distance when the whole day is given up to it, as to do the eight miles at home in two hours of the afternoon. But the one primary, indispensable requisite is a proper pair of boots. If they are not what they ought to be, nothing can be done. If they are of the right sort, all that is required may be done with comfort and with pleasure. English shoemakers are the worst and most stupid in the world, except the American; and they are worse because they exaggerate and caricature the stupidity of ours. Crispin, being crassly ignorant of the anatomy and action of the human foot, has come to make it his great object to cripple it, and render it incapable of acting, in the fashion nature intended, as an instrument of locomotion. A moment’s consideration will show you that your foot is a piece of mechanism most wonderfully constructed for the work designed it. First, the heel and the toes are so connected by the arch of the instep as practically to give you four feet upon two legs. Of this advantage, by rendering your foot rigid, a tight boot to some extent deprives you. But we will let that pass, though the loss is by no means small. The great point is that nature intended that your foot, as you set it down, and it receives the weight of the body, should expand; and that when you rise upon it to take a step it should expand still further. All depends upon this power of expansion. To enable it to perform this function, it has been constructed of a multitude of bones and of muscles, the interplay of which should be quite free and unimpeded. But to prevent its expanding at all, your shoemaker puts it into a tight case with a narrow sole. It still, however, endeavours to do its work by making all the effort it can to expand. In this tight case it cannot expand. See, then, what ensues: the bones chafe the muscles; the foot swells. Practically the case is screwed up still tighter. The whole machine becomes internally tender and painful, and externally blistered, particularly between the outer toes, where the tight case has been more ignorantly and cruelly constructed than elsewhere. And now you cannot walk any further; and what you did was done with effort and pain. Naturally you become disgusted with walking.

There is a simple, instantaneous, and complete remedy. Measure the sole of the walking boots you have hitherto used, and insist on Crispin making you a pair with soles at least four-eighths, five would be better, wider than you have ever had before. Henceforth, so far from your feet swelling and getting heated by walking, they will, after twenty miles’ work, be both cooler and smaller than when you got out of bed in the morning. You will never have another blister. And as to the jar of walking, which affects the whole frame, now that your foot has become elastic instead of rigid, there will be none of that. The width also of the sole will of itself and alone, greatly contribute towards breaking the jar. Nature will thank you for having understood her. And you will thank nature for having taken so much pains to contrive and construct for you so marvellous a machine, if rightly treated, for pleasurable exercise.