Ski-runs in the High Alps

by F. F. Roget

It was a peculiar thing to pass from Arosa, still lying under six feet of snow, over the south brim of the cup and to swoop down upon Lenzerheide, while the steamy fog of incipient spring hung over the moving, thawing masses, and the man who had brought me up so far shrank back. There were cracklings round about and dull thuds. A roar and clang came up from the bottom of the gorge as the snowbanks crashed in upon the stream whose reawakening had soaked and eaten away their supports. Something had gone wrong with a ski-binding. Thus a kindly word may be spoken in time by the mountain fiend before he strikes. He plays fair. Go away, he says, unless you know that you have the luck of the Evil One. The brim of that snow cup was a parting line. One pair of ski carried its man back the way he had come. The other carried its man forward whither the spirit led.

I left Arosa with a pang of regret. I had lived there some perfectly happy and health-giving days in an abode reserved for so many who are sick beyond human help. I was alone, and went from table to table as a guest bidden to dinner. My hosts would, if I may apply this figure of speech to a moral attitude, seek me out for my strength, and I found, in the proximity of their illness, the shadow of our common human plight falling across my path, bringing with it a kind of excuse for my rude temporary immunity from physical ills in which in time we all share alike, but which seem to create such unfair contrasts.

Some were there, so to say, for a last throw of the dice in this Monte Carlo of consumptives. On the return of some to health depended the future of a home, wife, children, awaiting anxiously the physician’s verdict upon their chief, for whose cure the last moneys of the family were now being staked upon the double card, Arosa Davos.

A powerfully built Englishman, among others, I got to know. On the next day he was to be told whether he could go home or not. He was writing to his wife in the last hour of that day, about that hour of the next which would hail his return to life, duty, and love, or bring down upon his head another of those blows for which there is no other remedy than the infinite serenity of the children of God.

Then he came up to me, spoke of the impending interview and of all that was at stake.

I looked at him and said, “You are as sound as a bell.” The words were magnetic. They were posted to London that night, and the next day the happy father and husband, released by the professional man’s verdict, prepared to pack.

There are two tragedies that to my mind are particularly pathetic, both Alpine—that of the lung patient whom the Alpine sun cannot save, and that of the Alp worshipper in bounding health for whom the Alps have become as a car of Juggernaut.

I have seen dead, handsome young men, for whom the avalanche had woven a shroud of snow, and I have beheld wasted frames for whom the sun could not weave fresh physical tissues.

Of the Arosa scenes I carried a keen remembrance as I passed, safe and sure, from ice-cold slope to sun-baked slope, whether the northern blast froze my moustache, or the Ausonian breeze loosened the rigidity of the air into balmy wafts. But Arosa was not without its moments of fun. There was a parson there who gave me his Christian name to guess. It began with B, and that was to be the clue. But I suggested Bradshaw, Bradlaw, and Beelzebub before his obliging wife put me on the way to the right spelling, Bible.