The sheet 482 of the topographical atlas of Switzerland assigns the name of Vermala to the mayens in Canton Valais, situated above Sierre, at an altitude of 4,500 feet or thereabouts. Swiss mayens are places where grass is grown that can be mown and on which cattle is grazed in autumn.
About 600 feet higher there is in the forest a clearing, with a south-west exposure, in which the Mont Blanc range, framed in fir-trees, presents itself in the distance to the appreciative eye as a beautiful background to a picture of loveliness. If the bareness of the map is to be trusted, this spot was not yet inhabited in 1884 when the topographical survey was made.
The map is right, and yet it is not quite right. There were at that time no ordinary dwelling-houses in the clearing, but people of ordinary mind held that the Ski-runner of Vermala, whose presence on the country-side was at that time exactly known, had his home somewhere in those parts.
From afar curious people would point out a rocky platform planted with beautiful, well-spaced firs amongst which it would be pleasant to bask in the sun in winter. But others were rather taken up with the peculiar apparitions which at night were seen there skimming the rocks in a sinister play of light. The map marks the place with a broken line, between Vermala and Marolire, right above Praz-Devant.
It was said that in earlier times the mowers piled up their hay at the top of the clearing in one or two mazots, or rough barns, set on short posts, four in number, planted in the ground and crowned with flat stone disks. But that hay had an unwelcome way of catching fire, consuming the mazots as well. Nothing was left but the stones. So the peasantry gave up this unlucky storage ground.
At present no other mystery hovers about this spot than that which these recollections call back to mind. The Forest Hotel occupies the site. The sun holds divided sway in summer with the coolness of the woods, in winter with King Frost. Here conventional tourists embrace at a glance the most marvellous piece of Alpine scenery—from Monte Leone and beyond, to Mont Blanc—that human eye can long for, such, that had Byron known of it, he would have sent his world-sick Manfred to contemplate it from Vermala.
The sweetness of this name would have rung as true to the poet’s ear as, in the Italo-Celtic tongue, it rings to the ear of the rough mountaineer. Would you not, for a while, when reading on the map names of such romantic harmony, forget that they are mere geographical terms? Let us personify those place names. Do not Vermala and Marolire spell out as tunefully as the classically tender and melodious Daphnis and Chloe?
But then there might be a risk of forgetting that there is not a halfpenny worth of love in this story. It is a homespun yarn, woven by rustics in ignorance and fear, and would fall very flat on the ears of civilised mankind, but for the curiosity roused by that consummate sportsman whose humours shine through the woof of the story.
Whence did he come? Who was he? Nobody ever knew.
He had already disappeared from the country when a more enlightened generation ceased to look upon him as a true ghost. There arose a class of minds which ran to the opposite extreme and held him to be a superman of the morrow. In the end he was described as the Ski-runner of Vermala, when some acquaintance with the new implements called back popular imagination within the bounds of reason. Then the glamour that had gathered around his memory at last faded away.