“Those who travel first class and stop in the best hotels do not know the real Switzerland. It is in the third-class carriages and small inns that one sees the most characteristic types. Nothing is more enjoyable than to escape for ten days from conventionality and dress clothes, wandering, kit on one’s back, from club hut to club hut, and descending at rare intervals to remote recesses in winter-bound valleys.”
The conclusion of this is that neither of us could describe in strenuous language the lazy afternoon we spent on the upper fringe of the woods above Blatten and Ried. We had a quiet repast, smoked our pipes, or cigars—and watched the shadows creeping up the Loetschenlücke. Having heaps of time, we sailed down to Kippel, as merry as finches, piping like blackbirds, and as fresh as new-laid eggs. Would we have been in such a happy predicament if we had not been on narrow boards about six and a half feet long and half as many inches broad, of Norwegian origin, which were used primarily as a means of crossing deep snow, and have lately been adopted as an aid to winter mountaineering?
The hotel we landed at was quite an ordinary eating and sleeping house of the ugly type which too often disfigures Swiss villages. How is it that dwellers in the Alps who, when left to themselves, show such good taste in the plainness of their dwellings and in their primitive church architecture, are, when they build for townspeople, such utter strangers to the most spontaneous suggestions of the artistic instinct?
At table we chanced to have as neighbours three members of the Swiss Alpine Club, whose native language was the Germanic. They were on their way from the Grimsel and had just completed that section of our route upon which we were to enter on the morrow. We sat with them after dinner, and here fiery Achilles behaved most wisely. With high hopes he went quietly to bed at a reasonable hour. Then Ulysses, seeing his opportunity, thought he would like to unbend for a while. He sat up with the Swiss party and sacrificed to good fellowship a few hours of rest and the contents of a few fragile flagons.
As midnight came on, the moon suddenly peeped indiscreetly upon the carouse, showing through the casement a seductive vista of most beautifully slanting slopes round the foot of which roared the river Lonza. Cunning Ulysses, beside himself with a naughty idea, sent the empty bottles flying through the window. Immediately the blood of the young Swiss was up. They rose, strapped on their ski in a trice, and down they went along the slope to the bank of the Lonza. The bottles were by then floating on the swirl of the stream. But, in the case of each pursuer, a timely Christiania swing brought him round up the bank again. There was a swish, a spray of snow, and three young men were saved to fight again for their country.
On returning to the hotel, they and I found a jolly old villain in possession of the tap-room. He was in the early stages of inebriation. Seeing from the costumes of the party that he had to do with town-bred mountaineers only, he drew from the depths of his imagination the longest bow that was ever harboured by a genuine mountaineer in his armoury. With him the humour was transparent. But it is not always so, unfortunately. Some of the Swiss peasantry, brought into contact with the foreign clientèle, are in the habit of being so pampered by sentimental, gullible people that they quite overstep the bounds of any liberty that may be permissible in resenting such treatment.
On the whole, the winter life led in the high Swiss valleys is not altogether wholesome. When they are visited in summer, the people are seen in the busiest time and appear in the most favourable light. The domestic establishments of the hotels, and the few individuals who benefit from the presence of strangers, such as mule drivers, casual dealers in cut flowers, in carved bears and rock crystals, are merely parasitic and as temporary features in the landscape as those whose passage called them into being.
The evils inherent to winter seclusion are more serious. This old man was an example, for he could be seen there day after day, spending his time in idle talk and throwing into the till his earnings of last season.
But stop: is Ulysses acting up to his reputation for wariness in moralising at the present moment to a weaker brother’s detriment? Has he forgotten that on the next day, Monday, January 4th, the little company turned out into the night at six o’clock without him? Was it a fair excuse, that, on the eve, he had engaged Theodore Kalbermatten to carry his kit for him to the next hut?
Having once more sworn allegiance to his usual beverage, milk, the best friend of the young and the old, he marched out last, but in good order, to join the troop over which he held command. As the dawn broke he found them waiting for him before a church in the Upper Loetschenthal, built six hundred years ago. Arnold had time to examine it. He says:—