“In the hotel, brilliant with many electric lights, we are sitting at a table with our friend, the guide Grass, and some welcome bottles of wine. Stäubli, the pink of neatness, is giving the guide a long account of our trip. Around us the usual set of well-dressed people laugh and talk. For them it is like every other evening; for myself, I find it difficult to realise that all I have seen and felt is not a dream. A glow of happiness fills my heart that not all these lights could surpass, and the wish comes to shut out all around and rest once more in those glorious solitudes. What a gulf seems to separate me from those who have not seen the wondrous mountains, those who have not shared our vision of the silent snows!
“Life is made up of contrasts, and I take pleasure in recalling them to my mind in order to perpetuate their memory.”
Strange it is, on reading over those lines written by Marcel Kurz, to have to add that the idea of the Piz Bernina ski circuit did not germinate in a Pontresina mind. Forsooth it was reserved for the Swiss to conceive and execute. But how strange is that apathy, that subjection to routine on the part of an otherwise bold and enterprising people! And how strange too that out of the number of foreign sportsmen congregating every winter in the Engadine, not one could brace himself to “get up and go” from Pontresina to the Bernina hospice, thence to the refuge Marinelli, thence to the Tschierva hut and back to Pontresina, in three days, if he so pleased!
CHAPTER X
FROM AROSA TO BELLINZONA OVER THE BERNARDINO PASS
The Arosa Information Bureau—The hospitality of sanatorium guests—The allurements of loneliness—Whither the spirit leads—Avalanche weather—The Spring god and King Frost—The source of the Rhine—The post sleigh in a winter storm—The Bernardino pass—Brissago.
