THE GLACIÈRE OF MONTHÉZY, IN THE VAL DE TRAVERS.
I rejoined my sisters at Neufchâtel on the 5th of July, and proceeded thence with them by the line which passes through the Val de Travers. One of them had been at Fleurier, in 1860, on the day of the opening of this line, and she added an interest to the various tunnels, by telling us that a Swiss gentleman of her acquaintance, who had taken a place in one of the open carriages of the first train, found, on reaching the daylight after one of the tunnels, that his neighbour had been killed by a small stone which had fallen on to his head. Where the stone came from, no one could say, nor yet when it fell, for the unfortunate man had made no sign or movement of any kind.
Every one must be delighted with the wonders of the line of rail, and the beauties through which the engineer has cut his way. In valleys on a less magnificent scale, cuttings and embankments on the face of the hill are sad eyesores, as in railway-ruined Killiecrankie; but here Nature's works are so very grand, that the works of man are not offensively prominent, being overawed by the very facts over which they have triumphed. When we reached the more even part of the valley, where the Reuse no longer roars and rushes far below, but winds quietly through the soft grass on a level with the rail, the whole grouping was so exceedingly charming, and the river itself so suggestive of lusty trout, and the village of Noiraigue[[48]] looked so tempting as it nestled in a sheltered nook among the headlong precipices, that I registered in a safe mental pigeon-hole a week at the auberge there with a fishing-rod, and excursions to the commanding summit in which the Creux de Vent is found. The engine-driver knew that he was in a region of beauties, and, when he whistled to warn his passengers that the train was about to move on, he remained stationary until the long-resounding echoes died out, floating lingeringly up the valley to neighbouring France.
We had no definite idea as to the locale of the glacière we were now bent upon attacking. M. Thury's list gave the following information:--'Glacière de Motiers, Canton de Neufchâtel, entre les vallées de Travers et de la Brévine, près du sentier de la Brévine;' and this I had rendered somewhat more precise by a cross-examination of the guard of the train on my way to Besançon. He had not heard of the glacière, but from what I told him he was inclined to think that Couvet would be the best station for our purpose, especially as the 'Ecu' at that place was, in his eyes, a commendable hostelry. Some one in Geneva, also, had believed that Couvet was as likely as anything else in the valley; so at Couvet we descended.[[49]]
This is a very clean and cheerful village, devoted to the lucrative manufacture of absinthe, and producing inhabitants who look like gentlemen and ladies, and promenade the ways in bonnets and hats, after a most un-Swiss-like fashion. They carefully restrict themselves to the making of the poisonous product of their village, and have nothing to do with the consumption thereof:[[50]] hence nature has a fair chance with them, and they are a healthy and energetic race. The beauties of the surrounding mountains, with their fitful alternations of pasture and wood, and grey face of rock, are not marred by the outward appearance, at least, of that which Bishop Heber lamented in a country where 'every prospect pleases.' An old lady is commemorated in the annals of Couvet as an example of the healthiness of the situation, who saw seven generations of her family, having known her great-grandfather in her early years, and living to nurse great-grandchildren in her old age. The landlord of the inn informed us, with much pride, that Couvet was the birthplace of the man who invented a clock for telling the time at sea; by which, no doubt, he meant the chronometer, invented by M. Berthoud. At Motiers, the next village, Rousseau wrote his Lettres de la Montagne, and thence it was that he fled from popular violence to the island on the Lake of Bienne.
The 'Ecu' promised us dinner in half an hour, and we strolled about in the garden of that unsophisticated hotel for an hour and a half, reconciled to the delay by the beauty of the neighbouring hills, the winding of the valley giving all the effect of a mountain-locked plain, with barriers decked with firs. It will readily be conceived, however, that three practical English people could not be satisfied to feed on beauty alone for any very great length of time, and we caught the landlady and became peremptory. She explained that dinner was quite ready, but she had intended to give us the pleasure of an agreeable society, consisting of sundry Swiss who were due in another half-hour or so: she yielded, nevertheless, to our representations, and promised to serve the meal at once. We were speedily summoned to the salle-à-manger, and entered a low smoke-stained wooden chamber, with no floor to speak of, and with huge beams supporting the roof, dangerous for tall heads. The date on the door was 1690, and the chamber fully looked its age. There was a long table of the prevailing hue, with a similar bench; and on the table three large basins, presumably containing soup, were ranged, each covered with its plate, and accompanied by a ricketty spoon of yellow metal and a hunch of black bread. A., who was hungry enough and experienced enough to have known better, began promptly a most pathetic 'Why surely!' but the landlady stopped her by opening a side door, and displaying a comfortable room in which a well-appointed table awaited us:--she had taken us through the kitchen rather than through the salon, in which were peasants smoking. We were somewhat disconcerted when we heard that the unwashed-looking place was the kitchen; but the landlady had made up for it by scrubbing her husband, who waited upon us, to a high pitch of presentability, and further experience showed that the 'Ecu' is to be highly commended for the excellence and abundance and cheapness of its foods.
There are many natural curiosities in and near the Val de Travers, which well repay the labour that must be expended upon them. The Temple des Fées, on the western side of the Valley of Verrières, used to be called the most beautiful grotto in Switzerland; and the great Cavern of La Baume, near Motiers, is said to be exceedingly wonderful. We were shown the entrance to a line of caverns in the hills above Couvet, and were informed that it was possible to pierce completely through the range, and pass out at the other side within sight of Yverdun. One of the caverns in this valley had been explored by some of A. and M.'s Swiss friends, and the account of what they had gone through was by no means inviting, seeing that the prevailing material was damp clay of a solid character, arranged in steep slopes, up which progression must be made by inserting the fingers and toes as far as might be into the clay; and, of course, when the handful of unpleasant mud came away, the result was the reverse of progression. To anyone who has only known the rope up the pure white side of some snow mountain, the idea of being roped for the purpose of grappling with underground banks of adhesive mud and clay must be horrible in the extreme. Another interesting natural phenomenon is presented by the source of the Reuse, that river gushing out from the rock in considerable volume, probably formed by the drainage of the Lake of Etallières, in the distant valley of La Brévine; while the Longe-aigue, on the contrary, is lost in a gulf of such horror that the people call the mill which stands on its edge the Moulin d'enfer.
As usual, we were assured that many of these remarkable sights were far better worth a visit than the glacière, of which no one seemed to know anything. A guide was at length secured for the next morning, who had made his way to the cave once in the winter-time and had been unable to enter it, and we settled down quietly to an evening of perfect rest. The windows of the bedrooms being guiltless of blinds and curtains, the effect of waking, in the early morning, to find them blocked up, as it were, by the green slopes of pasture and the dark bands of fir-woods which clothed the limiting hills, seemed almost magical, the foreground being occupied solely by the graceful curve of the dome of the church-tower, glittering with intercepted rays, and forming a bright omen for the day thus ushered in.
In due time the promised guide appeared, a sickly boy of unprepossessing appearance, and of patois to correspond. I was at first tempted to propose that we should attack him stereoscopically, A. administering French and I simultaneous German, in the hope that the combination might convey some meaning to him; but, after a time, we succeeded with French alone. Perhaps Latin would have made a more likely mélange than German, and to give it him in three dimensions would not have been a bad plan. The route for the glacière runs straight up the face of the hill along which the railway has been constructed; and as we passed through woods of beech and fir, with fresh green glades rolling down below our feet, or emerged from the woods to cross large undulating expanses of meadow-land, we were almost inclined to believe that we had never done so lovely a walk. The scenery through which we passed was thoroughly that of the lower districts of the Alps, with nothing Jurane in its character, and the elevation finally achieved was not very great: indeed, at a short distance from the glacière, we passed a collection of very neat châlets, with gardens and garden-flowers, one of the châlets rejoicing in countless beehives, with three or four 'ekes' apiece. Up to the time of reaching this little village, which seemed to be called Sagnette, our path had been that which leads to La Brévine, the highest valley in the canton; but now we turned off abruptly up the steeper face on the left hand, and in a very few minutes came upon a dry wilderness of rock and grass, which we at once recognised as 'glacière country;' and when I told our guide that we must be near the place, he replied by pointing to the trees round the mouth of the pit.
Shortly after we first left Couvet, a gaunt elderly female, with a one-bullock char, had joined our party, and tried to bully us into giving up the cave and going instead to a neighbouring summit, whence she promised us a view of unrivalled extent and beauty. She told us that there was nothing to be seen in the glacière, and that it was a place where people lost their lives. The guide said that was nonsense; but she reduced him to silence by quoting a case in point. She said, too, that if a man slipped and fell, there was nothing to prevent him from going helplessly down a run of ice into a subterranean watercourse, which would carry him for two or three leagues underground; and on this head our boy had no counter-statement to make. She asserted that without ladders it was utterly impossible to make the descent to the commencement of the glacière; and she vowed there was no ladder now, nor had been for some time. Here the boy came in, stating that the cave belonged to a mademoiselle of Neufchâtel, who had a summer cottage at no great distance, and loved to be supplied with ice during her residence in the country, for which purpose she kept a sound ladder on the spot, and had it removed in the winter that it might not be destroyed. There was a circumstantial air about this statement which for the moment got the better of the old woman; but she speedily recovered herself, and repeated positively that there was no ladder of any description, adding, somewhat inconsequently, that it was such a bad one, no Christian could use it with safety. The boy retorted, that it was all very well for her to run the glacière down, as she lived near it, but for the world from a distance it was a most wonderful sight; and, as for the ladder, he happened to know that it was at this time in excellent preservation. The event proved that in saying this he drew entirely upon his imagination. It is, perhaps, only fair to suppose that they don't mean anything by it, and it may be mere ignorance on their part; but the simple fact is, that some of those Swiss rustics tell the most barefaced lies conceivable,--unblushing is an epithet that cannot be safely applied without previous soap and water,--and tell them in a plodding systematic manner which takes in all but the experienced and wary traveller. I have myself learned to suspend my judgment regarding the most simple thing in nature, until I have other grounds for forming an opinion than the solemn asseverations of the most stolid and respectable Swiss, if it so be that money depends upon his report.[[51]]