Dagonet Abroad

by George R. Sims

It was at this point that the road had recently broken away. While we were standing and hesitating before we stepped upon the ledge, a lad came up behind whistling, and with his hands in his pockets stepped boldly upon the broken path, skipped over some bits of rock which had fallen upon it, and was presently safe round the terrible jut and on the broader and sounder pathway that led direct to Mergoscia.

That was enough for us. Steadying ourselves and clenching our teeth, we stepped forward. It was a very bad minute as we nervously crossed the jut. We dared not look down the face of the rock, or think what lay below us. But we arrived safely on the other side, and then we paused to take breath, and we confessed to each other that we wouldn’t do it again for a thousand pounds.

The village of Mergoscia stands at a dizzy height on the side of a sheer precipice. Looking back at the road by which we had reached it, it seemed impossible that anyone but an acrobat could traverse it. It was afterwards explained to us that the road was about to be repaired, that half of it had recently fallen away, and that while it was in its present condition the general way of approaching Mergoscia was from the opposite side of the gorge. That night, after I fell asleep, that awful path to Mergoscia came back to me in my dreams, and I woke up just as I was falling into the abyss below. The walk is described in a guide-book as ‘one of the most sublimely grand and romantic on the Alps.’ Romantic it certainly was, but besides the romance there was just a little too much reality about it to make it an unmixed pleasure.

There is a town on Lake Maggiore where all the cooks come from. It is called Brisago. The first person Columbus met when he discovered America was a cook from Brisago, which brings me to another of Albert Edward’s jokes. He was talking to Lord Mayor Monico and the Right Hon. S. Gatti at Dongio, and he said: ‘Ah, if William Tell had been a Ticinese, do you know what he would have done with the apple after he had shot it?’ ‘No,’ said Lord Mayor Monico, ‘I don’t.’ ‘He would have made it into an apple dumpling, and opened a restaurant with it,’ replied A. E. And everybody laughed so heartily that several avalanches fell in the neighbourhood.

There is one thing which cannot fail to strike the close observer of Swiss contemporary history, and that is the extraordinary contempt which the rival political parties have for each other. The Radical and the Conservative members of the Council never associate in private or in public life. They won’t even sit at the same café, they won’t put up at the same hotel, they won’t walk on the same side of the street.

And oh, the dreadful things they say of each other! The Conservatives assure me that the Radicals would not hesitate to set fire to Switzerland, or to blow it up with dynamite upon the slightest provocation. The Radicals tell me that the Conservatives are ruining the country; that they want to make the people slaves, and divide Switzerland among themselves. It is a sight to see a Radical and a Conservative meet accidentally. The scowl is a thing to remember for a lifetime. You can almost see them arch their backs at each other like rival tomcats, and you are quite astonished when they don’t spit. There is no place in the world where political antagonism becomes such real and personal antagonism as in the land of the gentleman who immortalized the apple trick.

One fine day we went over on a specially-conducted expedition to the Val Gatti—the beautiful and romantic valley, some four or five miles from Biasca, from which the celebrated brothers came forth many years ago to conquer London. Our expedition was almost a royal progress. In Bellinzona we were entertained by Mr. Stephen, M.P. for Switzerland, at a sumptuous breakfast, at the fifteenth course of which Albert Edward broke down, and shed tears because he couldn’t eat any more; then we all adjourned to the Presidential Palace, where we had cigars with the Government; and then it came on to thunder and to lighten and to hail, and presently—note this, for it is a remarkable fact—it became so pitch dark that we had to light lamps in order to see each other—and this was between twelve and one o’clock in the day. When in glorious Switzerland in the middle of May I saw the gas and the lamps and the candles alight in all the shops and houses at noon, I felt that I owed some slight apology to London for the unkind things I have sometimes said about it.

By one o’clock, however, the storm was over and gone, and the sun shone out, and then we took train for Biasca. At Biasca we alighted, and found a carriage and four horses, and postilions in magnificent uniforms, waiting to take us over the marvellous four miles of mountain road that lead to Dongio, the beautiful spot in the Val de Blenio in which the Palazzo Gatti is situated.

It is impossible for me to describe that drive. My adjectives would not hold out, and my neck is still aching with the twisting I gave it while endeavouring to gaze up at the kaiser crags and monarch mountains that stand like solemn sentinels guarding the glorious Gatti valley. The drive was spirit-stirring and sublime, and the face of Stephen, M.P., positively beamed as he saw how much we were impressed with the glory of his mountain home. We only had one or two trifling accidents by the way. Once the postilions took a road that the M.P. didn’t wish them to go ‘for fear of our nerves,’ and, in endeavouring to turn round on a wooden bridge across a torrent, they came so near landing us all upside down that the author of a hundred melodramas jumped out for his life. Unfortunately, he hopped out of the frying pan into the fire. Our carriage righted itself; but he jumped badly, and fell on his nose, and his hat went over into the roaring torrent, and the big waves banged it merrily against the rocks, and the last he saw of it it was going down the valley at the rate of fifty miles an hour.

Avalanches fall occasionally in the Val Gatti, and sides of mountains come down without being invited to do so by the inhabitants. I must confess that every now and then, as we dashed along a narrow road, with a yawning abyss below us and about a couple of billion tons of overhanging rock above us, and it began to look like thunderstorms on the weather quarter, I began to think that an Alpine life has its bad quarters of an hour. But we arrived safely at last at Dongio, and, when we reined our reeking steeds up in front of the Palazzo Gatti, and a deputation of Dongio maidens came and presented us with bouquets of mountain flowers, we felt that we had not risked our precious lives in vain.