My guide looked up benevolently at me, as if he felt it his duty to quiet my fears, and said in a soothing tone, "O, no, no, no!"
Of course, I might have known that little children have their angels there, as well as every where else. "When they have funerals there," said he, "they are obliged to carry the dead along that road," pointing to a road that resembled a thread drawn on the rocky wall.
What a strange idea—such a life and death! It seemed to me, that I could see a funeral train creeping along; the monks, with their black cloaks, carrying tapers, and singing psalms; the whole procession together not larger in proportion than a swarm of black gnats; and yet, perhaps, hearts there wrung with an infinite sorrow. In that black, moving point, may be a soul, whose convulsions and agonies cannot be measured or counted by any thing human, so impossible is it to measure souls by space.
What can they think of, these creatures, who are born in this strange place, half way between heaven and earth, to whom the sound of avalanches is a cradle hymn, and who can never see the sun above the top of the cliff on either side, till he really gets into the zenith?
What they can be thinking of I cannot tell. Life, I suppose, is made up of the same prosaic material there that it is every where. The mother thinks how she shall make her goat's milk and black bread hold out. The grandmother knits stockings, and runs out to see if Jaques or Pierre have not tumbled over the precipice. Jaques and Pierre, in return, tangle grandmother's yarn, upset mother's milk bucket, pull the goat's beard, tear their clothes to pieces on the bushes and rocks, and, in short, commit incredible abominations daily, just as children do every where.
In the night how curiously this little nest of houses must look, lighted up, winking and blinking at the solitary traveller, like some mysterious eyes looking out of a great eternity! There they all are fast asleep, Pierre, and Jaques, and grandmother, and the goats. In the night they hear a tremendous noise, as if all nature was going to pieces; they half wake, open one eye, say, "Nothing but an avalanche!" and go to sleep again.
This road, through the pass of the Tête Noir, used to be dangerous; a very narrow bridle-path, undefended by any screen whatever. To have passed it in those old days would have had too much of the sublime to be quite agreeable to me. The road, as it is, is wide enough, I should think, for three mules to go abreast, and a tunnel has been blasted through what seemed the most difficult and dangerous point, and a little beyond this tunnel is the Hotel de la Couronne.
If any body wanted to stop in the wildest and lonesomest place he could find in the Alps, so as to be saturated with a sense of savageness and desolation, I would recommend this hotel. The chambers are reasonably comfortable, and the beds of a good quality—a point which S. and I tested experimentally soon after our arrival. I thought I should like to stay there a week, to be left there alone with Nature, and see what she would have to say to me.
But two or three hours' ride in the hot sun, on a mule's back, indisposes one to make much of the grandest scenes, insomuch that we were glad to go to sleep; and on awaking we were glad to get some dinner, such as it was.
Well, after our dinner, which consisted of a dish of fried potatoes and some fossiliferous bread, such as prevails here at the small hotels in Switzerland, we proceeded onward. After an intolerably hot ride for half an hour we began to ascend a mountain called the Forclaz.