Dear:—
During breakfast, we were discussing whether we could get through the snow to Mont St. Bernard. Some thought we could, and some thought not. So it goes here: we are gasping and sweltering one hour, and plunging through snow banks the next.
After breakfast, we entered the char-à-banc, a crab-like, sideway carriage, and were soon on our way. Our path was cut from the breast of the mountain, in a stifling gorge, where walls of rock on both sides served as double reflectors to concentrate the heat of the sun on our hapless heads. To be sure, there was a fine foaming stream at the bottom of the pass, and ever so much fine scenery, if we could have seen it; but our chars opened but one way, and that against the perpendicular rock, close enough, almost, to blister our faces; and the sun beat in so on our backs that we were obliged to have the curtain down. Thus we were as uncognizant of the scenery we passed through as if we had been nailed up in a box. Nothing but the consideration that we were travelling for pleasure could for a moment have reconciled us to such inconveniences. As it was, I occasionally called out to C., in the back carriage, to be sure and take good care of the fur coat; which always brought shouts of laughter from the whole party. The idea of a fur coat seemed so supremely ridiculous to us, there was no making us believe we ever should or could want it.
That was the most unpleasant day's ride I had in the Alps. We stopped to take dinner in the little wretched village of Liddes. You have no idea what a disagreeable, unsavory concern one of these villages is. Houses, none of which look much better than the log barns in our Western States, set close together on either side of a street paved with round stones; coarse, sunburnt women, with their necks enlarged by the goitre; and dirty children, with tangled hair, and the same disgusting disease,—these were the principal features of the scene.
This goitre prevails so extensively in this region, that you seldom see a person with the neck in a healthy condition. The worst of the matter is, that in many cases of children it induces idiocy. Cases of this kind were so frequent, that, after a while, whenever I met a child, I began to search in its face for indications of the approach of this disease.
They are called cretins. In many cases the whole head appears swelled and deformed. As usual, every one you look at puts out the hand to beg. The tavern where we stopped to dine seemed more like a great barn, or cavern, than any thing else. We go groping along perfectly dark stone passages, stumbling up a stone staircase, and gaining light only when the door of a kind of reception room opens upon us—a long, rough-looking room, without any carpet, furnished with a table, and some chairs, and a rude sofa. We were shown to a bed room, carpetless, but tolerably clean, with a very high feather bed in each corner, under a canopy of white curtains.
After dinner we went on towards St. Pierre, a miserable hamlet, where the mules were taken out of the chars, and we prepared to mount them.
It was between three and four o'clock. Our path lay up a desolate mountain gorge. After we had ascended some way the cold became intense. The mountain torrent, by the side of which we went up, leaped and tumbled under ribs of ice, and through banks of snow.
I noticed on either side of the defile that there were high posts put up on the rocks, and a cord stretched from one to the other. The object of these, my guide told me, was to show the path, when this whole ravine is filled up with deep snow.
I could not help thinking how horrible it must be to go up here in the winter.