“Ah! A poor devil on the road,” breathed the other.
“Well, two it is,” growled the moving spirit.
I took two francs from my pocket and dropped them into the outstretched palm. The officer jingled the coins a moment, handed one to his companion, and pocketed the other with the air of a man who had well performed an unpleasant duty. His threatening scowl had vanished and a smile played on his lean face.
“Merci,” he said, dropping his shield into a side pocket and turning back to his hiding-place, “au revoir, monsieur!” And the small man, following close on his heels, turned to add, “Bon voyage, monsieur l’américain.”
I plodded on into the dusk, eating the high-priced grapes, and wondering just where the owner of the vineyard entered into the transaction.
Somewhere near the treacherous clump of bushes I passed the unmarked boundary between French and German Switzerland. Thus far the former tongue had reigned supreme, though pedestrians often greeted me with “Bon jour,” “Guten Tag.” But the voice of the street in Sierre, where I halted for the night, was overwhelmingly Teutonic, and the signs over hospitable doors no longer read “auberge,” but “Wirtschaft” and “Bierhalle.” There I lay late abed next morning, and once off, strolled leisurely along the fertile valley, for a bare twenty miles separated the town from Brieg, at the foot of the Simplon pass.
You who turn in each evening at the selfsame threshold, you who huddle in your niche among the cave-dwellers of great cities, you who race through foreign lands in car and carriage as if fearful of setting foot on an alien soil, can know nothing of the exhilaration that comes in tramping mile after mile of open country when life blooms forth in its prime on every hand. A single day afoot brings delight. Yet only he who looks day after day on an ever-changing scene, who passes on and ever on into the great Weltraum that stretches unendingly before him, can feel the full strength of the Wanderlust within. To stop seems an irreverence, to turn back a sacrilege. In these days of splendid transportation we lose much that our forefathers enjoyed. There is a sense of satisfaction akin to self-pride, a sense of real accomplishment that thrills the pedestrian who has attained a distant goal through his own unaided efforts, a satisfaction which the traveler by steam cannot experience.
The highway over the Simplon, constructed by Napoleon in 1805, is still, in spite of the encroachment of railways, a well-traveled route, though not by pedestrians. The good people of Brieg burst forth in wailing sympathy when I divulged my plan of crossing on foot. Traffic between the village and Domo d’Ossola in Piedmont has for generations been monopolized by a line of stage-coaches. There was more than the exhilaration of such a tramp, however, to awaken my revolt against this time-honored means of transportation, for the fare on one of these primitive bone-shakers ranged from forty to fifty francs.
With a vagrant’s lunch in my knapsack I left Brieg at dawn, for the first tramontane hamlet was thirty miles distant. Before the sun rose, the morning stage rattled by and the jeering of its drivers cheered me on. The highway showed nowhere a really steep grade, though it mounted seven thousand feet in twenty-three kilometers. With every turn of the route the panorama grew. Three hours up, Brieg still peeped out through the slender Tannenbäume, far below, yet almost directly beneath; and the vista extended far down the winding valley of the Rhône, back to the sentinel rocks of Sion and beyond. Across the chasm sturdy mountaineers scrambled from rock to boulder with their sheep and goats, as high as grew the hardiest sprig of vegetation. Far above the last shrub, ragged, barren peaks cut from the blue sky beyond figures of fantastic shape; peaks aglow with nature’s most lavish coloring, here one deep purple in the morning shade, there another, with basic tone of ruddy pink changed like watered silk under the reflection of the rays that gilded its summit.
Beyond the spot where Brieg was lost to view began the réfuges, roadside cottages in which the traveler, overcome by fatigue or the raging storms of winter, may seek shelter. In this summer season, however, they had degenerated one and all into dirty wine-shops where squalling children and stray goats wandered about among the tables. I peered in at one and inquired the price of a bottle of wine. A spidery female rose up to fleece me of my slender hoard and I beat a hasty retreat, thankful to have come prepared against the call of hunger, and content to drink the crystalline water of wayside streams.