THE BIRTH-PLACE OF AVALANCHES.
MOUNTAIN MULES.
One singular experience of Alpine travel is indelibly impressed upon my memory. It occurred on my passage of the Gemmi into the valley of the Rhone. The Gemmi Pass is no magnificent highway like the St. Gotthard, macadamized and smooth and carefully walled in by parapets of stone. It is for miles a rough and dangerous bridle-path, the edge of which is sometimes decorated with a flimsy rail, but often has not even that apology for safety. One can thus readily believe that, like the Jordan, the Gemmi is emphatically "a hard road to travel." At all events I found it so, especially as I crossed it early in the season, before the winter's ravages had been repaired. Since I was at the time suffering from a temporary lameness, I could walk but little. With this road dates my first acquaintance with a mule,—an intimacy that will never be forgotten! All day long that memorable beast would never for one instant change his gait, nor was the monotony of his dreadful walk once broken by a trot. My only consolation was in the thought that if the beast did change it, my neck, as well as the monotony, would probably be broken. Thus, hour after hour, I kept moving on and up, my knees forced wide apart by this great, lumbering wedge, until I felt like a colossal wish-bone, and as though I should be bow-legged for the rest of my life.
A FRAIL PARAPET.
Nor was this all; for, as the day wore on, the mule took special pains to make my blood run cold by a variety of acrobatic feats, which might have made a chamois faint with vertigo. For example, wherever a rail was lacking in the crazy fence, he would deliberately fill the space with his own body and mine, walking so dangerously near the brink, that half my form would be suspended over the abyss! Of course, the moment it was passed, I laughed or scolded, as most travelers do; yet, after all, in such cases we never know how great the peril may have been. A little stone, a clod of earth, a movement in the nick of time—these are sometimes the only things which lie between one and the great Unknown, and hinder one from prematurely solving the mysterious problem of existence.