The Lake of Geneva

by Joseph E. Morris

but to sail on a sunny day on the waters of Lake Leman is to sail on the perfect blue of heaven itself.

This exquisite phenomenon then, which has been compared with the tender, suffused blue that is seen when looking down into the depths of a crevasse, has never been accounted for, though theories are not lacking in profusion. And not only is this nascent river the most beautifully coloured and transparent thing on earth—every pebble at the bottom is visible through I dare not guess how many feet of depth—but its surface is also the most lustrous in the world. Even at night, when the moonlight glances on its water, or at least the electric lights on the promenade and bridges, this quality of lustre, and to some extent of colour, still remains proudly visible, when other rivers, if still lustrous, would be black. In daylight, too, this bridge is a pleasant spot to linger on, not merely for joy of the crystal depths below, but for joy of the scene above. Nowhere, I think, is Geneva seen to better purpose than hence: to the left the towers of its ancient Cathedral, high on their crowded hill above the stream; in the centre, the Ile-de-Rousseau, with its picturesque clump of trees; and to the right, above more old houses, the long blue wall of Jura, lofty enough and abrupt enough wholly to hold the eye, till, turning with an effort, we cease to sigh for Jura, because there, though at greater distance, are the altogether more dazzling splendours of the Alps.

Next to the ex-Cathedral the best object of artificial attraction in Geneva is undoubtedly the new Museum of Art and History. Few provincial collections exceed, or even rival, it in the interest of their specimens or their excellence of arrangement. Here, in addition to the remains of glass and wood-work, already mentioned, from St. Pierre, are several relics—ladders, helmets, a banner, etc.—of that famous Escalade by which the Duke of Savoy—always an uneasy neighbour to Geneva—attempted to take the city by stealth, and did in fact nearly succeed in taking it, during the night of December 11-12, 1602. Calvin had been already nearly forty years dead (in 1564), but his old friend and disciple, Theodore Beza, in whose arms he had expired, and who, like Calvin himself, was by birth a Frenchman, was still living in Geneva, though then eighty-three years old; and it was Beza who gave out the next day, in public thanksgiving in church, the one-hundred-and-twenty-fourth Psalm ("If the Lord Himself had not been on our side") that is said ever afterwards to have been sung on the anniversary of the Escalade. Stored with these relics in the basement are some important specimens of thirteenth-century glass, or even earlier. But perhaps the chief value of the museum is to be found in the cases upstairs, with examples, bronze and iron, of the pre-historic ages. Here, in addition to the usual celts, daggers, spear-heads, etc., that one finds in all collections of the sort, is a really wonderful assemblage of bronze bracelets, pins, knives, and razors from lake villages; whilst the Iron Age is represented by tridents, shears, safety-pins with spiral springs, choppers with hooked points, and reaping-hooks, many of which exactly resemble those still in use at the present day: the persistence of shape is really marvellous. Here too are long, deadly pins, with big bead heads, precisely like those that women still stick through their hats to-day, though the world is more than two thousand years older. Here too are human tibia bones, each with its four bronze anklets still in situ, and here is one end of a "dug-out" canoe that was found in the lake, at Morges, in 1878. Some museums of this sort are distinctly dismal; but this at Geneva is so rich in this particular direction, and so admirably marshalled, that even those who are little interested in origins will not regret an hour's loss of sunshine on lake and hill.

SUNSET ON MONT BLANC, FROM ABOVE GENEVA.

II.

I suppose one is justified, or even compelled, in writing even a short sketch, such as this, of Geneva and its lake, to say something of the valleys that penetrate southward from its basin into the mountain highlands of Savoy. The man is to be pitied who can gaze at the distant snows of Mont Blanc, or the Aiguille-du-Midi, from the quays at Geneva, yet is stirred by no violent passion to view them at closer quarters: who can linger by the junction of blue Rhone and turbid Avre, where the streams for a space flow parallel, but do not consent to mix, yet experiences no impulse to track up the Avre itself to its majestic source, where it issues in volume and thunder ("magno cum murmure montis") from the foot of the Mer-de-Glace. Few writers, in short, on Geneva fail to conduct their readers to the bleak upland vale of Chamonix; where they may worship "at the temple's inner shrine" what they have worshipped so long at a distance, in the Galilee, or vestibule. I do not, however, propose to expend a deal of space in dealing with the usual line of approach to Chamonix by way of Bonneville and the Baths of St. Gervais, or even on Chamonix itself. Nearly thirty years ago, when I first travelled between the two towns, but in the reverse direction, it was necessary to drive by diligence the whole distance between Geneva and Chamonix: now the journey that took formerly a whole long summer day is easily effected in a few short hours, and the old, leisurely, unrestricted view from the coupé of the diligence is bartered away for a series of flying glimpses—and hardly that, if the compartment is full—framed for half a minute, and lost before fairly realized; seen, like the film of a cinematograph, amid surroundings equally stifling and dull. From St. Gervais, it is true, where the ordinary railway terminates and the electric line begins, you may stand, if you like, on the open platform at the end of the little carriage, and marvel thence, as you mount steeply, at the depth of the wooded gorge below you, and at the fierce waters of the Avre, and look back at the bare, brown, limestone precipices of the colossal Tête-à-l'Ane, or forward to the more colossal snow-peaks that tower and still tower above you in ever-increasing splendour, till you climb at last to the bare strath of the cold, upland valley that was once the monastic Campus Munitus, and are shocked perhaps by the vulgarity and hopeless anti-climax of modern Chamonix itself. Chamonix, indeed, though emphatically no longer a mountain village, is picturesque enough inside in the picturesque French fashion, regarded, as it ought to be, as a mountain "ville-de-plaisir"—as Luchon, for instance, is picturesque in the Pyrenees, or as Mont Dore, among the highlands of Auvergne. Visit the place in spring, when winter-sports are over, and the tide of summer tourists has not yet commenced to flow, or visit it in autumn, when the tide has fairly ebbed, and you may still catch something of the solemn inspiration that filled the soul of Coleridge when he wrote his great "Hymn to Mont Blanc." At other times, I confess, the swarms of well-dressed idlers—they infest the paths to the Flegère, or Montanvert, like droves of human ants, and overflow in aimless wandering the unfenced, communal fields—are hardly less an annoyance than Wordsworth found the ragged children who tried to sell him pebbles when he landed on Iona. The Baths of St. Gervais, moreover, at the bottom of the hill—not the picturesque old village on the slopes above the Bon Nant—have been spoilt of recent years by one of those vast electric "usines" that form so vile a menace to the beauty of the Alps. The strath of this lower valley, from the gorge of Cluses, past Sallanches, to Chedde, can never have been distinguished for its charm. It is one of those lower Alpine valleys that are absolutely flat-bottomed—they look like dried-up marsh—and that are dusty and coarse in all their features, whether natural or due to man: dusty and coarse in their long, straight, unfenced roads; dusty and coarse in their wastes of tumbled boulders; dusty and coarse in their jungle of stunted scrub; in their straggling cottages, and untidy saw-mills; in the very flowers, parched and sun-dried, that survive by the side of their dull, dry roads. They are bordered, of course, by noble hills; but even these look monotonous and garish when seen across a foreground so ragged and entirely flat. Compared with the green valleys of the higher Alps, where the emerald pastures fall in soft curves to the exact level of the stream, and where every scrap of detail is fresh with moss or flower, these hot and arid vales are like the blazing hours of noon, with its pitiless lack of shade, in contrast with the long soft shadows of evening, or the dewy freshness of early morn.

Now for all these reasons—the presence of the railway, the electric works at Chedde and St. Gervais, and the dullness of the actual bottom of the valley between St. Gervais and the "gate of the hills" at Cluses—one would scarcely choose to travel by this orthodox route from Geneva up to Chamonix—though fine enough in places, and almost everywhere full of interest—provided one were offered a prettier alternative, and one not otherwise too heavily handicapped in point of greater distance or fatigue. Such a route, in fact, there is, though for pedestrian, or horseman, only, which, beautiful throughout, attains supreme and final excellence in the section that lies beyond Sixt. Probably very few tourists of the annual thousands who visit Chamonix are ever sufficiently adventurous to shoulder pack, or rucksack, and thus desert the broad valley of the Avre, with its rather obvious graces, for the shy and retiring loveliness of the valley of the Giffre. The steam-tramway along the road may, I think, legitimately be taken as far as Samoëns, where it ends; for it is at Samoëns that the interest of the walk begins. Sixt, beyond Samoëns, is a charming old village, at the junction of two wild Alpine streams that descend respectively from the Buet (10,201 feet) and the Pointe de Tanneverge (9,784 feet). Here in the Middle Ages was a small Augustinian abbey, the domestic buildings of which are now utilized for a simple, but clean, hotel, and the chapel of which is now the parish church. The dining-room is the old refectory; and painted round the wall-plate of its wooden ceiling may still be read its history: "... hoc opus fecit fieri Hubit' de Mon XI Abbas de Six Ano. Dni. MDCXXII. Deus converset. I.H.S. Maria."

From Sixt we ascend through forest by the side of the rushing stream, through a landscape that is enlivened with as many splashing waterfalls as greeted Ulysses and his companions with their music when they came to the afternoon land of the Lotos Eaters. A little below the Eagle's Nest, the pleasant summer home of the late Mr. Justice Wills, the forest virtually ceases, and the road ends altogether; and thenceforward on to Chamonix we have only a mountain track, or mule-path, which mounts at first abruptly by a series of sudden zig-zags, but afterwards for an interval keeps a leveller upland route across wild and desolate pastures that lie round the big mountain tarn known as the Lac d'Anterne, beyond which rise in superlative grandeur, for more than two thousand feet, the giddy, sheer rock precipices of the strangely named Tête-à-l'Ane. All this is very splendid, and every inch of going pleasant; but I have brought you all this distance for a single point of view that bursts suddenly into vision, without warning or preparation. Suddenly, as perhaps you are getting a little tired, or finding the landscape a trifle monotonous, literally almost a single step brings you to a little break in the ridge of the opposite hill, whence the whole majestic chain of Mont Blanc—not only the monarch himself, but his whole range of attendant satellites and regally shattered aiguilles, from the Aiguille du Tour, on the left, to the Aiguille du Gouter, on the right—leaps splendidly into view—such a vision of splintered crags, and snows of dazzling, unsullied purity, and dark hollows of sullen glacier, and plinth of green pasture and forest, as certainly you will not find anywhere else in the Alps, nor, for ought I know, though the scale may be bigger, among Andes or Himalayas. Nor does all this magnificence here rise, as it rises when seen from closer and more familiar quarters, from the Flegère or the Brévent, directly from the foreground of the rather shabby Vale of Chamonix, with its electric railways to Argentière and the Montanvert, and with its unspeakable vulgarity of an aerial flight, or whatever they call their piece of villainy, up the pinnacles of the Aiguille du Midi, and with Chamonix itself in the centre, a mass of obtrusive roofs; but here it springs heavenward from above, and beyond, the long, dark ridge of the sombre Brévent itself, which serves in its comparative humility at once for measure and foil; whilst immediately below us are the dark, unpeopled depths (save for a small, solitary inn) of the upland valleys of the Diosaz and its tributary streams. Around is utter solitude, and wherever the eye can penetrate; and in front this unspeakably splendid chain, revealed in a single second, and viewed in its total length. A man would perhaps do well, who wishes to appreciate to perfection this sovereign of Alpine hills, never to approach it more closely than this crest of the Col d'Anterne.