By-gone Tourist Days: Letters of Travel

by Laura G. Case Collins

There’s a flash of inspiration for you, which reminds me I had a feminine compliment yesterday among those other feminine impositions. If it had been of masculine origin, how different would have been the animus of the

“return-thanks.” She said, it must be true if one woman could bestow such words on another, so you needn’t try to put a pin in my balloon. “Mrs. Collins is always inspired.” I had just “made a remark” as innocent as “a natural” (Scotch for idiot) of any intention to soar above “the dead level.” Think of my sudden inflation. In all your kite-flying days, you never gave one such “a bully send-off.” You may be sure I did not allow myself to “flop down” by opening my mouth except for “rations” the rest of the day. But was I ever “in the whole course of my long life” whirled about in such an eddy of nonsence? I can’t account for it, unless on the principle of counter-irritation, because writing to you who are so lavish of “good, sound sense.” Bite and wait for your own turn. I am applying soothing lotions already in anticipation of the crunching your reply will give me. How I’ll wish I had not then. Well, now I may as well have out “my dance on a fiddle-string.”

I left off at Lucerne. I wish I could remember what I told you of that lovely week there. I shan’t venture on more than a word for fear of repeating myself. But I want you to know, if I did not tell you, what a hold that “lion” has taken. You know about it; that it is carved in a grotto out of the natural sandstone in the face of the grand cliff, the crest of which is fringed with overhanging trees. It is reclining, dying, transfixed by a broken lance, and protecting with its poor, helpless paw the shield of France with its Bourbon Lily. Anything more noble and pathetic I cannot conceive. It made my heart ache as the Dying Gladiator did. I wanted to get near enough to take its head in my lap and stroke it, and chafe its paw with my hands, and somehow make it feel my human sympathy. Indeed, it is a miracle “in kind,” that dead stone can be wrought into forms that so move one. The wonder of this is that it is a lion—the lord of the brute creation, it is true—but not a human being in a lion’s form. The qualities expressed are those tested in our intercourse with that “lower order of creation,” affection, sense of trust, faithfulness unto death. You don’t know how often I think of him, and yearn to him as to a living suffering creature, that majestic creation of one of my fellow beings. Oh! sometimes I take a most reverential pride in my race. Who was it—Dr. Holland—who said, “It is a great thing to be a man?” One must agree now and again. I shan’t linger on Lucerne now. Hereafter, may be. From there here will have to be a skeletonized sketch. You can’t divine the difficulty of leaving out how trying such shadowy limning is to such an effusive creature as I, who have always had the dubious distinction of making not something, but so much out of nothing, of seeing more than is ever shown. Alas! poor me.

From Lucerne by the Schöellenen Defile and Furka Pass to the Rhone Glacier, a diligence trip from Andermat, giving many privileges in the way of fine views and other things, such as “getting up very high in the world.” At last nothing but barren rocks, snow and the plucky little wild flowers, that wouldn’t be beaten out of beautifying waste places as long as a cleft or cranny was found to give them a foothold. At the very highest, 7,992 feet, I could have made snow-balls with one hand and posies with the other without moving. I saw the great glacier from almost every point, and in such a glow of sunshine as can only be transcended in some other world. From it to Visp. Here I had my first “mule ride,” on horseback, with a guide to lead it. This for four hours; then a blessed exchange to an open carriage, which in as many more hours brought us to Zermatt, at the foot of the Matterhorn. Here the windows of my room just framed that curious freak of rock and snow, and I saw its transfiguration at dawn without moving my head from my pillow. Give me due credit though for the early wakefulness that won me that spectacle. First, in the wink of an eye, one glowing, burning golden ruby spot—the tip of the horn struck by the first gleam in the crystal of dawn; then it spread downward like the suffusion of a blush to where its base seemed resting on a dark pine-covered mountain; and behold! the whole gigantic horn a dazzling mass of that fervid glow. You can guess Beauty in the fairy story did not lie stiller or more breathless under her spell of enchantment.

Then I had my second mule-ride, this time a sure-enough mule, to make the ascent of the Gorner Grat. I don’t know what you know about it, but I am bound to tell you something at least of what I know. Just here I think I’ll confess to a singular hallucination; it seems to me that nothing I have been seeing was ever seen before. My analysis of this has only gone far enough to convince me there is no egotism, self-conceit or anything “on a lower range of feeling” in this, only that innocent, unsophisticated child-feeling over an experience out of its common way. This is a ridge of rock rising in the center of a vast hollow surrounded by a vaster amphitheater of snow-peaks and glaciers, the former including the Matterhorn, Monte Rosa, etc., the latter numbering eleven. It is the sublimest spectacle my eyes have rested on. Retracing to Visp, then by rail along the Rhone to Leuk, whence by open carriage again to Leukesbad to make the passage of the Gemmi.

Leukesbad is the place where they do the spectacular bathing, remaining in the baths for hours at a time, and to beguile the tediousness thereof having floating tables on which are placed books, papers, games or refreshments—the public admitted to see what good times can be got in that way. Also there is a great curiosity in the neighborhood; a little village of a most aspiring turn of mind has built itself like an eagle’s eyrie on the most inaccessible perch it could find, 8,895 feet high. The way to it is by a pathway or stairway of ladders fastened into the precipitous face of the mountains. The guide-book does not recommend a trial of it to persons liable to dizziness, and says the descent is more difficult than the ascent. It says also, however, that the view from the grotto at the end of the second ladder will repay the climber. You can guess into what climber’s head that “put notions.” Yes, she stole off there Sunday morning, “all alone by herself,” took the measure of the feat and feet, laid aside ulster, umbrella and guide-book, and went up like a beast on all fours, and down like a crawfish. Alas! that you can never know the comfort and elation of having done it.