Wedged in and stayed by cushions, I soon tested and approved the sagacity of an eminent physician’s advice to invalids—chronic and occasional. “Change air and place, instead of drugging yourself. Move as long as you can stir. When you cannot,—be carried! But, go!”
The air was fresh and invigorating, blowing straight from the mountains. The road wound up and over terraced hills, cultivated to the topmost ridges; through fertile valleys and delicious forest glades, gemmed with wood blossoms. It was haying time. Purple clover and meadow-grasses were swathed, drying, and stacked in a hundred fields, the succulent stems yielding under the tropical sun the balm of a thousand—ten thousand flowers. I have talked of the wild Flora of Italy until the reader may sicken at the hint of further mention of such tapestry as Nature rolled down to our wheel-tracks. Cyclamen, violets, wild peas,—daisies, always and everywhere,—edged and pearled the green carpet. The scenery changed gradually, without loss of beauty, in nearing the Lake of Lugano. Lying among pillows on the deck of the steamer we had taken at Porlezza, I noted that the very mountain shapes were unlike those environing Como, and their coloring darker. There were no more straight brows and abrupt precipices, but one conical height was linked to another, furrowed by foaming cascades, springing from crest and sides, until S. Salvador loomed up before us at the terminus of our twelve-mile sail, majestic and symmetrical, wearing a gray old convent as a bride her nuptial crown.
At the Hotel Belle Vue, on the border of the lake, we tarried two days, to rally strength for the continuous effort of the next week, more than to inspect Lugano and its suburbs. We hired here a carriage, in size and general features resembling a Concord stage. A written contract was signed by both parties. The driver, vehicle and four horses were ours until we should be delivered, baggage and bodies, upon the steamboat plying between Fluelen, at the upper end of the Lake of the Four Cantons, and the town of Lucerne. The diligence was well-hung, fitted up with red velvet seats, soft and elastic; the horses were strong and true,—the driver spoke Italian—not German, which we were beginning to dread. For almost a week we were to be only passengers, free to eat, sleep and see at our will, without the fear of altered prices, extras and other sharp impositions, incessantly weighing upon our foreign-born souls.
How we climbed the Alps is too long a story to relate in detail. Maggiore, the Ticino, Bellinzona, the quiet Sabbath at Faido near the mouth of the St. Gothard tunnel, then building,—I catch the names in fluttering the leaves of our note-books, and each has its story.
Julius Cæsar fought his way from Rome to Gaul through the valley of the Ticino. The plains on each side of the classic river, as level as an Illinois prairie, are a narrow strip between the mighty ranges of snow-mountains. The meadow-farms are divided by hedge-rows and flecked with grazing flocks. Other herds are pastured high up the hill-sides in the summer, the huts of their keepers black or tawny dots, when seen from below. Every few furlongs, cataracts flash into sight, hasting by impetuous leaps, down the rocks to the river, not infrequently dispersing themselves in spray and naught, in the length and number of their bounds.
We crossed the Pass, July 9th—a cloudless day. Since early morning we had been climbing. The road is built and cut into the solid mountain, and barely wide enough to permit the skillfully-conducted passage of two diligences. It winds up and around spurs and shoulders, and is protected at the more dangerous curves and steeper cliffs by stout stone posts. The traveler eyes the thickness and obstinate expression of these with growing satisfaction as the villages below dwindle into toy-hamlets and the fields into dolls’ patchwork-quilts of divers shades of green and yellow; while he makes rapid silent calculations of the distance between them, and their relation to the length and breadth of the stage. Could we go down backward, sideways, anyway, were a horse to balk, or a trace to break, or a wheel come off? Looking directly upward, we saw a tedious succession of terraces, similarly guarded; dizzy inclines that were surely inaccessible to hoof or wheel. The next hour showed us from the most incredible of these, the road from which we had surveyed it.
“I begin to comprehend ‘Excelsior,’” said Secunda, solemnly. “No wonder he died when he got to the top!”
We were nearing the snow-line. We were warmly wrapped, but the increasing frostiness of the air warned us to unfasten shawl-straps and pull from beneath the seats the carriage-rugs we had stowed away at Faido. Caput had spent as much time out of the diligence as in it, in the ascent. A bed of scarlet pinks or blue gentian; a blanket of hoary moss capped with red; a clump of yellow pansies—the tiny “Marguerites” of the Alps,—branchy shrubs of rose-colored rhododendrons;—were continually-recurring temptations to leap over the wheel from his place in the coupé. Once out, it was hardly worth his while to get in again when, for a mile or two ahead, the like attractions, and many others, cushioned the rocks, nodded from their brows and smiled from every crevice. Now, as he came up to the side of the carriage to toss in upon us his burden of beauty, his face was reddened by cold,—not sunburned;—he struck his emptied hands smartly together to quicken the circulation, and the rime began to form upon his moustache. Scanty patches of snow no longer leaked from sheltered nooks across the road. Brown earth and barren rocks were hidden partially, then, entirely,—then, heaped over by the gray drifts. They were gray,—positively grimy. Not quite as dirty as city-snow, but of a genuine pepper-and-salt that was a surprise and a disgust. From below they were as dazzlingly pure as the clouds that caught against them, with the same cold azure shadows in their clefts. We were driving now between cloven banks of packed snow,—six, twelve, twenty feet high, on which the heavens might have showered ashes for as many days and nights as darkness had brooded over Pompeii, so befouled were they. The July sun shone full upon the glistering surface, with no more perceptible effect than if the month had been December. The ingrained dust had been swept from the iron crags jutting into the snow-cutting at the next turn of the pass, and frowning upon us from yet loftier terraces. It was granitic powder, disintegrated and beaten fine by frost and blast.
Once in a while, we passed a low house with deep eaves and great stones laid upon the roof. These supplied refuge at night and in storm, to the goats browsing on Alpine moss and grasses. The herdsmen wore jackets, coats and caps of goat and sheepskin. Wiry dogs, not at all like the pictorial St. Bernard, slunk at their heels, or barked crossly at a straying kid. A clatter of hoofs and rattle of trace-chains upon the upper road prepared us for the appearance of a single horse, trotting steadily by us in the direction from which we had come.