“A traveler died, last year, near the top of the Pass from collapse of the lungs!” a gentleman had said to another one evening at the hotel as I passed through the hall.
I had scarcely thought of it again until now, when I was dying in the same way. I heard Caput’s shout to the driver; saw mistily the entire party tumble out into the snow, and Prima, plunging down a steep bank to reach us the sooner,—brandy-bottle in hand. As if swallowing were easier than breathing! They got me into my nest again; wound me up in shawls and rugs; poured some wine down my throat; chafed my hands, and, after an age of misery, the tiniest whiff of breath found entrance to the laboring lungs, as when a closed bellows is slowly opened.
The driver, during all this commotion, sat, rigid as the nearest Alp, without abating his scrutiny of his leaders’ ears. Collapsing lungs were no novelty and no terror to him, and none of his business. He had contracted to deliver us, alive or dead—(and our luggage,) upon the deck of the Fluelen steamer within a week, for and in consideration of the sum of so many hundred francs. That was all he knew or cared about the matter. He loosened one of our horses at the post-house on the summit, and the patient beast trotted off down the mountain in the convoy of a dog chained to his collar. The cold was now piercing; the never-thawed ice of the lake before the Hospice, blue and hard as steel. Caput added to his adjurations to haste, a gratuity that touched a chord of natural feeling in the wooden man. He fairly raced down the other side of the mountain, spinning around curves and grating upon the wheel-brakes while our hair stood on end and our teeth were on edge. Down defiles between heights that held up the heavens on each side; on the verge of precipices with the wheels almost scraping upright rocks on the left and grazing the outermost edge on the right; thundering over bridges and flying through the spray of waterfalls, we plunged, ever downward—until, at sunset, we whirled out into the open plain and into the yard of the Hotel Belle Vue at Andermatt.
In ten minutes more, I lay, smothering in the well of one feather-bed, another upon me, and was cold withal. A Swiss maid was building a fire in the stove, within four feet of the bolster. The Invaluable and the spirit-lamp were brewing a comforting cup of tea upon the round stand at my side.
The hotel was excellent, being clean, commodious, well-provisioned and handsomely-appointed as to furniture and service. The rest of the party used it as a center for all-day excursions to the Furca Pass and the Rhone Glacier, while I lay in bed, too worn and miserable to be more than feebly diverted by scraps of conversation that arose to my windows from the piazza and lawn. Such, for example as this:
English Voice—feminine and fat. “I guess you are an American boy, stranger!”
Boy. “What makes you think so?”
E. V. “Oh! I judge—I mean, I guess—by the cut of you.”
Boy (who never “guesses”—) “And I judge you are English. I can tell them wherever I see them.”
E. V. “How—I should like to know?”