If we had never gone up the Mount Washington Railway, the ascent of the Rigi would have been exciting. The cars are less comfortable than those on the New Hampshire mountain, and the passengers all ride up backward, for the better enjoyment of the view,—a miserable arrangement for people of weak stomachs and heads. Mt. Washington had been a thrilling terror that fascinated me as did ghost-stories in my childhood. The Rigi is a series of gentle inclines with but one span of trestle-work that could have scared the most indefatigably-timid woman. But Mt. Washington offers no such prospect as was unfolded for us in wider and more wondrous beauty with each minute. The sun was setting when, instead of entering the Hotel Rigi-Kulm where our rooms had been engaged by telegraph from Lucerne, we walked out upon the plateau on which the house stands. Against the southwestern horizon lay the Schreckhörner, Finsteraarhorn, and—fairest of “maidens,”—the Jungfrau,—faint blushes flickering through the white veils they have worn since the fall of the primeval snow. On the south-east the Bristenstock, Windgelle, Ober-Alp, and a score of minor mounts, unknown to us by name, caught and repeated the reflected fires of the sunset. The air was perfectly still, and the distances so clear as to bring out the lines of heights like penciled curves, that are seldom seen even from an outlook embracing an area of three hundred miles. “Alps on Alps!” Mountain rising behind and overtopping mountain, until the sublime succession melted into the outlined curves just mentioned. In the direction of Lucerne, stretched right beneath us what seemed a level, checkered expanse of farms, groves and villages, lighted, once in a while, by the gleam of a lake (we counted ten without stirring or turning from where we stood) and intersected by an hundred streams. The twilight was gathering upon the plain. When the light had died out from lake and river, we stood in the sunshine, and the snow-summits were deepening into crimson. The air was chill, but we lingered to show our friends the “Alpen-glow,”—to us a daily-renewed and lovely mystery. The lowlands were wrapped in night; the ruddied snows paled into pink,—ashes-of-roses,—dead white. The West was pallid and still. The day had waned and died, blankly and utterly. When, suddenly, from peak to peak, glowed soft flame,—a flush of exquisite rose-color, quivering like wind-blown fire, yet, lasting a whole minute by my watch, ere it trembled again into dead whiteness. Another minute, and the phenomenon recurred, but less vividly. It was a blush that rose and blenched as with a breath slowly drawn and exhaled. One could not but fancy that the white-breasted mountains heaved and fell with the glow in long sighs, before sinking and darkening into slumber.
“It is really night now!” Caput broke the silence. “We will go in. But it was worth staying to see, though one had witnessed the like a thousand times.”
We came out again after an excellent dinner, but the wind had risen, the night was piercingly cold, and we were driven into our beds. By nine o’clock there was nowhere else to go. The lights were extinguished in the salon and main halls, and bed-room fires had not been thought of. The only suggestion of comfort was in the single beds heaped higher than they were broad with blankets and duvets. The window at the foot of my couch was unshuttered. Sleep was slow in coming, while the wind thundered like rock-beaten surf against the house, threatened to burst the rattling casements.
I pulled another pillow under my head, and had a picture before me that made me revel in wakefulness. The moon was up and near the full. The horizon was girdled with effulgence, sparkling, chaste—inconceivable. The valleys were gulfs of purple dusks; the forest-slopes black as death. I could discern the glitter of granitic cliffs, and upon inferior hills, the sheen of snow-banks left in sunless hollows. Had my eyes been sealed, I should have pronounced it a tempestuous night. Could I have closed my ears, the divinest calm had brooded upon the world enclosed within the white mountains.
“The strength of the hills is His also!” The strength of these heights! Serenity of power! The perfectness of Peace!
I did not mean to sleep. There would be other nights,—and days—if I chose to take them—for that. But the bugle-call at half-past three startled me from slumber in which moonlight and mountains were forgotten as though they were not. The snow-tops were dimmer in the dawn than they were under the high moon, the sky behind them dun and sullen. Guests are forbidden by English, French and German placards to “take the blankets from their beds.” The wisdom of the prohibition was palpable to all who assembled upon the plateau to see the sun-rise. The wind was still furious, the morning colder than the night, and, I think, not ten people out of the forty or fifty shiverers present had made a regular toilette. Ladies had thrown on double flannel wrappers, and tied up their heads in hoods and scarfs. Gentlemen had donned dressing-gowns, and some had come forth in slippered haste. All wore cumbrous shawls, waterproof cloaks and railway rugs. One half-frozen Frenchman was enveloped in a strip of bed-side carpet brought from his chamber. A more serious annoyance than cold or gale, was the dust, raised by the latter,—or more correctly speaking, minute grains of attrite granite that offended eyes and nostrils. I had dressed snugly and warmly, and tied a thick veil over my face and ears, but the wind tore viciously at my wraps, and the pulverized particles sifted through the net until I could scarcely breathe, even by turning my back upon it, while my three cavaliers formed a close guard between me and the hurricane. We could not forget discomfort, but we disregarded it when we had cleared our eyes from the stinging sand.
The lower landscape was still in shadow, the mountains wrapped in bluish-gray indistinctness. Presently, warm glows of color suffused the dun vapors of the lower heavens,—saffron and rose and carmine;—quivering arrows of amber light shot upward and outward from an unseen center below the horizon verge,—and, one by one, as beacons respond to the flash of the signal-fire, the loftiest tips of Finsteraarhorn, Schreckhörner, Wetterhorn, the Monch, the Eiger—the Jungfrau—flamed up above the mists. Floods of changeful lights rolled down upon the lesser hills, revealing peak, chasm and valley; pouring, finally, a benign deluge over the plain. It was not a swift, capricious darting of rays hither and yon, but a gradual growth of the power of the light into a fullness of occupation. The sun came in calm stateliness out of his chamber in the east, and the world was awake.
Early as it was, women and boys were threading the crowd with chamois-horn paper-cutters and knobby bunches of dirty Edelweiss and Alpine roses for sale at Rigi-Kulm—(or tip-top) prices. An Englishman, in an Indian-pattern dressing-gown, a smoking-cap bound over his ears with a Madras handkerchief,—swore roughly at them collectively, and at one poor hag in particular, as she offered the shabby bouquet.
“Picked but yesterday, milor’, from the edge of a glacier. Milor’ knows—”with a ghastly smirk—“that the Edelweiss is the betrothal-flower?”
He may have understood the wretched patois of Swiss-German-French. He probably comprehended nothing except that she wanted him to buy what he styled, not inaptly—“filthy rubbish.” But he would have sworn as vehemently in either case, for the wind had tangled him up badly in his voluminous skirts, and while striving to disengage his calves with one hand he held on to his cap—possibly to his peruke—with the other.