That most delightful and poetic and enthusiastic of mountain-climbers, Emile Javelle, made friends with the guides and herdsmen, and was for ever eliciting from them avowals of their belief in spirits and dragons. He says that any night passed among the good herdsmen of Salanfe, under the Dent du Midi, will be rich in old tales, and he thus relates the legend of the Monster of the Jorat:—
“The herdsmen tell me that formerly (some even think they can recall the time) there dwelt on the Col du Jorat, a monster, a dragon, in fine an animal of unknown species and horrible aspect, who guarded the passage of the Col by night. He had already claimed many victims and the boldest hunters dared not attack him. Night having fallen, he descended from the glacier. He reigned over the whole mountain, and woe betide the man who approached the Jorat.
“One day, at last, a man of the Rhône valley had been condemned to death. He possessed uncommon strength and boldness. Pardon was offered him on condition that he should fight the monster and succeed in destroying him. He accepted, climbed up to Salanfe, waited for night and mounted the path of the Jorat. It is said that the battle was terrible; but the man was victorious and tranquillity was after that restored to the pastures of Salanfe.”
Javelle explained the reluctance of the mountaineers at climbing to the upper heights by this universal belief in supernatural powers, and he explained the belief in these supernatural powers by their very familiarity with the strange phenomena of the mountains:—“They see the boulders come rolling down from the cliffs, the avalanches breaking off from the heights and dashing down to demolish their châlets—in the heights originate the storms; and there also they hear those mysterious crackings of the glacier. It is not strange that such phenomena should be explained by them in legends.”
Their imagination, too, is shown in the various names which they confer on the Devil. He is Lo Grabbi, the Miser; La Bêta Crotze (Bête-à-griffe), the beast with claws; Le Niton, the Tricky One; Lo Tannai, Cavern-haunter; L’Ozé or Lo Maffi, the Sly One; Lo To-frou, the Always Abroad. One of his assistants is the Nion-neloû (Nul-ne-l’entend), who hides behind trees and jumps out to scare horses. The Diablerets are the very stamping-ground of dwarfs, gnomes, and dragons. When a pinnacle is doomed to fall, they quarrel as to its direction. At Rubli these supernatural beings are called gommes: they guard mines; at night they are seen as meteors going from place to place.
Whence came the great heaps of stones, as for instance at the foot of Jolimont? We know that these vast masses, often of a different kind of rock from that characteristic of the locality, were brought down by glaciers; but the ignorant peasants attribute them to Satan, who, of course, was intending to crush some Christian church with them, but, perhaps through catching sight of a cross, was compelled to drop them. Some of these stones are of enormous size—the Plowstone, for instance, which rises almost twenty meters (sixty feet) above the ground between Erlenbach and Wetzweil and has been traced to its original source in the canton of Glarus.
But there is one more than twice as big at Montet, near Devent, and when, later, we were going over the Monte Moro pass, we saw one near the Mattmark See which it is estimated contains two hundred and forty thousand cubic feet of Serpentine. Clever old Devil to get rid of his burden! The Swiss Government now prohibits breaking up these blocks of stone for building purposes. This was due to the initiative of the Swiss Scientific Societies.
Forbes, in his “Travels through the Alps of Savoy,” gives a very good description of these masses of rock as seen at Monthey, overlooking the valley of the Rhône:—
“We have here a belt or band of blocks—poised, as it were, on a mountain-side, it may be five hundred feet above the alluvial flat through which the Rhône winds below. This belt has no great vertical height, but extends for miles—yes, for miles—along the mountain, composed of blocks of granite of thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty feet to the side, not a few, but by hundreds, fantastically balanced on the angles of one another, their gray weather-beaten tops standing out in prominent relief from the verdant slope of secondary formation on which they rest. For three or four miles there is a path, preserving nearly the same level, leading amidst the gnarled stems of ancient chestnut-trees which struggle round and among the pile of blocks, which leaves them barely room to grow: so that numberless combinations of wood and rock are formed where a landscape-painter might spend days in study and enjoyment.”