Together

by Norman Douglas

Now boys seem to make a point of doing risky things, whereas a man of my father’s age and experience should have made a point of not doing them. What can have induced him to act as he did? He was well acquainted with this particular shale; in that very paper on the Rothe Wand which is the origin of our trip to Formarin, he remarks that the only troublesome part of the ascent was a steep tract of the “soft, crumbling, blackish Algäu-Schiefer, which continually slipped away under our feet,” adding that “for the rest, no part of the climb could be called dangerous or even difficult.” (The present route up there is another and really easy one.) Was it downright bravura? That is not impossible! He had led an enchanted life among the rocks and ice, and a friend of his, an old gentleman whom I saw the other day in Bludenz and who was with him once or twice in the mountains, spoke to me of his contempt of danger; he said that while climbing he “seemed to tread on air” and could not be made to understand what people meant by giddiness. Or was he stalking some particular chamois? In that case the tragedy grows almost intelligible; there are few things a man will not do under those circumstances.

Two others accompanied him on this expedition, Dr. Dürr of Satteins and his own Jaeger Fetzel, a native of our village; both have died long since and neither, I believe, was actual eye-witness of what happened at the fatal moment. Many journalistic cuttings and letters relative to this affair, and doubtless giving adequate accounts, were contained in that bundle which disappeared together with other literary and family papers when a certain portmanteau was broken open on its journey; it is a loss I shall never cease to deplore. The ground is supposed to have given way under him; certain it is that he fell from the height, as we were then told, of many, many church steeples—a phrase that stuck in my mind; from the height, I should reckon, of some thousand feet. There was nothing about him that was not shattered; his gun, his watch, were broken into fragments. Strangest of all, even his alpenstock was picked up in several pieces, which gave rise to the conjecture that this implement had betrayed him and snapped under his weight as he leaned on it for support; how else explain the splintering of such light and resilient material? Be that as it may, they carried his remains to Dalaas down the steep and savage Radona-tobel, and anybody who has been there will wonder how they achieved this task.[22] He was laid to rest in the Protestant cemetery of Feldkirch; for the first time in history the bells of all the countryside were tolled at the funeral of a “Lutheran”....

His article on the Rothe Wand is one of several which he contributed to the Journal of our Alpine Club; they can be traced in the files, together with his presidential addresses to the Vorarlberg section, of which I also possess four; one of the most interesting of these papers describes an ascent of the Piz Linard (3416 meters) and Piz Buin and the crossing of the Silvretta and Sagliain glaciers, the latter of which had never been traversed before; it presented no difficulty. These writings betray a strong love of nature, and all the exhilaration consequent upon “living dangerously.” He was also interested in the scientific aspects of alpinism, as I can see from his marginal annotations to Forbes’ “Theory of Glaciers.”

More important are two archæological monographs which reveal another facet of his mind; I wish I knew whether he wrote any other such things and where they are to be found; does the library at Bregenz perhaps contain them? The first one (1865, with two diagrams) deals with his excavations on a strangely shaped eminence near Mauren—a village in Liechtenstein, just across our frontier—which he held to be a Celtic hill-fort; his surmise was proved correct by the discovery of certain bronze relics. The other treats of the Roman occupation of this province.[23] It is in the shape of an address to the Museum Society of Bregenz with which he was connected; an exhaustive and conscientiously written memoir, full of ripe speculations of his own, enriched with copious footnotes and citations from those authorities, ancient or modern, who had hitherto touched upon these matters; and defining all remains of antiquity excavated here up to that day (some noteworthy new finds have since been incorporated into the Bregenz Museum). It has given me a feeling difficult to describe, to go through this paper again; I seem to be reading my own lucubrations, for at the same time of life I was writing in the same style on subjects of the same kind; a scholarly digression, for instance, on the Roman roads of the district, no trace of which exists, is done quite in my manner of that period. I observe that he contradistinguishes between Celts and Rhætians (p. 6 and note to p. 10);[24] that he takes Lindau, and not either of the other two islands, to have been the one occupied by Tiberius; and holds the Vallis Drusiana, the Walgau, the heart of our province, to be called not after the Roman general and stepson of Augustus, seeing that the name Druso is of Celtic or Rhætian

origin—pre-Roman, in short, and indigenous to this country, whence localities like Drusenfluh, Drusenthor, Druseralp, Druserthal.[25]

Of peculiar interest to me, among my father’s writings, are forty or fifty manuscript essays, long and short, on a variety of themes; mere “asides” written, to please himself, in three different languages: English, French and German. French he studied at Geneva; German at the gymnasium of Augsburg, and so successfully, that he learnt to handle that tongue with more freedom and elegance than many a native writer of the country. Most of these miscellanies date from the late fifties or early sixties when he was still young; he doubtless continued to compose them to the end, and the later ones would have a greater value; they are lost. The titles testify to considerable intellectual curiosity: On ambition—The first snowdrop—A woman’s thoughts about women—On a passage in Pascal—The carnival—To the memory of ancient Rome—On a comet—Voices of Nature—Friendship—A characteristic of the German language—Dreaming of sounds—On certain pictures in the National Gallery of Scotland—The Lake of Geneva by night—Palleske’s Life of Schiller—Suicide—The thunderstorm—Spiritualism—Sunset in autumn—On the want of the habit of writing—The study of Natural Science; and so forth; a heterogeneous collection! One or two, such as a passionate lament for the death of some little boy-friend, are set in lines as if they were poetry, but there is no poetry about them save a certain rhapsodical elevation of sentiment. Those written in English prove that he had not yet excreted the poison of a German (metaphysical) schooling, which lays fetters upon our thought and dims the candor of literary expression. Immature stuff for the most part, heavy in diction and saturated with the conventional wisdom of youth, although here and there one alights upon something more esoteric, such as (in a “Fragment on Style,” 1858): “A noble thought always commands powerful and harmonious expression.... When a truly great thought is clothed in language unworthy of it, the mind which dictated the words can have conceived it only imperfectly”—which strikes me as an unexpected pronouncement, for a youngster of twenty. Altogether, the perusal of these things is a groping, twilight adventure into the soul of a dead man; vainly I ask myself along what lines he would have developed had his life been spared.

Hardly had we reached home again, after a long walk down from Formarin over Lagutz and Marul and Raggal, before Mr. R., who has a sweet nature but is apt to be pig-headed at times beyond the common measure of man, began to complain bitterly that I had shown him no chamois, proceeding thereafter to hint that all my accounts of such animals might well be pure inventions; the chamois-race was doubtless as extinct as the ibex I had shown him at Innsbruck; otherwise, why were they not on the spot, “where they ought to have been,” like those marmots? As if the country were a kind of perambulating menagerie! I am all for humoring young people up to a certain reasonable point, but it was a little more than I had bargained for, to start off climbing again that moment. Had he expressed any such wish at Formarin, we might have wandered towards Lech and entered some side-valley on our left, and possibly espied a beast or two among the crags. He said not a word about it up there. And now it was nothing but:

“Show them! Show them! What am I here for?”