“Well, after that, I suppose you will have to see them. As to climbing rocks—— I think I can show chamois to people without climbing at all.”
So I did; by a stroke of luck which was surely not undeserved. Knowing Mr. R.’s character only too well, and how that there would not be another moment’s peace for me until those legendary creatures had been proved to exist, I called to mind, after some little thought, a place where chamois could almost invariably be seen, and we left home then and there, over Bludenz and Brand and the Zalim alp towards the Strassburger hut which lies under the Scesaplana, between a precipice and a perennial snow-field; arriving just as the sun went down.[26] Near the end of our march we turned a little to the right and glanced about us. There they were, three young beasts, almost straight below; unmistakable chamois, and as close at hand as any one could wish. Straightway Mr. R., whose familiarity with precipices is only surpassed by his familiarity with English grammar, proposed scrambling down a sheer wall of several hundred feet, and then throwing stones at them from behind. Who knows? A chance hit on the head, and we might bag one or the other. What a lark, if we did! The novelty of the idea was so alluring that I might have succumbed, if the animals had not scented us—as they would have done ere this, had we been standing below them—and made off amid a resounding clatter of stones. Mr. R. formally declared himself to be satisfied.
“Thank God for that,” I replied. “And, now that we are here, I will be able to show you something still funnier and more interesting to-morrow. Butterflies on this snow-field.”
“Why not pelicans?”
“Some folks are hard to please.”
There are nearly always frozen butterflies to be found up here. They have been wafted from their green meadows into these barren Arctic regions on the upward-striving blasts of the Fön.
Meanwhile we passed the night in the well-heated Strassburger hut, where we discovered as objectionable a crowd of Teutons as I have ever seen gathered together; and I have seen not a few. A fierce argument was proceeding between two of these bullet-headed ones as to whether the snowfield was a Ferner or a Gletscher. The Ferner man was right (though the Tyrolese use the word “Fern” for a glacier); but his opponent also came in for some share of applause. He had the louder voice of the two.
Up the Scesaplana next morning in time for the sunrise, where Mr. R. grew silent and respectful. Naturally enough. For there is something oppressive to the spirit on being thus islanded, for the first time, in a glittering ocean of Alpine peaks, and breathing the icy air of dawn at 3000 meters. I greeted old friends that arose up round us, and my glance, turning eastwards, rested at last upon the stainless white dome of the Ortler, fifty or sixty miles away. I called to mind that short snow-arête just before you reach the summit, knife-like and not even level; would I now care to run along it as I did then? Well, that was in the eighties and perhaps they have built a railway up the Ortler by this time; in the eighties, while we were touring on old-fashioned high bicycles over the Stelvio pass—a record, I fancy: there was a notice of it in the C. T. C. Gazette; over the Stelvio into Italy and back by the Splügen, riding home in one day from the Post at Splügen over Thusis and Chur and Ragatz and Feldkirch—which was also something of an achievement for the wretched machines of those days.
On the way down we stepped for a moment into the Lünersee hut, where Mr. R. had a look at the large photograph of my father after whom the place had been named, then followed the Rellsthal towards Vandans under that formidable flank of the Zimba on which the other tourist had died of sheer fright. During this descent my companion, unfortunately, began to relapse into something like his normal frame of mind; that is to say, our pleasure was nearly marred by persistent jocular allusions to that London hat of mine which has not yet ceased to provoke his merriment. Some time ago I was under the impression that he had forgotten this trivial and well worn theme of mirth. Far from it. Young people never will realize when a joke has grown threadbare, and he now distilled so much fresh laughter out of its shape, its color, its brim and other details of construction, its general fit, its suitability to my particular style, likening me at one time to his own countryman Napoleon and at another to a certain old female cousin of whose existence I had hitherto been unaware, that I was on the verge of getting annoyed when I hit upon the genial expedient of making him translate his miserable witticisms into the English tongue.
Then, and not till then, did they become really amusing; it was my turn to laugh.