Bradley’s letter was fowarded from Lucerne after some little delay, and reached Miss Craik at Brieg, just as she was preparing to proceed by private conveyance to Domo d’Ossola. She had taken the carriage and pair for herself and her maid, a young Frenchwoman; and as the vehicle rounded its zigzag course towards the Klenenhorn she perused the epistle line by line, until she had learned almost every word by heart.
Then, with the letter lying in her lap, she gazed sadly, almost vacantly, around her on the gloomy forests and distant hills, the precipices spanned by aerial bridges, the quaint villages clinging like birds’-nests here and there, the dark vistas of mountain side gashed by torrents frozen by distance to dazzling white.
Dreary beyond measure, though the skies were blue and the air full of golden sunlight, seemed the wonderful scene:
We make the world we look on, and create
The summer or the winter with our seeing!
And cold and wintry indeed was all that Alma beheld that summer day.
Not even the glorious panorama unfolded beneath her gaze on passing the Second Refuge had any charms to please her saddened sight. Leaving the lovely valley of the Rhone, sparkling in sunlight, encircled by the snow-crowned Alps, with the Jungfrau towering paramount, crowned with glittering icy splendour and resting against a heaven of deep insufferable blue, she passed through avenues of larch and fir, over dizzy bridges, past the lovely glacier of the Kallwasser, till she reached the high ascent of the Fifth Refuge.
Here the coarse spirit of the age arose before her, in the shape of a party of English and American tourists crowding the diligence and descending noisily for refreshment.
A little later she passed the barrier toll, and came in sight of the Cross of ’Vantage. She arrested the carriage, and descended for a few minutes, standing as it were suspended in mid air, in full view of glacier upon glacier, closed in by the mighty chain of the Bernese Alps.
Never had she felt so utterly solitary. The beautiful world, the empty sky, swam before her in all the loveliness of desolation, and turning her face towards Aletsch, she wept bitterly.