We always rested a few hours in the middle of the day, slept awhile, and had simple dinners of trout and bread, with honey and wine.
Rich Peasant’s House.--[Page 89.]
Right and left the scenery is gorgeous, certainly, but this grand nature is also man’s enemy in these higher Alps. Flood and avalanche are forever threatening; the fields produce little, the villages are poor and wretched, and we ask ourselves, why do people seek such places to live in?
The answer is, they can’t get away; they are too poor. Besides, here is where their ancestors lived always; why should they not live here, too, they answer. Years later, a girl from one of these places came and lived in our home as a domestic; but she was forever lamenting her mountains and her wretched village, spite of the fact that it had been three times overwhelmed by avalanches. That was the town of Selva.
Near to this Selva, is the hamlet of Gesten, and there eighty-four souls were lost by an avalanche in a single night. The big grave containing them all was shown to us, outside of the village.
Tourists who travel by coach and railway in Switzerland, have little conception of what real, Swiss, Alpine scenery or Alpine life is like. It is just judging the moon by looking through a telescope. Life in these almost unknown valleys, differs from all the rest of Switzerland. Here the commune is the government. Of national laws, or presidents and parliaments, the people know nothing. The village mayor is the king. Not many years ago, these mayors and their village advisers in the Vorder Rhine countries, could hang men and women of their own accord.
The people are a species of Italian and speak an Italian dialect. Five hundred years ago, they had petty republics up here. Here were the “Gray League,” the “Ten Jurisdictions” and the “House of God.”
In 1396, the liberty-loving people of the high Rhine valleys fought for liberty, and founded a little nation called Rhaetia, that lasted four hundred years, when it became united to Switzerland. Ilanz, their old capital, stands here still, a novel picture of past ages. The snow-capped mountains, the fine forests, the picturesque river Rhine, are there as they were then, and the sons and daughters of these old liberty athletes have changed almost as little as the scene of their fathers.
We walked on to Selva and spent the night. I could have thought myself living among Roman peasants in the time of Julius Cæsar. Everything was antique, simple, different from the nineteenth century. Corn grows up there, but the people live mostly from their flocks. I noticed the men wore earrings, and men and women, with their ruddy, brown faces and black hair, look like a better class of Southern gipsies. They have almost no books, few schools, and only a single newspaper in the whole valley. No human being, outside of the Upper Rhine, would think of calling that journal a newspaper. The houses are built of hewn logs, turned brown as a Cincinnati ham, and the clapboard roofs are held on by big stones.