Spite of their surroundings, these peasants and villagers are happy, and sing and dance as did their ancestors on the plains of Tuscany.
They fear the avalanches every night. They call them “The White Death,” and look on them as sent by spirits.
They know little, and care less, about what is going on in the world, and would give more to wake up any morning, and find a new kid or lamb born, than to hear of the discovery of a new continent. Their only ambition is to get their cribs full for the winter, and at last to mix their bones with the dust of their fathers, beyond the village church.
Near to one of these villages, and farther down the valley, is the tiny lake of “Tama,” and there the river Rhine begins. The natives here call it “Running Water.” The stream is dark and green, and the lake is surrounded by dreary rocks and ice-clad mountains. It is 7,690 feet above the sea. Tourists on the palace steamers of the Rhine, down by the sands of Holland, should see the historic river at its cradle, if they would have memories to last forever.
We followed another branch of the Rhine that joins this one at Reichenau. It, too, is born among the grand mountain scenes, and sweeps through deep gorges, among them the famous Via Mala. Here at Reichenau, too, is the first bridge over the united Rhine. It is of wood, eighty feet high and 238 feet long, in a single arch.
Near it, we were shown a little, old castle that has become historic. There was a school kept there upon a time. One October evening of 1793, a wandering pilgrim, with a pack on his back, knocked at the door and begged the old schoolmaster to give him work. He could cipher and talk French, and write a decent hand. For many months, the humble stranger helped to teach the boys, and earned his daily bread. No one troubled himself to find out who he was. He signed his name Chabourd Latour. One evening, the boys saw the undermaster in tears. He was reading a newspaper, wherein was the account of his father’s being beheaded on a Paris scaffold. The secret of the poor teacher was soon out. It was not Latour, but Louis Philippe, a coming king of France. He had wandered everywhere in disguise, for after his escape from banishment, no nation had dared give him a resting place.
This little Rhine valley had no more romantic story.
*****
One evening after we were back at Zurich a kindly faced gentleman called at the consulate. The fatal card hung on the door, “Office closed till 9 to-morrow.” I was in the court below, with just ten minutes between me and train time. I was to hurry out home to a party by the lake. I saw the look of disappointment on the man’s face, and something told me I ought to stop. The gentleman was a traveling American. Some papers of importance had to be signed by him immediately before a consul. Of course I missed the party, but I made a friend. It was Mr. A. D. Jessup, a Philadelphia millionaire. He lingered about Zurich a few days, and we met and talked together often. Sometimes we had our lunch and beer together at the famous little café Orsini. Then Mr. Jessup said good-by and left on his travels. A month from then a telegram came from him at Paris. It was an invitation to be his guest on a ten days’ drive in the Austrian Tyrol, with a wind-up at the World’s Fair in Vienna. He was a friend of President Grant’s, the message continued, and he could arrange for my leave of absence.
A few mornings later a four-horse carriage halted by the consulate and we started for the Engadine, that lofty Alpine valley that is coursed for a hundred miles by the river Inn. This is not a valley of desolation. It is broad and productive, and once had many people and a little government of its own. To-day there are pretty villages at long distances and Insbruck is a picturesque and historic town. But the Inn valley is sky high compared with other rich valleys of Europe. We had bright sunshine and a delicious mountain air all the way. The Inn is rapid and beautiful, and right and left, for twenty miles at a stretch, rise high green hills, or else abrupt and lofty mountains, with sometimes bold and almost perpendicular crags. If we saw a rock that looked extraordinarily picturesque, away up toward the blue sky, there were sure to be also there the romantic ruins of some old castle. It seemed that we passed a hundred of these lofty ruins, with broken towers and fallen walls, through whose tall arches we sometimes saw patches of blue sky. Eagles soared around many of these lofty and deserted ruins. As we two drove for miles and miles along the white winding road by the river we constantly looked up at the romantic heights, and in our minds re-peopled the gray old castles and thought of the time, a thousand years ago, when all the peasantry of the rich valley were the serfs of masters who reveled in these castles built with the toil of the poor. A time came when the enslaved rose and all these castles were overthrown or burned and left as they are to-day. There are ruins high up above this Inn valley that, doubtless, have not been visited by a human footstep in a hundred years. Most of them are inaccessible. The former roads cut up the rocky mountain sides to them, are gone and forgotten, and the heights with their awful ridges against the sky look as desolate as the desert.