This last year Jones and I sent for Guglielmoni to take us over the Sassello Grande from Airolo to Fusio. Soon after starting we were joined by a peasant woman and her daughter who were returning to their home at Mugno in the Val Maggia some twenty minutes’ walk below Fusio. They had come the day before over the Sassello Pass through Fusio carrying two hundred eggs and several fowls to Airolo. They had had to climb a full four thousand feet; the path is rugged in the extreme; neither of them had any shoes or stockings; the weather was very wet; the clouds hung low; the wind on the Colma blew so hard that, though the rain was coming down in torrents, it was impossible to hold up an umbrella, and they did not know the little road there is. Happily, before they got above the Valle di Sambucco they had fallen in with Guglielmoni, on his way to meet us; otherwise one does not see how they could have got over. As it was, they did not break a single egg, but they were a good deal scared and asked us to let them go back in our company. We found them delightful people; the girl was very pretty and the mother still comely, with a singularly pleasing expression. We found out what they had done with their eggs and fowls. They sold the eggs for nine centimes apiece, whereas at Fusio they would have got but five. The fowls fetched three francs apiece as against two they would have got at Fusio. Altogether they had made the best part of twenty francs by their journey, over and above what they would have made if they had stayed at home, and thought they had done good business.
The weather was perfect for the return journey. After passing Nante we noticed by the side of the path several round burnt patches some four feet in diameter which struck us as rather strange, so we asked Guglielmoni about them. He said there had been ants’ nests there, and the people burnt them because the ants did so much damage. He showed us one that was in process of reconstruction, the ants building upon the remains of their ruined home, and pointed out the deep channel which the ants had worn in the ground through their habit of entering and quitting their old-established nest by one main road. We had thought the channel was a rill artificially cut for irrigation, and it was not till Guglielmoni showed us how impossible this was that we came to see he was right. He showed us a disused road that had led to a nest now destroyed, and on two or three other occasions showed us roads leading from one nest to another.
He told us several more things about marmots which I may mention as opinions held by the Fusians, but upon which I should be sorry to base a theory. He said their fat was so subtle that it would go through glass and could not therefore be kept in a bottle. He said it would go through a man’s hand. I said: “Let us try,” but it appeared that it might take three or four hours in getting through, so we delayed the experiment for a more convenient season. I asked how the marmots held their own fat if it would go through skin. I was answered that at the end of summer, when the marmots are very fat, they no longer hold it and their fur is greasy. I could not contradict this from personal knowledge and was obliged to let it pass. He said marmots’ fat was good for rheumatism and sprains, but that it must never be used for a broken bone, as the ends of the bone would not grow together again if the fat reached them. Badgers’ fat, he said, was very good, but it was not so sovereign a remedy as marmots’. There are badgers about Fusio, though not so many as lower down the valley in the chestnut country. We saw some badgers’ fat later on at Tesserete; it was kept in a tin which was certainly very greasy, but we did not think that the fat had gone through the tin.
Then we met an old gentleman with a Rembrandt-Rabbi far-away look in his eyes. He wore a coarse but clean linen shirt, and was otherwise neat in his attire. He looked as if he had suffered much and had been chastened rather than soured by it. We talked a little and the conversation turned upon deceit. I said that deceit was a necessary alloy for truth which, without this hardening addition, like gold without an alloy of copper, would be unworkable.
“Chi non sa ingannare,” I said in conclusion, “non sa parlare il vero.”
The old gentleman seemed to like this, and so we parted. Guglielmoni told us he was a painter and liable to temporary fits of insanity. During these fits he would go up by himself into the mountains, like some old prophet going out into the wilderness, and stay there till the fit was over, living no one knew where or how.
Cheese is the principal product of these valleys. I asked Guglielmoni whether there was any sign of the upper pastures becoming impoverished by the annual removal of so much cheese. He said the soil about Fusio did not yield as much by a third as it had yielded when he was a boy, but I hardly think it likely that there is much difference. He did not see why taking away so many hundredweight, or rather tons, of cheese yearly should impoverish the land, for, he said, the cows manured it. He did not see that the cheeses should be taken into account. At one time he said that two hundred years hence the Alpe di Campo la Turba would not be worth feeding; at another that the cows left what they ate behind them. Our own impression was that, what with insect and bird life and the fertilising power of snow and the frequent addition of new soil by avalanches, there was probably no harm done, and that the grass was there or thereabouts much what it always had been since people had first begun to feed it. I have myself known these alpi off and on ever since 1843, and can perceive no difference, except that the glaciers, especially at Grindelwald, have receded very considerably, and even this may be only fancy.
I asked Guglielmoni whether the Alpigiani—the people who spend the summer in the alpi—ever get pulmonary complaints. “Oh si,” was his answer, and he nodded as though it were common, which I can well believe; but it is more difficult to understand how the few robust Alpigiani escape. The majority seemed to us to be prematurely worn and to live in a state almost of squalor. What would a doctor say to the damp floor covered with mildew growing on spilt milk and fragments of half-made cheese? What about men sleeping night after night in a room built in the middle of a dung-heap, with never a ray of sunshine save a little near the door and an occasional beam through crannies in the walls? What nidus can be conceived more favourable for the development of organic germs? How can any one escape who spends a summer in one of these huts? I should say the worst and most insanitary cellar into which human beings are huddled in London is not more unwholesome than these alpi in the middle of the finest air in Europe.
Guglielmoni had some edelweiss in his hat, and we asked him the Italian name for it. He replied that it had no other name. The passion for this flower has evidently spread from the north. The Italians are great at suppressing unnecessary details. I was going up once in the posta from Varallo to Fobello and had an Americanised Italian cook for my only fellow-traveller. I asked him the name of a bird I happened to see, and he said:
“Oh, he not got no name. There is two birds got names. There is the gazza; he spik very nice. I have one; he spik beautiful. And there is the merlo; he sing very pretty. The other, they not got no names; they not want no names; every one call them what he choose.”