Letters from Switzerland

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

In the morning I met an American gentleman returning from the summit of St. Gothard pass, and he advised me strenuously not to go further up, unless I was going now into Italy. The most wonderful of the engineering in the construction of the road, had already been seen, and there was nothing else of interest above. The same savage scenery, in the midst of which the Reuss leaps down 2,000 feet in the course of a two hours’ walk, is continued, and the dreariness of desolation reigns alone. A house for the accommodation of travellers has been maintained for hundreds of years, destroyed at times and then restored, and a few monks have been supported here to extend what aid they may to those who require their assistance. We resolved to pursue a route through the Furca pass, one of the most romantic and interesting of all the passes in Switzerland. A long day’s walk it would be over frozen mountains and by the side of never melting glaciers, and no carriage way! Nothing but a bridle and a foot path, and a rough one too, was now before us, and if we left the present road, and struck off over the Furca, it would be four or five days before we should reach the routes which are traversed by wheels. Our baggage, though but a bag apiece and blankets, was too heavy for us to carry if we walked, and I proposed to take a horse, put on him our three bundles, and ride by turns. Heinrich had never heard of the mode of travelling called “ride and tie,” and he was greatly amused when it was described to him. Accordingly we ordered a horse for the day. The price is regulated by law, under the pretence of protecting the traveller, but really for the purpose of extorting from him a sum twice as large as he would have to pay if the business were open to competition. The horse was brought to the door, and when we ordered the bags of three to be strapped on, the landlord flew into a great rage, and declared he would not be imposed upon. I smiled in his red face, and asked, “If he knew how much baggage the law allowed each man to carry on his horse.” He said he did, and I then told him to weigh those, and he might have for his own all over and above the legal allowance. He was still dissatisfied, but when we bade him to take his old nag to the stable, he suddenly cooled. Without further delay he made fast “the traps,” gave me a good stout fellow to conduct the party and bring back the beast. An idle group of guides and tavern hangers, and quite a party of Germans and English were looking on when I bestrode the animal, and took my seat in the midst of the bundles rising before and behind, like the humps of a camel. We are yet in the vale of the Urseren, not more than a mile wide, and lofty mountains flanking its sides. The mountain of St. Anne is clad with a glacier, from which the “thunderbolts of snow” come down with terrific power in the spring, and yet there stands a forest in the form of a triangle, pointing upward, and so placed that the slides of snow as they come down are broken in pieces and guided away from the village below. The great business of the people in this vale is to keep cattle and to fleece the strangers who travel in throngs over the pass of St. Gothard. Hundreds of horses are kept for hire, and nothing is to be had by a “foreigner” unless he pays an exorbitant price. Even the specimens of minerals are held so high, that no reasonable man can afford to buy them. But we are now leaving Andermatt, and on the side of the road not long after leaving the village we saw two stone pillars, which need but a beam to be laid across them, and they make a gallows, on which criminals were formerly hung, when this little valley, like Gersau on the lake, was an independent state. The pillars are still preserved with care, as a memorial of the former sovereignty of the community.

We reached Hospenthal in a few moments; a cluster of houses about a church, and with a tower above the hamlet which is attributed to the Lombards. I was struck with the exceeding loneliness and forsakenness of this spot. It seemed that men had once been here, but had retired from so wild and barren a land, to some more genial clime. Hospenthal has a hotel or two, and it is a great halting place for travellers who are about to take our route over the Furca to the Hospice of the Grimsel. Here we quit the St. Gothard road, and winding off by a narrow path in which we can go only in single file, we are soon out of the vale, and slowly making our way up the mountain. The hill sides are dotted with the huts of the poor peasants, who have hard work to hold fast to the slopes with one hand, while they work for a miserable living with the other. The morning sun was playing on the blue glacier of St. Anne, and a beautiful waterfall wandered and tumbled down the mountain; yet this was but one of many of the same kind that we are constantly meeting as we go through these defiles of the high Alps. The vast masses of snow and ice on the summits are sending down streams through the Summer, and these sometimes leap from rock to rock, and again they clear hundreds of feet at a single bound; slender, like a long white scarf on the green hill, but very picturesque and beautiful. At the foot of this mountain are the remains of an awful avalanche, which buried a little hamlet here in a sudden grave, and a sad story of a maiden and a babe who perished, was told me with much feeling by the guide as we passed over the spot. The peasant men and women were bringing down bundles of hay on their heads and shoulders from the scanty meadows which here and there in a warm bosom of the hills may be found, and as they descended I recalled the story of Orpheus, at whose music the trees are said to have followed him, and I could readily understand that such a procession might be taken or mistaken for the marching of a young forest. We are still following up the river Reuss towards its source, and though it is narrower, it is often fiercer and makes longer strides at a step than it did last evening. We cross it now and then on occasional stones, or on rude logs, and come to a spot where the bridge was swept away last night by an avalanche of earth and ice, and well for us that it came in the night before we were here to be caught. An old man with a pickaxe in his hand had been working to repair the crossing, and had managed to get a few stones arranged so that foot passengers could leap over, and the horses after slight hesitation and careful sounding of the bottom, took to the torrent and waded safely over. I held my feet high enough to escape a wetting, but I heard a lady of another party complaining bitterly that the water was so deep or her foot so far down, I could not tell which, but it was evident that very much against her will she had been drawn through the river.

At Realp, a little handful of houses, we found a small house of refreshment, where two Capuchin friars reside to minister to travellers, and this was the last sign of a human habitation we saw for some weary hours. We are now so far up in the world, that the snow lay in banks by the side of the path, while flowers, bright beautiful flowers were blooming in the sun. It is difficult to reconcile this apparent contradiction in nature. The fact is not surprising here, where we see such vast accumulations of snow and remember that a short summer does not suffice to melt it, but it is strange to read of flowery banks all gay and smiling, within a few feet only of these heaps of snow. I counted flowers of seven distinct colors, and gathered those that would press well in my books, souvenirs of this remarkable region. On the right the Galenstock Glacier now appears, and out of it vast rocks like the battlements of some old castle shoot 1,000 feet into the air. I am now among the ice palaces of the earth. The cold winds are sweeping down upon me, and I hug my coat closer as the ice blast strikes a chill to my heart.

We were just making the last sharp ascent before reaching the summit of the Furca when I overtook a lady sitting disconsolately by the wayside. She cried out as soon as I came up, “O Sir, my guide is such a brute—the saddle turns under me and I cannot get him to fix it—my husband has gone on before me—I cannot speak a word of German and the dumb fool cannot speak a word of English. What shall I do?”

“Madam,” said I, “my servant shall arrange your saddle, and I will conduct you to the summit where the rest of your party will doubtless wait.” She overpowered me with her expressions of gratitude, and while my servant was putting her saddle girths to rights, I gave her guide the needful cautions, and we crossed a vast snow bank together, climbed the steep pitch, and in ten minutes reached the inn at the top of the Furca. Distant glaciers, snow clad summits, ridges, and ranges stood around me, a world without inhabitants, desolate, cold and grand in its icy canopy and hoary robes of snow.

The descent was too rapid and severe for riding, and giving the horse into the charge of the servant we walked down, discoursing by the way of things rarely talked of in the Alps. My young German friend had all the enthusiasm of the French character joined to the mysticism of his own nation. He is well read in English literature, and familiar with ancient and modern authors, so that we had sources unfailing, to entertain us as we wandered on; now sitting down to rest and now bracing ourselves for a smart walk over a rugged pass. I became intensely interested in him, though I had constant occasion to challenge his opinions, and especially to contrast his philosophy with the revealed wisdom of God. We had spoken of these things for an hour or more when I asked him if he had ever read “the Pilgrim’s Progress,” and when I found he had not, I told him the design of the allegory, and said “we are pilgrims over these mountains, and have been cheering one another with pleasing discourse as the travellers did on their way to the celestial city. They came at last in sight of its gates of pearl.”

“But what is that?”

We had suddenly turned the shoulder of a hill, and a glacier of such splendor and extent burst upon our view as to fix us to the spot in silent but excited admiration. It was the first we had seen near us. Others had been lying away in the far heights, their surface smoothed by the distance, and their color a dull blue; but now we were at the foot of a mountain of ice! We could stand upon it, walk on its face, gaze on its form and features, wonder, admire, look above it and adore! This is the glacier of the Rhone! That great river springs from its bosom, first with a strong bound as if suddenly summoned into being, works its way through a mighty cavern of ice, and then winds along the base till it emerges in a roaring, milky white stream and rushes down the valley toward the sea. This glacier has been called a “magnificent sea of ice.” It is not so. That description conveys no idea of the stupendous scene. You have stood in front of the American fall of Niagara. Extend that fall far up the rapids, receding as it rises a thousand feet or more from where you stand to the crest: at each side of it let a tall mountain rise as a giant frame work on which the tableau is to rest; then suddenly congeal this cataract, with its curling waves, its clouds of spray, its falling showers of jewelry, point its brow with pinnacles of ice, and then, then let the bright sun pour on it his beams, giving the brilliancy not of snow but of polished ice to the vast hill-side now before you, and you will then have but a faint conception of the grandeur of this glacier.

“It answers,” said Heinrich, “to Burke’s definition of the sublime—it is vast, mysterious, terrible!”

I replied that “it was impossible for me to have the sensation of fear, and scarcely of awe in looking upon the scene before us—it rather had to me the image of the outer walls of heaven, as if there must be infinite glory within and beyond when such majesty and beauty were without. And then these flowers skirting the borders of this frozen pile, and smiling as lovely as beneath the sunniest slope in Italy, forbade the idea that this crystal mountain was of ice.”