Letters from Switzerland

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

On the whole, I was led to infer from what Naigle said that the church of the Upper Hasli valley is about in the same condition with hundreds of others in this and other lands. There is in the midst of this mountain scenery far removed from the intercourse of the world, where a newspaper is rarely seen, and few books are ever read, a little people among whom God has some friends, who in their way are striving to serve him, and whose service it will be pleasure to accept. Many of them have only a form of religion. The Romish religion that surrounds these lands, and which is so admirably framed for an ignorant and sensual people, pervades the minds of many who are Protestants in name, and who cannot be taught, or rather will not learn, that salvation is only by faith in the Saviour. That other gospel which gives heaven to him who does penance for his great sins, and bows often to the picture of a handsome woman, is the religion for a people who cannot read, or who have no books if they can. Ignorance and Romanism go hand in hand.

My estimate of the Swiss character has wofully depreciated since I have travelled among these mountains. With a history such as Greece might be proud of, and a race of heroes that Rome never excelled in the days when women would be mothers only to have sons for warriors; the Swiss people now are at a point of national and social depression painful to contemplate. They are indebted largely to the defences of nature for the comparative liberty they enjoy, and perhaps to the same seclusion is to be referred their want of a thousand comforts of life, which an improved state of society brings. All the romance of a Swiss cottage is taken out of a traveller’s mind, the moment he enters one of these cabins and seeks refreshment or rest. The saddest marks of poverty meet him in the door. The same roof is the shelter of the man, woman and beast. The same room is often the bed chamber of all. Scanty food, and that miserably prepared, is consumed without regard to those domestic arrangements which make life at home a luxury. There is no future to the mind of a Swiss youth. He lives to live as his father lived—and that is the end of life with him. Perhaps he may have a gun, and in that case, to be the best shot in the valley may fill his ambition: or if he is strong in the arms and legs he may aim at distinction in the games which once a year are held at some hamlet in the Canton, where the wrestlers and runners contend for victory, and others throw weights and leap bars as of old in Greece, when kings were not ashamed to enter the lists. Many of the youth of Switzerland are willing to sell themselves into the service of foreign powers, as soldiers—Swiss soldiers—hired to be shot at, and shoot any body a foreign despot may send them to slay: a service so degrading, and at the same time so decidedly hazardous to life and limb, with so poor a chance for pay, that none but a people far gone in social degradation would be willing thus to make merchandise of their blood. Yet they have fought battles bravely with none of the stimulus of patriotism, and their blood has been as freely poured out for tyrants who hired them, as if they were bleeding for their own and the land of William Tell.

Falls of the Reichenbach.

I had enjoyed all the pleasures of pedestrianism that I wished, and told Naigle to get me a horse for to-morrow. He was willing to go on with us for a day or two more, but I gave him a trifle for his wife, and to pay him for his evening while I kept him talking when he would have been sleeping; and after he had brought me a man who would go with his horse, and carry me on over the Wengern Alp, I dismissed him. There is nothing in Swiss travelling more annoying than the impositions practised upon you by those who have horses or mules for hire. The price for a horse is at the rate usually of about ten francs or two dollars a day; but if you are not to return the next day to the place from which you started, (and you rarely or never do,) you must pay the same price for the horse to come back. The driver manages to find a traveller to come back with, and so gets double pay both ways in nine trips out of ten. If the business were left open to competition without the help of government, the price would be reduced. Naigle brought me a man who would go with his horse as far as I liked for ten francs a day, and nothing for return money, but he desired me to set off in the morning on foot, and he would be a few minutes off, out of the village, for if the landlords who keep horses to let, knew that he was at the business on his own hook, they would molest him. He served me well, and I paid him to his entire satisfaction.

Leaving Meyringen on a lovely morning, the last of August, crossing the Aar by a bridge, I came at once to the Baths of Reichenbach, where there is a good hotel, said to be better than those at Meyringen. The grounds about are tastefully arranged, and an establishment fitted up for invalids, with every convenience for warm and cold baths on a moderate scale. If plenty of mountain water and mountain air will make sick people well, here is a fine place for them to come and be cured. I climbed the mountain in haste, to get the finer view of the Reichenbach Fall, whose roar I had heard, and the spray of which was rising continually before me. I could see the torrent as it took its first leap out of the forest, but it plunged instantly out of sight into a deep abyss, and I must ascend to its brow, and see the rush of waters as they descend into the gorge. The path to those coming down is very difficult, so steep, indeed, that it is safer and pleasanter to leave the horse and come on foot. But we went up slowly till we reached a meadow of table land, which we were permitted to cross on paying a small toll, to a house which has been built at the point where the best view of the fall from below can be had. It is almost a shame to board up such scenes as these, and compel a man to look through a window at a scene where he would have nothing around him but the mountain, flood and sky. The young woman was very civil, and offered us woodwork for sale, and a view through colored glass, and a subscription-book to record our donations for the construction of the foot-path, and we finally had the privilege of taking a look in silence. A narrow, but no mean stream, plunging TWO THOUSAND feet makes a cataract before which the spectator stands with awe. The leap is not made at once, yet the river rests but twice in all that distance, and only for a moment then. The point of view where we are now beholding it, is midway of the upper and grandest of these successive falls. The fury of the descending torrent is terrible. The spray rises in perpetual clouds from the dread abyss into which the river leaps. It might be a bottomless abyss, so far as human penetration can discover, for no arm can fathom it, no eye can pierce the dark cavern where the waters boil and roar, and whence they issue only to make another leap into the vale below. The bow of God is on the brow of the cataract. I do so love to find it there, not more for its exceeding beauty than the feeling of hope and safety it always inspires. We counted all the colors as it waved and smiled so fondly in the spray, as if it loved its birth-place.—Having had the finest opportunity of seeing the fall from this point, we did not return across the field to the horses, but took the foot-path straight up the mountain, over a rough and toilsome way, led on by a little lad who seemed anxious to do us the favor. He guided us by a walk of twenty minutes to the brink of the precipice. The path was just wide enough for one person to pass around the headland, holding by the bushes as we walked, and thus by taking turns in the perilous excursion, we went to the brow of the cataract, and looked down the front of the terrific fall. A single misstep or the slipping of a foot, might plunge the curious gazer into the gulph; yet so seductive and so flattering is such danger, we rarely have the least sense of it till it is over. Not the water only, but the whole prospect from this overhanging cliff, is in a high degree sublime. The plains of Meyringen, the mountains beyond, from which cascades are hanging like white lace veils on the green hill-sides, villages and scattered cottages, the river Aar shooting swiftly across the valley, are now in full view, and we turn away reluctantly from the sight to resume the ascent.

CHAPTER VIII.
A GLACIER AND AVALANCHE.

Alpine Horn—Beggars—The Rosenlaui Glacier—Beautiful Views—Glorious Mountain Scenes—Mrs. Kinney’s “Alps”—A Lady and Babe—The Great Scheidek—Grindelwald—Eagle and Bear—Battle with Bugs—Wengern Alp—A real Avalanche—The Jungfrau.

A beautiful Chamois was standing on the ledge of rock that overhung the path as I turned away from the Reichenbach Fall, and I was pleased to see so fine a specimen of the animal whose home is the Alps and whose pursuit has for ages been the delight of the mountaineer. He would have sprung from crag to crag at my approach and soon disappeared, had he not been held by a string in the hand of a boy who expected a few coppers for showing the animal. This is but one of a hundred ways and means of begging adopted by the Swiss peasantry. Of all ages from the infant to extreme decrepitude, they plant themselves along the highways of travel, and by every possible pretext seek to obtain the pence of the traveller. Some are glad to have a poor cretin or a case of goitre in the family, that they may have an additional plea to put in for charity. Others sing or play on some wretched instrument, and the traveller would cheerfully pay them something to be silent, that he may enjoy the beauties of the world around him without the torment of their music. But the Alpine Horn makes music to which the hills listen. A wooden tube nearly ten feet long and three inches in diameter, curved at the mouth which is slightly enlarged, is blown with great strength of lungs, and the blast at first harsh and startling is caught by the mountain sides and returned in softened strains, echoing again and again as if the spirits of the wood were answering to the calls of the dwellers in the vales. The man who was blowing, had but one hand, and after a single performance, or one blast, he held out that hand for his pay, and then returned to his instrument, making the hills to resound again with his wild notes.

The Rosenlaui valley into which we now enter is a green and sunny plain, where the verdure is as rich and the fruits as fair as if there were no oceans of never melting ice and hills of snow lying all around and above it. On either side the bare mountains rise perpendicularly: the Engel-Horner or Angel’s Peaks sending their shining summits so far into the heavens that the pagans would make them the thrones of gods, and the Well-Horn, and Wetter-Horn, bleak and cold, but now resplendent in a brilliant sun light. A small but very comfortable inn is fitted up in this valley with conveniences for bathing, and a few invalids are always here for the benefit of the air, scenery and the mountain baths. We rested at the tavern, and then walked a mile out of the way to see the Glacier of the Rosenlaui. After a short ascent we entered a fine forest, and followed the gorge through which the glacier torrent is rushing: an awful gorge a thousand feet deep it seemed to me, and if some mighty shock has not rent these rocks, and opened the way for the waters that are now roaring in those dark mysterious depths, they must have been a thousand years in wearing out the channel for themselves. A slight bridge is thrown across the ravine, and a terrible pleasure there is in standing on it and listening to the mad leaps of rocks which the peasants are prepared to launch into the abyss, for the amusement of travellers. I shuddered at the thought of falling, and felt a glow of pleasing relief when I was away from the tempting verge. I never could explain to myself the source of that half formed desire which so many, perhaps all have, of trying the leap when standing on the brow of a cataract, the verge of a precipice, the summit of a lofty tower. It is often a question whether persons who have thus perished, designed to commit suicide or not. It is not unlikely that some are suddenly seized with this undefined desire to make the trial: the mind is wrought into a frenzy of excitement, dizziness ensues, and in a moment of fear, desire and delirium the irresponsible victim leaps into the gulf. Many of the fearful passes of the Alps have their local tragedies of this sort, and I was not disposed to add another. We soon climbed to the foot of the glacier. We have come to a mountain of emerald. The sun is shining on it, at high noon. The melting waters have cut a glorious gateway of solid crystal: we step within and beneath the arch. A ledge of ice affords a standing place for the cool traveller who may plant his pike staff firmly and look over into the depths where the torrent has wrought its passage and from which the mists are curling upwards. The sunlight streams through the blue domes of these caverns, long icicles sparkle in the roof, and jewels, crowns and thrones of ice are all about me in this crystal cave. Its outer surface is remarkable for the purity of the ice, its perfect freedom from that deposit of earth and broken stone which mars the beauty of most of the glaciers of Switzerland. Great white wreaths are twisted on its brow, and on its bosom palaces and towers are brilliant in the sunlight; and from the side of it the Well-horn and Wetter-horn rise like giants from their bed, and stretch themselves away into the clouds. No sight among the Alps had so charmed me with its beauty and sublimity. These hills of pure ice, this great gateway only less bright in the sun than the gates of pearl, cold indeed, but with flowers and evergreens cheating the senses into the feeling that this is not real, it must be a reproduction of fabled palaces and hills of diamonds, and mountains of light. I am sure that I do not exaggerate: the memory of it now that I recur to it after many days is of great glory, such as the eye never can see out of Switzerland, and the forms of beauty and the thoughts of majesty, awakened as I stood before and beneath and upon this glacier, must remain among the latest images that will fade from the soul.