The Wengern Alp.
The ride through the vale in the early morning was refreshing. Parties of travellers were emerging from cottages where they had found beds, and winding their way by the bridle paths, in various directions, on foot and on horseback, all seeking to see the world of Switzerland, and all enjoying themselves with the various degrees of ability which had been given them. We crossed the lesser Sheideck, and stopped on the ridge of it at a small house of refreshment to eat Alpine strawberries and milk. The berries are small and have very little of the strawberry taste, but are quite a treat in their way. They were apparently more abundant here than we had seen them elsewhere, and with plenty of milk they made a capital lunch. Well for us that we had the milk before a dirty boy who was playing at the door when we came up, plunged his mouth and nose into the milkpan and took a long drink, only withdrawing when his father wished to dip some out for a lady who had just arrived. Had she seen the operation, she would have declined the draught, but where “Ignorance is bliss ’tis folly to be wise.”
We rested a few moments only at this chalet, and then pushed on, passing a forest, or the ruins of a forest, which the avalanches had mown down as grass. The stumps, and here and there a scraggy tree were the witnesses of the desolation that had been wrought. From the height we are crossing we have one of the most magnificent of Alpine views. The Jungfrau stands before us clad in white raiment, beautiful as a bride adorned for her husband: in the sunlight she is dazzling and seems so near to heaven, and so pure in her vestal robes, that we are willing to believe the gateway must be there. The name of this mountain Jungfrau, or the Virgin, is given, on account of the peculiar beauty and purity of the peak which until 1812 had never been sullied by the foot of man. Rising like a pyramid above the surrounding heights thirteen thousand seven hundred and forty-eight feet, and seeming to be as smooth as if cut with a chisel out of solid marble, she stands there sublimely beautiful, to be gazed at and admired. Lord Byron has made this region the scene of some of his most terrible passages, and I was forcibly impressed as I read them with the contrast, not the similarity, between his emotions and my own in the midst of these mountains. Here he conceived some of those images never read in his Manfred without a shudder. In his Journal he says “the clouds rose from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring-tide—it was white and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance.” Then in Manfred he does it into verse:
“The mists boil up around the glaciers: clouds
Rise curling fast beneath me white and sulphury,
Like foam from the roused ocean of deep hell
Whose every wave breaks on a living shore,
Heap’d with the damn’d like pebbles.”
None but a mind surcharged with horrors, a mind which all bad things inhabit, could find such images to convey its emotions in view of these sights of grandeur, beauty, and glory. The mists were curling along up the precipices as I have seen incense in a great cathedral, mounting the lofty columns, and curling among the arches, a symbol of the praise that goes up from the hearts of worshippers to the God of heaven. These white clouds, not “sulphury”—so far from being suggestive of hell-waves, were heavenly robes rather, and as the sun now nearly at noon, was filling them with light, I loved to watch them, and then look away up to the summit of the mountains around me, rejoicing in the manifestations which the King of kings was making of himself in this dwelling among the munitions of rocks. With these thoughts full on me as I rode along the verge of the tremendous ravine that separates the Wengern Alp from the Jungfrau, we reached a small inn, on the brow of the ravine, where large parties, chiefly English people, were ravening for dinner. This house has been planted here in the Jungfrau, that travellers may rest themselves in its beauty, and watch for the avalanches that now and then come thundering down its precipitous sides. Streams of water are in some places pouring down. The music of the fall is constantly heard, and every five or ten minutes the roar of a snow-slide thunders on the ear. Few of them are seen. They break away from crags that are out of sight, and plunge into dark abysses where the eye of man does not follow them. But this is just the time of day when we might look for one, for it is past noon when the sun’s power is the greatest, and if the great toppling mass which seems to be holding on with difficulty would but let go its cold death grasp and come headlong into this mighty grave at the base of the mountain, it would be a sight worth coming to Switzerland to see.
We watched and wished, and the more we watched, the more it would not come. During the half hour we had sat wrapped up in our blankets, gazing at the cold snow hills, and shivering in the bleak winds, the dinner had been in preparation, and despairing of getting something to see, we determined like sensible people, to have something to eat. The long table was filled with hungry travellers, and all had forgotten in the enjoyment of dinner the wonders of the Alps, when suddenly the alarm was given, “Laweenen,” the “Avalanche.” Servants dropped the dishes and ran, gentlemen and ladies following them rushed from the table, over chairs and each other, crowding for the doors and windows: and had there been danger of a sudden overwhelming of the house, and the destruction of all the inhabitants, we could not have fled in greater haste and confusion than we now did, to see the descending “thunderbolt of snow.” All eyes were upon one point where a stream like powdered marble was pouring from one of the gullies far up the Jungfrau and lodging on a ledge. It differed in no respect from a stream of snow, nor indeed from one of water which is perfectly white in the distance when a small cascade is dangling from the rocks. Yet we are told, and there is no reason to doubt that this stream is made up of vast blocks of ice and masses of snow, dashed constantly into smaller fragments as it comes “rushing amain down,” but still weighing each of them many tons, and capable of dealing destruction to forests and villages if they stood in its path. We looked on in silence, and with disappointment mingled with awe. The stream that had rested for a while on one ledge now began to flow again, and the roar of the torrent increased every instant, filling the air with its reverberations, which were caught by distant mountains and sent back in sharp echoes, and again in deep toned voices that seemed to shake the sky. But I was disappointed. It was just what I did not expect, although I had read enough of them to be prepared for what was to come. This was said to be one of the grandest scenes this season! Of course we believed it, and report it accordingly. Grand indeed it was, and when we consider that at least four miles are between us and the hill side down which it is rushing, it is not surprising that the masses of ice should be blended into a steady and liquid stream. Certainly I prefer to see such a torrent at a distance, to being sufficiently near it to run any risk of being buried alive in an icy grave.
CHAPTER IX.
INTERLACHEN AND BERNE.
The Staubach Fall—Lauterbrunnen—Interlachen—Cretins and Goitre—Dr. Guggenbuhl—Giesbach Fall—Berne—Inquisitive Lady—Swiss Creed—Crossing the Gemmi—Leuchenbad Baths.
The Staubach Fall, nearly a thousand feet high, is far from being such a thing of beauty as I had hoped to find it. It comes from such a height and has so small a body of water, that it dissolves into spray, and falling upon the rocks gathers itself up again and leaps down into the valley. Byron compares it to the tail of the white horse in the Apocalypse. Wordsworth speaks of it as a “heaven-born waterfall,” and Murray likens it to a “beautiful lace veil suspended from a precipice.” It is just at the entrance of the village of Lauterbrunnen, which lies in a valley literally gloomy and sublime. The sides of the mountains that shut it in are precipitous and so lofty that in winter the sun does not climb the eastern side till noon, and so cold is it through the summer, that only the hardiest fruits can be raised. I counted between twenty and thirty cascades leaping over the brow of these mountains and plunging into the valley. In the calm of the evening, after the sun had ceased to shine in it, I rode from the village to Interlachen, and thought it the most mournfully pleasing ride in Switzerland. Others whom I met, and who passed me on the way, appeared to regard it as purely delightful, and perhaps few would find in it as I did, the materials of melancholy musings.