Letters from Switzerland

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

As we pressed our way up the great Saint Gothard road, frowning precipices rise a thousand feet high, black, jagged rocks, almost bare of vegetation, shutting out the sunlight, and making a solitude fearful and solemn, its silence rarely disturbed but by the passing traveller and the ceaseless dashing of the river, which, instead of flowing, tumbles from ledge to ledge. In the spring of the year the avalanches make the passage still more fearful.

Twenty or thirty thousand persons travel over this pass every year; and to keep the current in this direction, the cantons of Uri and Tessin built this splendid carriage-path, as smooth as a floor, and so firm in its substructures as to resist the violence of the storms and the swollen torrents that so often rush frightfully down these gorges. Twice was the work swept away before this road was completed, which, it is believed, will stand while the mountains stand. So rapid is the ascent, that the road often doubles upon itself, and we are going half the time backward on our route. Sometimes the road is hewn out of the solid rock in the side of the precipice, which hangs over it as a roof, and again it is carried over the roaring stream that is boiling in a gulf four hundred feet below. Toiling up the gorge, with the savage wildness of the scenery becoming every moment more savage still, we reach the Devil’s Bridge. More than five hundred years ago, an old abbot of Einsiedeln built a bridge over an awful chasm here; but such is the fury of the descending stream, the whole mass of waters being beaten into foam among the rocks that lift their heads through the cataracts—such is the horrid ruggedness of the surrounding scenery, and so unlikely does it appear that human power could ever have reared a bridge over such a fearful chasm, it has been called, from time immemorial, the Devil’s Bridge. A Christian traveller would much prefer to ascribe its origin to a better source; for whatever miracle it required, we might refer it to the skill and goodness of Him who hung the earth upon nothing, and holds the stars in his hand. We were quite cold when we reached the bridge, and, quitting the carriage, walked over it to study its structure, and enjoy the grandeur of a scene that has hardly an equal even in this land of the sublime and terrible. At this spot the River Reuss makes a tremendous plunge at the very moment that it bends nearly in a semicircle, and a world of rocks has been hurled and heaped in the midst of the torrent, to increase the rage and roar of the waters, arrested for a moment only to gather strength for a more terrific rush into the abysses below. We approach the parapet, and look calmly over, and there, far below us, is another bridge, which, becoming useless by age and the violence of the elements, was superseded by this new and costly structure.

We crossed the bridge and soon entered the long Gallery of Uri—a tunnel cut through the solid rock—a hard but the only passage, as the torrent usurps the whole of the gorge, and the precipice above admits no possible path overhead. A hundred and fifty years ago this hole was bored, and before that time the only passage was made on a shelf supported by chains let down from above, on which a single traveller could creep, if he had the nerve, in the midst of the roar and the spray of the torrent in the yawning gulf below him. To add to the gloom and terror of the scene about us, a storm, with thunder and lightning broke upon us as we emerged from this den, and right speedily set in while as yet we had no shelter. We had come into an upper valley, a vale five thousand feet above the level of the sea, where no corn grows, though the land flows with milk and honey. The cows and goats find pasture at the foot of the glaciers, and the bees, who find flowers even in these realms of eternal snow, make their nests in the stunted trees and the holes in the rocks. At Andermatt, a village among the mountains, we come upon an inn whose many lighted windows invited us to seek refuge from the increasing storm, and we entered a room already thronged with travellers who had reached it before us, many of them coming down, and they were now rejoicing over a smoking supper. They made us welcome, and in the good cheer we soon forgot the fatigues and the perils of the most exciting and exhausting day we had had in Switzerland.

“Blessed be he who first invented sleep,” the weary traveller says, with Sancho, whenever night comes, and wherever, if he is so happy as to have a place wherein and on to lay his head. Sleep, that will not come for wooing to him who wastes his hours in idleness at home, now folds her soft arms lovingly about him, kisses his eyelids, whispers gentle memories in his soul, and dreams of the loved and the distant are his as the swift night-hours steal away. The nights are not long enough; for when the first nap is past the sun of another day is struggling to get over the hill-top and look down into the vale of Andermatt!

We might pursue this St. Gothard highway over into Italy, but we have not yet seen Switzerland.—Hitherto we have been traversing only the great roads of travel. Now we will strike off into the regions where wheel carriages have never yet been seen. The Furca Pass leads off from the St. Gothard road, and with a guide to pilot us, we struck into a narrow defile. Away above us the blue glacier of St. Anne was shining in the morning sun, and now we are at the foot of a beautiful waterfall that leaps from its bosom into the vale below. Here are the remains of an awful avalanche of rocks and earth that came down a few years since, on a little hamlet clustering on the hillside. The inhabitants fled as they heard it coming, but a maiden, tending a babe, refused to leave her precious charge, and could not fly with it as rapidly as the rest. She perished with it in her arms. Soon we came to a mountain stream which crossed our path, and the bridge had been swept away by an avalanche only the very night before. There were no signs of danger now, and we could scarcely believe the stories that were told us of the sudden destruction wrought by these thunderbolts of snow, and ice, and earth, which are the terror of these regions. The village we slept in last night is protected by a forest of trees so arranged as to receive and ward off the slides; but they come at times with such force as to cut off the trees, and bury everything in undistinguished ruin.

This pedestrianism is very well to boast of at home, and for those who are used to it and fond of it, it may be a very agreeable mode of travel; I confess I was tired of it the first day, and took to the horse as decidedly a better, as it certainly is an easier method of transit. It was just about as much as I could do to walk, and think of the number of miles we had gone, and had yet to go, with scarcely any spirit to enjoy the romance of the scenery, the glaciers and waterfalls, the precipices and snowy summits that were around me; and groaning all the while with the burden of locomotion. It was another thing altogether to sit on a horse, and folding one’s arms, to look upward and around rejoicing in the wonders of God’s world, and breathing in with the mountain air, the rich inspirations of the scene.

We are now so far up in the world that the snow, though the month of August is closing, is lying by the side of the pathway, while the wild flowers, in bright and beautiful colors, are blooming in the sun, and close to the edges of these chilling banks. On our right hand the Galenstoch glacier lies among the peaks of naked rock that, like the battlements of some thunder-riven castle, shoot upward eleven thousand feet into the clear blue sky. We are among the ice-palaces of the earth. I hug my great coat closely, as the cold winds from these eternal icebergs search me, and in a few minutes reached the inn at the summit of the Furca Pass. Snow-clad summits of distant mountains glistened in the noonday sun, and blue glaciers wound along and down the gorges, and so far above the valleys were we now that it seemed like a world without inhabitants, desolate, cold, and majestic, in its solitude and icy splendor.

The descent was too rapid for safe riding, and, giving the horse to the guide, who would lead him around, I leaped down the steep declivity, and soon found myself in a lovely vale. Turning suddenly around a promontory, a scene of such grandeur and beauty burst upon our sight as we had not yet encountered, even in this land of wonders. An ocean lashed into ridges and covered with foam, then suddenly congealed, would not be the spectacle! Freeze the cataract of Niagara and the rapids above it, and let them rise a thousand feet into the air; congeal the clouds of spray, the falling jewelry; pile up pyramids and minarets, and columns, and battlements of ice, and then, at each side of this magnificent scene, set a tall mountain, with green pasturage on its sides, and its head crowned with everlasting snow, and you have some faint image of the Glacier of the Rhone! Travellers have called it the Frozen Ocean of Switzerland. But it is more than this. And yet out of its bosom, its cold but melting heart, the River Rhone is flowing. This is its source. The daring adventurer may follow it up, beneath the blue arches and between the polished walls, till he finds himself far away in these caverns of ice, where no living thing abides. And here he learns the great design of a beneficent Creator in forming these glaciers. The snows of winter are here stored up, and, instead of being suddenly melted in the spring, and then sent down in torrents to devastate the lands through which the overwhelming currents would be borne, they are melted by degrees, and led by channels through these mountain passes into the river beds that water all the countries of Europe! For this great purpose Switzerland was built! It has been lightly said that this Swiss country looks as if it had been the leavings of the world when creation was finished, and the refuse material that could not be conveniently worked in had been thrown in dire confusion, heaps on heaps, into this wilderness of jagged rocks, and shapeless mountains, and disordered ranges of hill and vale—impracticable for man or beast—a rude, wild land, doomed to perpetual poverty, and existing only to be an object of curiosity to the traveller. But we find it to be the great fountain of living waters, pouring its inexhaustible streams into the wide and many lands below, carrying fertility and beauty over millions of acres, and food and gladness to countless homes.

A hard hill to climb was the Grimsel. Sometimes I rode, but more frequently I was content to toil upward on my own feet, without taxing the jaded horse with my weight to be added to his own. But when we reached the summit, and overtook other parties who were before us, and were overtaken by yet others coming up behind, we formed a picturesque procession of some forty or fifty pilgrims, who wound slowly along the banks of the Dead Sea—a lake that lies away up among these frozen heights, and derives its name from the fact that it was once the grave of a multitude of soldiers who perished in the fight in these mountain fastnesses.

The vale of the Grimsel is beneath us, and just before the sun sets we reach the Hospice, and eagerly ask for lodgings. On the borders of a little lake, in the bottom of a narrow valley, surrounded by almost perpendicular rocks, stands this solitary house, in former years inhabited by friendly monks who made it their pious care to entertain the traveller and furnish free hospitality to the poor. Now it is a hotel, and a very poor one at that, where you may get a supper, and a bed, and a large bill in the morning. This is a dreary spot now, and in the winter more fearful it must be.