II
VAL BERNINA
Val Bernina, the most notable of the side-valleys of the Engadine, is traversed by the railway that runs from St. Moritz to Tirano in the Valtelline. This is joined by the Rhaetian Railway from Samaden at Pontresina, the pleasant collective name of the three villages—Laret, Spiert, and Giarsun—that stretch in a long street at the entrance to the valley, happier than most resorts in the Engadine in enjoying magnificent views of the great snow mountains.
Of course, like all popular resorts, Pontresina pays the penalty of being appreciated. Those who gibe at the Upper Engadine as a transcendent tea-garden have a special gibe for Pontresina. But the garden is so very transcendent, so lovely, so extended, so varied, so full of retreats of wild, sweet beauty, so continually rising into points of view whence one looks illimitably across the high places of the earth, that the term is freed from all opprobrium.
Seldom do crowded places have within a few minutes of them such attractive haunts as the Schlucht promenade along the left bank of the deep ravine of the Bernina. The many-hued cliffs grasped by the snaky roots of straight-stemmed firs are writ with records of the stream's former course: the curve of waterfalls; the winding, widening, and narrowing of its channel; the swirl and sweep of its current; the deep holes ground by stones revolving in its eddies, as it gradually wore down its bed to that along which it now frets and fumes, incessantly bearing away the substance of staid and sober Switzerland to make land for the restless peoples of the Danube and the Black Sea.
The great points of view are on the other side. The most famous is the Piz Languard, reached by a beautiful walk. Another is the Muotlas Muraigl to which we may mount by a cable railway from the station of Punt Muraigl at the junction of the lines from Samaden and St. Moritz. Hence we have a splendid prospect: in front lie the Upper Engadine lakes, like successive reaches of a broad blue river; to the right is the pinnacled ridge of the lower Julier range; to the left the Rosegg valley, with the glaciers and peaks at its head; still more to the left the view in Plate I., the steep northern slope of the Chalchaign, and the shining summits and far-flung snows of the Bellavista, Palü, and Cambrena peaks.
Fine, too, is the prospect from the Schaffberg, where is a memorial to Giovanni Segantini, who for some time before his death was occupied in painting this magnificent view. Here, one winter day in 1899, he succumbed, in face of the great landscape that had cast its spell on him.
Could kindliest fortune fairer parting send?
The Rosegg and Morteratsch glaciers are Pontresina's two main entrances to the high Alpine world, that radiant world which lies so near us in the Upper Engadine, yet seems as far from soil and smirch of lower earth as though it had just descended out of heaven from God. Plate V. gives the former: in front is the pleasant, primitive little inn; beyond it the glacier, for a long time receding, has left the usual mean and desolate disorder; farther are the combined glaciers of the Rosegg and Tschierva; between them is the rocky Aguagliouls, a curious reserve of vegetable life on which, it is said, two hundred different specimens of plants have been counted; in the height of summer sheep are driven across the glacier to graze there; in the background, from right to left, are the Caputschin and Mongia peaks, the broad gap of the Fuorcla Glüschaint, the Piz Glüschaint, the double summit of la Sella, and, hidden in the clouds, Piz Rosegg.