We then come to Ponte, with many interesting old houses, and then to Madulein, a name that is said to have no connection with Magdalen, while the etymology that derives it from medio-lacu is probably little more than a pun on some far older name rooted in a forgotten tongue. The fact, however, that the derivation was current some centuries ago is interesting as suggesting that there may then have survived some strand of tradition stretching back to the time when a remnant of the lake that must once have covered this reach of the valley still existed. On a rocky spur of mountain above Madulein are the ruins of Guardaval, erected in 1251 by Bishop Conrad, 'the castle lover.'
Here and there homely potato-plots and patches of oats and rye give sign that the severity of the high Alpine climate is mitigating. On the left opens out the pleasant Val d'Eschia, carved by water from the glaciers that imbed the four rocky peaks of the Kesch, shown in Plate VII. Before us is Piz d'Eren, a great cone of limestone capped with snow. The valley widens and, clustering round a tall spire on a broad slope of meadow, we see the close-packed houses of Zuoz.
When, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, the villages of the Upper Engadine rose from the ashes to which the devoted patriotism of their inhabitants had consigned them—a devotion that saved the whole Leagueland—Zuoz was by common consent the chief among them, and all the leading families built residences there.
On entering the village we see the interesting Chesa Gregori-Gilli, dated 1551. On its front are the Rhaetian wildman and St. George, with the inscription 'Evviva la Grischa,' followed by a precept that at some periods of its history la Grischa has sadly needed 'Res parva concordia crescit, maximæ discordia dilabuntur.' In the central square is a fine house of the Plantas. On the neighbouring Tuor Planta an inscription records that it was destroyed by fire in 1499 through the patriotic self-sacrifice mentioned above, and here again is an exhortation to dwell together in unity.
'SUM EWIGEN SCHNEE'
These inscriptions point the moral of the municipal history of Zuoz. Nowhere raged more fiercely the fire of faction that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bid fair to bring to naught the independence that the heroism of a nobler generation had so hardly won. Yet a saving seed was left. The picturesque Chesa Juvalta, which preserves many portraits of past Juvaltas in the next village of S-chanf,* recalls the pleasing legend that when the insanity of civil strife was at its highest, and the streets of Zuoz were red with the blood of its citizens, the women of the town, headed by Anna Juvalta, threw themselves with tears and prayers between the maddened combatants, and declared that they should only strike one another by passing over the bodies of their wives and daughters.
* I will not attempt to phoneticize the peculiar ch of Romanic orthography. English spelling has been styled an invention of the Father of Lies, but it is nothing to the masterpiece of misrepresentation that the alphabet has achieved in Romanic. In Engadine place-names I have preferably used the native Ladin form, except in the many cases where the German form seemed naturalized in English.
Relentless criticism has, I believe, relegated Anna to the limbo of unaccredited immortals that every day becomes more crowded, but I trust it will be long ere the souls of young Engadiners cease to be nourished on the exploded legends of their country. It matters little that they be not history. There are legends that are truer than history in that they embody the spirit without which the external facts of history would not have been. William Tell may not have shot his arrow at Altorf, nor Anna Juvalta stood between the armed ranks at Zuoz, but had there not been many men and women of the temper of Tell and Anna the Forest Cantons would still be ruled by aliens, and Rhaetian independence would long ago have foundered in anarchic bloodshed.