Zuoz and S-chanf have become of late years something of an educational centre, and also a resort for winter sports. Zuoz has provided itself with a Kursaal, which it terms Castell, a finely situated building in good Engadine style designed by Nichol Hartmann. Recent building in the district gives gratifying evidence of the influence of the Heimatschutz, a league for the preservation of old architecture, and the assimilation of its styles and spirit in new construction.
Two miles below S-chanf is the hamlet of Capella, so called from the chapel of St. Güerg of which but a fragment remains. Near it formerly stood an enormous pine tree sacred to St. George, the patron of the Upper Engadine, which was an object of profound veneration throughout the valley. When, on S-chanf declaring for the Reformation, the aged tree was felled, its fall was probably a greater wrench with the past than any thesis or formula of faith. What echoes of old rites, what ghosts of forgotten creeds, may have haunted the shade of its sombre foliage! That its sacred character was originally connected with St. George is most unlikely; it was more probably a relic of a faith and worship to which St. George was as of yesterday, and which primitive Christianity recognized as too deeply rooted in the popular imagination to be lightly discarded. There was a large humanity in those early missionaries that went for much in their success. They would not rudely cut away props on which men's souls had leaned, but left them to stand while they might, consecrated to a new significance. Some better thing might be reserved for the succeeding time, but without them it was not to be made perfect.
Soon after this the road crosses the Sulsanna, coming from its cascaded valley, and the changing character of the scenery ahead reminds us that we are nearing the end of the upper valley of the Inn. A mile beyond Capella, in a green basin below the road, is Sinuos-chel, the last hamlet, a few picturesque houses, one of them quaintly frescoed, with a demure little church. The valley narrows to a ravine; the Inn whitens to a torrent as it rages down the gorge that it has cut for itself through the bar of schist that once dammed it into a lake; two bridges, one in stone upon the present road, the other the historic wooden Punt Ota on the grass-grown road above, span the foaming yellow brook that is the immemorial boundary of the Upper Engadine.
IV
THE LOWER ENGADINE
The division of the Engadine into Upper and Lower is not a piece of arbitrary map-making. We seem to pass into a new country when, leaving the broad upper valley, lying wide-stretched to the sky, where only human supervision prevents the Inn spreading out into lakes and marshes, we go down into the deep trough bordered by picturesque peaks and ridges, where the river that has so long been the companion of the road flows far below it between steep walls of rock. And not only does the scenery change, but the climate, the flora, the very dialect of the people and their character in history is different.
Descending from the Punt Ota to the roofed wooden bridge that takes us to the right bank of the Inn, we are hemmed in by heights in a land of clamant streams. The sombre severity of Upper Engadine scenery is broken into a romantic variety of detail: austere masses of mountain give place to splintered peaks and ragged ridges, their sides are more furrowed, a luxuriant forest vegetation clothes their steeper slopes, and the meadows on the gentler slopes are more interspersed with tilth.
