There is an individual note, too, about the people, a suggestion of peculiar history that mocks us as we try to seize it. One of the earliest documents in a people's archives is ordinarily their language, but that spoken by Engadiners, the interesting form of Romanic known as Ladin, one of the many tongues evolved from late Latin, only takes us back to the Roman conquest of the Rhaetian upland that won the magniloquent admiration of Horace. In truth, the population is a human document, a palimpsest on which the Romans are but the latest and most masterful writers. Since, at the commencement of our era, the soldiers of Drusus and Tiberius wrote their enduring record, there have been only interlineations, mainly Teutonic, but many are the traces of antecedent scripts. Could we read below the prevailing Latin, we should probably find an elusive Keltic romance and enwoven with it perhaps a grave Etruscan legend, while scattered through all are undecipherable memorials of forgotten races and perished tongues. One ethnic wave after another has surged up that ancient highway from central Europe into Italy, and each as it passed or receded has contributed some component to the population.
But even the briefest sketch of the tangled history of the Engadine is beyond the scope of this booklet. I will stick to my little last, the graceless business of cutting away four out of every five pages of a previous work which the world has willingly let die.*
* This little book is mainly an abridgment of 'The Upper Engadine' (A. and C. Black, 1906).
Most travellers enter the Engadine by the tunnel under the Albula, having slowly wound up from Chur along a line that can hardly be surpassed in bold engineering and romantic variety. After a momentary halt at Spinas, we steam for a couple of miles down Val Bevers—very interesting to the geologist and botanist, the singular mixture of Alpine and meadow flora can be noted even from the rail—and reach the valley of the Inn at Bevers, where are some excellent specimens of the quaint old Engadine houses that have no small part in giving the valley its individual character. Away on the east stands Piz Esan, a bold, bare, dolomitic mass capped with Rhaetic, which is the south-western sentinel of the lately established National Park.
The rail turns right and left. Let us turn right to Samaden, administratively the chief village of the Upper Engadine. Here, too, are good examples of old Engadine architecture, including a house of the Plantas, one of the ancient families of the valley whose name is writ large on every page of its history. St. Peter's at Samaden enjoys a traditional primacy among the churches of the valley, and has many representative functions. It bears the date 1491, but this must refer to the rebuilding of the nave; the Romanesque tower must date from the tenth or eleventh century. Switzerland has old churches in plenty, but both care and neglect have combined to denude them of nearly all the interesting features that the belfries show they must have possessed. Protestantism is often blamed for this, but in artistic desert I do not know that there is much to choose between the two communions; such difference as there may be is expressed in two different estimates of George IV. Someone remarked that he had no taste. 'On the contrary,' said another, 'he's a great deal of taste, but it's bad.'
Piz Ot, near Samaden, is a superb point of view; the neighbouring Piz Padella is interesting botanically and geologically.
A mile beyond Samaden are Celerina and Cresta, now merged into one. Plate II. is a view on the way: in the background Piz Albriz, on the right a buttress of the sombre Piz Chalchaign, Pontresina in middle distance; nearer, standing lorn among the tombs on a little larch-clad hill, the ancient church of San Gian, which, except for funerals, is now disused; in the meadowed floor of the valley the Inn rests in quiet reaches after its furious descent from the lakes; its clear waters are joined by those of the Flaz from Val Bernina, turbid with 'the dust of continents to be,' and larger in volume than those of the stream in which after their confluence its name and individuality are lost; in the triangle between the rivers are the Samaden golf links. The most famous and fatal of toboggan runs descends between St. Moritz and Cresta.
Between Celerina and St. Moritz the rail threads the romantic Charnadura gorge above the raging Inn. At the upper end is a fine fall by which the water descends from the lake of St. Moritz, the lowest of the chain of blue-green lakes that form the characteristic charm of the upper reaches of the Engadine.
St. Moritz strikes one on arrival as a town of hotels. Happily, hotels are becoming sensible that they cannot afford to be unsightly outrages on the scenery that is their raison d'être. An example of this is the Hôtel Margna, designed by Signur Nichol Hartmann, in whom the Engadine possesses an architect imbued with the spirit of its characteristic and picturesque style of building, and with unfailing resource in adapting it to modern requirements and utilizing old construction. 'Only a matter of appearance,' said a practical companion when I was hesitating to enter a restaurant that disfigured a lovely nook of tarn and fell. It was said with a superior air of appealing to higher considerations, much as Solomon, in extolling the God-fearing woman, reminds us that favour is deceitful and beauty is vain. But, after all, what is scenery save a matter of appearance? In fact, Switzerland lives on appearances, and it is but business to take them into account in catering for the thousands who are attracted thither, not by the sterling virtues of the inhabitants, but by the superficial beauty of the land.
St. Moritz, seated on a spur of hill at the head of the lake, is the highest village in the Engadine, being some 200 feet higher than the Maloja Pass at the head of the valley. At the highest point is the old church, no longer used, whose interesting belfry seems leaning to its fall. The inestimable Swiss periodical Heimatschutz has pointed a salutary architectural moral by presenting this neglected tower with its simple proportions and vestiges of good work side by side with the modern parish church, a painstaking example of bad taste.