THE GREAT ST. BERNARD
BY ERNST VON HESSE-WARTEGG
WITH PICTURES BY ANDRÉ CASTAIGNE
IN a popular guide-book to Switzerland, it is stated that of all Alpine passes the Great St. Bernard is the least interesting. With this view the traveling public does not seem to agree, for the St. Bernard is crossed every year by more people than any other pass. On an average, twenty thousand annually arrive at the hospice on the summit, and nine tenths of them during the short summer season, from the beginning of July to the end of August, which means over three hundred daily.
Now, the whole district of the St. Bernard for many miles around possesses not one of the vast caravansaries characteristic of the picturesque mountain-tops in Switzerland,—indeed, not even a modest inn,—where tourists may find shelter for a few days. Why, then, should these armies of tourists invade the pass every summer, if it really offers little of interest?
To me, who have seen almost all the passes from one end of the Alps to the other, the trip over the Great St. Bernard was most enjoyable. Though the scenery may not be so beautiful as that of the St. Gotthard, for instance, it surpasses by far even that and most of the others in wild grandeur; for nowhere else in the Alps can be found mountains of bolder aspect and greater height. On the west, near the French boundary, I need only mention Mont Blanc and Mont Dolent; on the east, the glacier-covered peaks of Mont Velan, and the towering masses of the Grand Combin.
The valley of the river Dranse, which is followed by the traveler from Martigny, in the Rhone valley, to very near the summit, more than eight thousand feet above the sea, is full of romantic beauty and wildness, closed in by snow-covered mountains of fantastic shapes, their steep slopes partly covered with dark pine forests. Nestling on the rocks or sleeping in the valleys there are a few straggling settlements, with heavy-visaged natives, apparently of a different race from the Swiss, and entirely untouched by modern life. They live in tottering, wooden houses of the quaintest shapes, dark brown with age, and with wooden barns on stilts attached to them. Only a few villages, as Orsières, Liddes, and Bourg St. Pierre on the Swiss side, and St. Rémy on the Italian side, have stone houses along their narrow main thoroughfares.
During the summer months these roads are daily traversed by a motley crowd of tourists from all parts of the world, traveling on foot, or in private carriages or postal diligences, for the road is kept in capital order. Many wayfarers stop at the modest inns to rest and take a glass of kirsch, or even to seek shelter in the old houses when storms spring up suddenly, blowing furiously down the valleys; or they may repose on the rotten thresholds of the houses side by side with old matrons working at their spinning-wheels or with young girls knitting stockings, and converse with them in their French patois. The men are frequently employed as guides, and all are in constant intercourse with modern people from the great capitals of both continents, yet they do not depart from their ancient manners and ways.
The uncommon tenacity of these mountaineers is surprising, as the St. Bernard traffic is by no means new. True, the new carriage-road connecting central Europe, by way of Switzerland, with Italy was opened only in the first days of August, 1905, when the King of Italy himself was present, together with the authorities of the neighboring countries. But the St. Bernard has been a highway for thousands of years; it has seen many armies in war-time and many caravans with merchandise in times of peace. More than two hundred years before Christ, the great Hannibal passed over it with his Carthaginian legions; over the winding road which Hannibal had constructed Julius Cæsar led his Roman army down the valley of the Dranse for the conquest of Gallia and Germania. Emperor Augustus II improved and rebuilt the road, portions of which are still seen by the side of the new carriage-road wherever the latter has not been built on the foundation of the Roman highway.
At the beginning of the Christian era, the summit of the pass was crowned with a temple in honor of Jupiter, with rest-houses for travelers. Vestiges of this temple still exist, and in the large and well-stocked library of the present Hospice of St. Bernard the prior of the religious order in charge showed me a number of gold and silver coins, ex-voto figures, tablets, vessels, statuettes, and other objects found by the priests on the temple site. Indeed, owing to its situation on the direct geographical line between Italy and the North, the St. Bernard has been crossed in the course of time by more people than has any other pass.