Their sufferings are sometimes intense. The climate is so severe, and their duties are so arduous, that their constitutions would soon be broken down if they were not allowed to recuperate temporarily at their house in Martigny, their places being taken by other members of this brave and devoted brotherhood.
On the St. Bernard summit the seasons are unknown. Winter is, so to speak, perpetual, without spring or autumn or summer, the only indication of our warm seasons being the melting of the snow, which sometimes drifts about the three tall stone buildings to a height of forty feet. The cold is often twenty degrees below zero Fahrenheit and has been in one instance twenty-nine degrees. When I stayed at the hospice early in August, the lake behind it was frozen over during the night, and the monks told me that there have been years when the ice on its surface did not melt.
Under these conditions, I was not surprised to find among the occupants of the hospice mostly young men, only one of them being over fifty, and he had spent twenty consecutive years on the St. Bernard. The hardest labors of these pious men are during the winter months, notably in November and February, when numerous poor laborers from Italy venture to cross in search of work. Unfamiliar with the hardships and dangers they have to face, they ascend from Aosta over St. Rémy, plodding wearily through the deep snow, which obliterates all traces of the road, sometimes covering even the telegraph-poles. At last their strength gives out, or they are buried under an avalanche, or they lose their way and cannot proceed from sheer exhaustion. Those who do not perish owe their lives to the zeal of the monks and the alertness of the famous dogs of St. Bernard.
Day after day all the monks are out on their beat through the “Valley of Death” on the north side opening immediately below the hospice, and the steep snow-fields to the south, each accompanied by a servant and a dog. They search the surroundings, where every dell, every rock is familiar to them, with powerful field-glasses. Breaks or dark spots are detected at once on the white surface, but the surest and never-failing discoverers of unfortunate victims are the dogs. Their extraordinary fine scent indicates to them the exact direction in which it is necessary to search, and the men follow on snow-shoes. Arrived at the supposed spot, the dogs begin to bark and to scratch in the snow, the men take to their shovels, and soon the poor wayfarer is discovered. If life has fled from him, the body is carried up to the hospice and placed in the little low, desolate stone hut standing at a short distance from the buildings, the abode of the dead. In this “morgue” rest the victims of the Alps till their bodies crumble to ashes. There is no other way of disposing of the dead, since for miles about the hospice not enough soil can be found to furnish a grave.
Drawn by André Castaigne.
INTERIOR OF THE CHAPEL IN THE HOSPICE
At the time of my visit, only one body of the preceding winter was lying among the remains of the victims of former years. The others who had been found had been restored to life.
Many thousands have been rescued from certain death, principally owing to the cleverness of the dogs, carefully trained to their work. According to the register kept at the hospice, these dogs, originally a cross between Newfoundland and Pyrenean, were employed first in the fifteenth century, and the present breed is undoubtedly descended from them. To preserve it pure, several dogs are also kept at the two other settlements of the brotherhood, the Simplon hospice and Martigny. The expediency of this is shown by the accident of 1825, when nearly all the dogs at the St. Bernard hospice, together with three lay brothers, perished in a terrible avalanche on the Swiss slope near the present “Cantine de Proz,” the highest inn on the way to the hospice, kept by the Swiss Government as a postal station. Only two or three dogs survived, and they perpetuated the race.
Now there are about fifteen dogs at the hospice. They are objects of much petting on the part of travelers, especially ladies, to which they indulgently submit. In appearance they differ considerably from what we picture them to be. They are much smaller than the St. Bernard dog of other countries, but heavier-set and stronger. The hair is white, coarse, and tight to the skin, with large yellow or reddish-brown spots, the chest and the lower part of the body being always white. The long tail is heavy and shaggy, the neck short-set and uncommonly strong, carrying a large head, with the muzzle short and broad. The front teeth are mostly visible, and the dogs would look rather ferocious without the intelligent and withal docile expression of their large, bright eyes. Many of them have been reproduced on postal cards, for sale in the large reception-room, one of the few rooms furnished with a stove. The prior, who is also Swiss postmaster, told me that on the average one thousand postal cards, mostly with pictures of the dogs, are daily sent “with hearty greetings” to all parts of the world. But in the “season,” as many as fifteen hundred have been mailed in a single afternoon, especially when snow-storms or rain keep the tourists indoors with nothing to do.