At last, one makes one's way into the Valley of Schöllenen, where the first ascent of the Saint-Gotthard commences. This valley is a notch two thousand feet in depth, cut out of a solid block of granite. The faces of the block form gigantic overhanging walls. The mountains no longer present aught save their flanks and their ardent and reddened crests. The Reuss thunders down its vertical bed, lined with stones. The ruin of a tower bears witness to a former time, even as nature here points to unremembered ages. Supported in the air by walls along the granite masses, the road, an immobile torrent, winds parallel to the mobile torrent of the Reuss. Here and there, stone-work vaults form a shelter for the traveller against the avalanche; one turns for yet a few more paces in a sort of tortuous gallery, and suddenly, at one of the volutes of the shell, finds one's self face to face with the Devil's Bridge.
The Devil's Bridge.
This bridge to-day intersects the arch of the new bridge, which is higher, built behind it and overlooks it; the old bridge thus debased no longer resembles anything but a short two-storeyed aqueduct. The new bridge, when one comes from Switzerland, conceals the cascade at the back. To enjoy the rain-bows and the leaping of the cascade, one must stand upon the bridge; but, when one has seen the Falls of Niagara, no water-fall remains. My memory is constantly contrasting my journeys with my journeys, mountains with mountains, rivers with rivers, forests with forests, and my life destroys my life. The same thing happens to me with respect to societies and men.
The modern roads, which the Simplon has taught us to make and which the Simplon effaces, have not the picturesque effect of the old roads. The latter, bolder and more natural, avoided no difficulty; they scarcely deviated from the course of the torrents; they rose and descended with the ground, surmounted the rocks, plunged into the precipices, passed under the avalanches, taking nothing away from the pleasure of the imagination and the joy of danger. The old Saint-Gotthard Road, for instance, was adventurous in quite a different way from the present road. The Devil's Bridge deserved its reputation, when, on approaching it, one saw the cascade of the Reuss above, and when it marked out an obscure arch, or rather a narrow path, through the gleaming spray of the fall. Then, at the end of the bridge, the road ascended perpendicularly to reach the chapel of which we still see the ruin. At least, the inhabitants of Uri have had the pious thought of building another chapel at the cascade.
Lastly, it was not men like ourselves who crossed the Alps in former days: it was hordes of Barbarians or Roman legions; caravans of merchants, knights, condottieri, freebooters, pilgrims, prelates, monks. Strange adventures were related. Who built the Devil's Bridge? Who flung the Devil's Rock into the Wasen Thal? Here and there rose castle-keeps, crosses, oratories, monasteries, hermitages, preserving the memory of an invasion, a meeting, a miracle, or a misfortune. Each mountain tribe kept its language, its dress, its manners, its customs. It is true, one did not find, in a desert, an excellent inn; one drank no champagne there; one read no newspapers; but, if there were more robbers on the Saint-Gotthard, there were less cheats in society. What a fine thing is civilization! I leave that "pearl" to the "handsome first lapidary."
Suwaroff[448] and his soldiers were the last travellers in this defile, at the end of which they met Masséna.
After passing out from the Devil's Bridge and the Urner Loch tunnel, one reaches the Urseren Thai, closed by redans like the stone benches of an arena. The Reuss flows peacefully in the midst of the verdure; the contrast is striking: it is thus that society seems tranquil after and before revolutions; men and empires slumber at two steps from the abyss into which they are about to fall.
At the village of Hospital commences the second ascent, leading to the summit of the Saint-Gotthard, which is overrun by masses of granite. Those voluminous, swollen, broken masses, festooned at their tops with a few garlands of snow, resemble the fixed and frothy waves of an ocean of stone upon which man has left the undulation of his road.
Au pied du mont Adule, entre mille roseaux,
Le Rhin, tranquille et fier du progrès de ses eaux,
Appuyé d'une main sur son urne penchante,
Dormait au bruit flatteur de son onde naissante[449].