I felt so cheered, and I will certainly follow his lead. I wrote a long, explanatory letter to the Cynic, an apologetic one to Rose, and a picture postcard, promising a longer communication, to Mother Hubbard, and then turned in and slept like a top.
CHAPTER XXII
THE HEATHER PULLS
The sensation of dazzling light and the sound of tinkling silvery bells woke me early, and I jumped up and looked out of the window. The bells belonged to a herd of goats which were being driven slowly to pasture. Stalwart guides, with stout alpenstocks in their hands, and apparently heavy cloth bags upon their backs, were standing near the hotel and on the station platform. Tourists of both sexes were getting ready to accompany the guides, and there was much loud questioning and emphatic gesticulation on both sides. A few mules stood near, presumably for the use of the ladies. It was all too provocative, and I flung myself into my clothes and went out.
If I were writing a guide book I could wax eloquent, I believe, in my descriptions of Zermatt; but I am not, and I therefore refrain.
The squire was delighted with my enthusiasm, and insisted upon my "doing" the place thoroughly. He did not rise until noon, so that my mornings were always free, and the Greys took me all the shorter excursions. One day we had quite a long trip to the top of the Gorner Grat, whence one gets an unrivalled view of snow peaks and glaciers; and from thence we walked to the Schwarz See, where the Matterhorn towers in front of you like an absolute monarch in loneliness and grandeur.
Oh, those ravines, where the glacier-fed streams rage furiously in their rapid descent! Oh, those gorges, in whose depths the pent-up waters leap onward between high walls of rock to which the precarious gangway clings where you stand in momentary fear of disaster! Oh, those woods, with the steep and stony footpaths, and the sudden revelation of unsuspected objects: of kine munching the green herbage; of the women who tend them, working industriously with wool and needle; of wooden châlets with stone-protected roofs; of trickling cascades and roaring waterfalls!
Oh, those pastures, green as emerald, soft as velvet, where one might lie as on a couch of down and feast the eye on mountain and vale and sky, and never tire! Oh, those sunsets, and particularly the one which struck my imagination most, when the sky was not crimson, but topaz-tinted, and the huge cloud which hung suspended from the neck of the Matterhorn was changed in a second into beaten gold, as though touched by the rod of the alchemist; when the Breithorn flushed deep for a moment at the sun's caress, and the land lay flooded in a translucent yellow haze that spread like a vapour over the works of God and man, and turned mere stones and mortar into the fairy palaces of Eastern fable!
It seems now like a wonderful dream, but, thank God! it is something much less transient. For a memory is infinitely better than a dream: the memory of an experience such as this is a continual feast, whereas a dream too often excites hopes that may never be realised, and presents visions of delight which are as elusive as the grapes of Tantalus.