The Switzers

Front matter

Class

Book ■ 1

J-

Preface

' In from Vevey ? ' hails an English voice at Neufchatel, where trains from Vevey and Lausanne meet trains from Bern and Zurich on their way to Paris.

'Yes; and you — from Bern?' replies a New- York voice.

' From Bern. You had a good time V

' Yes ; it rained Niagara ; but the lakes are lovely and the mountains absolutely grand.'

' Saw anything of the Switzers V

■ Eh ? You mean the boys who lead your mules, and cook your meals, and tie you up in ropes 1 Not much. Somehow, you hardly notice them. Why not ? Well, now you ask me why —

Vlll PREFACE.

I think it is because they are so quiet, and get on with what they have to do so well.'

c These people, when you come to know them, are as much worth study as their alps and lakes.'

' Indeed ! Then tell us all about them.'

6 St James's Terrace,

New Year's Day, 1872.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. MOUNTAIN MEN 1

II. ST. GOTHARD . . . . • 10

Chapter I. * Mountain Men

' We are a folk apart, we mountain men,' a Switzer says — a Switzer who has seen the world, and learnt in many lands to know the ways of man and nature — as we watch the sun go down behind a screen of domes and peaks. 'What say you, Sister Agnes ; are we not a folk apart ? '

A Nun from Sion, in the Canton Valais, with a ruddy cheek and pair of southern eyes, this Sister Agnes is a pilgrim of the season, on her way to Meinrad s Cell, the famous chapel of Our Lady of the Anchorites in Canton Schwyz. She is the chance companion of a day. We found her sitting at a wayside cross ; we took her up, for she was sore of foot and slight of frame. While we were

B dining at an inn, she wandered to the ice-eaves, lost her way, and fell. At length we found her, weak with pain, and brought her to this mountain-pass.

An Engineer from Bern, a man of thirty-five, with bearded chin, broad brow, and pair of cold blue eyes, the Switzer is on public duty in these mountains ; armed with rule and chain, with drill and mallet ; to interrogate these crests, to tap these rocks, to span each beck and fall, to note each curve of alp, and try if science cannot find some means of saving the great wreck of life and land below, by guiding, and controlling at their sources, the St. Gothard floods.

Fair types of South and North, of Celtic and Teutonic Switzerland, are these companions of the way ; the girl from Sion and the man from Bern ; one warm and feminine, with a drooping brow, and eyes that wait on nature and solicit saintly help ; the other strong and masculine, with head thrown back, and eyes that peer into the granite, and rely on man's own wit and strength. The girl, with rosary dangling from her girdle, is a servant of the Cross ; the man, with mallet hi his lifted . hand, a genuine son of Thor.

Too busy with her thoughts to answer him, the Nun, her eyes bent steadily on the west — a sky all amber, blush and blue— runs nimbly through her beads, while words, inaudible to man, appear to part her lips in prayer.

' Just note,' he adds, a touch of pity in his tone, 'how far we are a race apart. We have no kings, no subjects ; every man is free. We have no noble class, no pauper class, no standing army, no official church. We have no language of our own. We have no common code. We have no public debt. No man among us owns the best part of a canton, as a Russian prince the best part of a province, and an English duke the best part of a shire. Nine men in ten are owners of the soil they graze and plough.'

( You are a race apart ! '

' The earth on which we build and plant is not a stretch of vineyards, orchards, cornfields, pastures, dropping towards the sea on every side, with hardly any break of waste. We dwell among the crags and clouds. Our flats are mostly water and our slopes are mostly ice. Your plains lie basking in the summer, while our heights are swept by storm. Your river-beds are loam ; our river-beds are grit. You dreamers by the water-side have but to wait on Nature, while we

THE SWITZERS.

watchers by the mountain-side must take her gifts by force/

' It is by natural law that mountains make the mountain men ? '

' How else ? Man acts on Nature in his way, as Nature acts on man in her way, till the two great spirits of the earth grow like each other, even as a man and wife who live in peace grow like each other year by year. Among the vines and olives in Italian gardens men are soft, poetic, phosphorescent ; no less full of fire than they are fond of change. Among the pines and larches of Valaisian glaciers men are hardy, patient, dumb ; as slow to fume and flash as they are hard to bend and break.'

' Yea, some are hard to bend and break ! ' sighs Sister Agnes, who has told her beads, and now sits looking into space.

' As men in plains take up a drift and ply/ the Engineer goes on, ' so men on mountain-tops take up a drift and ply. Our drift is to be silent, sleepless, prompt ; for we lie down with danger at our doors, and we must rise to meet it when the moment comes. At dusk you see a cottage on a shelf of rock ; a hut in which the shepherd churns his milk ; a bit of soil in which he grows his

MOUNTAIN MEN.

herbs ; a patch of grass on which his heifers browse ; a simple cross at which his urchins pray. At dead of night a tremor passes through the mountain side ; a slip of earth takes place ; a cry which no one hears rings up to heaven. At dawn there is a lonely shelf of rock above, a desolate wreck of human hopes below/

' We strive too much/ again sighs Sister Agnes, bending to his tale : ' we fight for earthly things when we should give our minds to heavenly things. What are we doing in this Year of Pilgrimage ? Preparing to bore holes through living rocks, and ride to Rome in railway trains, when he who is the father of all Christian men is held a prisoner in his house by disobedient sons !'

' You folk who live in flats and hollows,' says the man of science, glancing at the Nun with curious smile, ' build towns, in which you dally with the graceful arts; while we, who cling like limpets to our rocks, raise chalets far and wide, from which we tend our flocks, in which we find a shelter from the fiery clouds. You have the fig, the citron, and the vine ; we have a treeless waste, with long, coarse grass, and mosses which the goat and chamois dare not crop. Dame Nature nurses us to different ends. To you is given the genius to construct the marble fane, the royal castle, and the fretful town ; to us, the timber chapel, the industrious household, and the lowly thorpe/

' A little lowliness of heart would do us good, 5 exclaims the Nun — the golden sunset on her face — ' if we could only learn to know our place, and give to Heaven the things of Heaven ! '

A smile that seems to say — if ever smile has meaning — ' I should like to kiss that nonsense from your lips,' plays round his delicate mouth and sparkles in his cold blue eyes. A moment afterwards he adds :

' In every zone, so far as I have seen, the mountain races are a free, a pastoral, an unchanging people. Men who come from cities find us rough, and fancy we are dull. All mountain races love the past ; suspect new words, new things, new men ; and harden like the hills in which their lives are spent. Their fundamental laws are few and slowly formed ; as slowly formed as they are stoutly held. A hill-tribe stands upon their ancient ways/

( God and His angels are the same for evermore/ responds the Nun.

( Turn where you list, and take the lesser with

MOUNTAIN MEN.

the greater heights ; the crests of Snowdon and Ben Nevis, through the Pyrenees to Monte Negro and the Julian Alps ; in every zone you find this rule — the mountain -people stand aloof from what is new and strange, while those who live on plains and by the sea, are apt to change their laws and creeds from year to year. The hill-tribes of Judea kept their covenant, while the tribes of Jordan and Esdraelon fell away. Those Medes who never changed a law, descended from the Caspian alps ; those Greeks who sought new things from day to day, were dwellers by the iEgean sea/

' You think the sea has much to do with man's desire for change V

' It is the cause. A man who looks on water grows like water, and a man who looks on alps grows like an alp/

'Yet, tell me, is it not the rule that alpine tops are barren of great men 1 '

' It is so. Let the worst be said that can be said in truth. No prophet ever comes from mountain-top ; no poet, thinker, warrior of the foremost order, comes from mountain-top. All gifts of hand and tongue, all services of art and science, are in less demand with us than in the streets

THE SWITZERS.

of busy towns, where every one is seeking after something new, and chiefly for his personal good. We know it ; nay, we make it so/

' You do not want great men in your republic ? '

' No ; we want good men, not great men. In our system, what you call great men can have no part ; they would disturb us, perhaps destroy us. A republic is a league of equals, not a company of general officers and men-at-arms. A great man is a monarch. If a Caesar should arise among us, we might have to kill him. In his craft, each man among you strives to be the first, and you applaud his efforts, even when they fail. You like a man to be a duke. Your maxim is, be first in your own class. Such maxims are not ours : we have no ducal spirit in these alps. We are a band of brothers, but without an eldest born. Our rule is — All for each, and each for all — the oath of Grutli — our unwritten code. All teaching has with us this end in view, that no one shall grow up into a man till he has learnt to rank the public weal above his private gain/

£ We set the peace of earth above the grace of Heaven,' observes the Nun.

'You train your youth,' the Bernese engineer proceeds, ' by contrast and contention ; we by

MOUNTAIN MEN.

sympathy and mutual help. You urge each scholar to surpass his fellows ; we forbid all effort to disturb the line. You like to see one lad above his class, for you have put your trust in dukes and chiefs. We notice such a thing with pain, and try to make our boys regard each other in the school-room as their right and left hand files. Your method brings out special strength, and makes one giant to a hundred dwarfs. Again, you take but scanty notice of the weak ; you dote on strong majorities : and push your brethren who are weak in number, to the wall. You have the conqueror's spirit in your camp. You seek opinions which are strong, and clothe those strong opinions with the garb of public law. We have a tender feeling for the weak. We break the force of our prevailing wind by groynes, by dykes, and by dividing walls ; that is to say, by giving to each Canton and each Commune in our countryseparate and substantial powers ; to every Canton equal votes, to every Commune local life. You see we are a folk apart ! '

Chapter II

The sun is sinking on a cloud of summits as we pace the road which, winding up the Siedeln alp, and vaulting over by the Furka, weds the two great valleys of the Rhone and Reuss, and brings the Simplon pass into connexion with the Gothard pass.

A mist is rising in our front from horn and glacier, from the Grimsel ridges, from the Gelmer snow-fields, from the Handeck falls, a mist which swells the solar disk and turns the flame to fire. Athwart this thickening haze the light is flashing into lengths and streams, and the white clouds above these lengths of light are rolling into curves and crowns. The colours melt and deepen as we gaze. A moment since the tints were amber, rose, and blue ; but while we speak that amber burns to gold, that pink grows crimson, and that blue is purple, brown and black. Afar off,

ST. GOTHAED.

in the Bernese Oberland, two pyramids of earth, — the Schreck-horn and the Finster Aar-horn, — part these ever- widening waves ; two dark and mighty cones, which tower above the highest wreaths of cloud.

Our right is bounded by the Ehone glacier; a scarp of frozen ice ; here rough with shales of slate, there dark with drifts of dust. So near us lies this shining fall that we can peer into the rents and watch the play of green and rosy light within them. Down below, the surface of the glacier has been smoothed and rounded by the noon-day heat ; along our level it is jagged and broken by the midnight chill. A ravine passes to our left — a sombre ravine, which ascends the ridge on which the Muttbach feeds * and over this dark parting of the ridges rise the Mutt-horn, Shaf-berg, Tell Alp, Saas-horn; while beyond these peaks, and partly hidden from our sight, extend those granite walls which press the summer back upon Italian lakes. Below these masses, in the groove between the Mutt-horn and the Grimsel, flow the waters of the Rhone — here lost to sight among the rocks, there flooding out among the trees and fields — past Oberwald and Obergestelen, then through

THE SWITZERS.

long green reaches, lit with roof and spire — sweet notes of life and home in the stern desert of an alpine night. Up north and west, above the Grimsel, spread the crests and gulfs to which no spring, no autumn, ever comes ; a realm where it is always either frost or fire ; where chain is laid on chain, and peak is piled on peak ; with domes and falls of ice, with sweeps and drifts of snow, and pinnacles of rock too sharp for either flying mist or driving rain to clutch. Beyond the Grimsel stretch the Gauli glacier, the lesser and the greater Grindelwald glaciers, the Kander glacier, the two Aar glaciers, the Lotschen glacier, the Miinster glacier, and the Aletsch glaciers, hanging on the sides and dripping at the feet of secondary alps ; while high above these seas of ice roll up vast fields of granulous snow, too high for sun to melt ; and over these white fields, the humps and teeth of Jungfrau, Wetter-horn, and Monsch, with yon twin pyramids of earth, the Schreck-horn and the Finster Aar-horn, which divide the flashing lines of light — as though they stood in arms, two mountain kings, to guard their brides and captives from a bold, crusading sun.

Yet nobler than such wintry masses, and

ST. GOTHAKD.

to larger use and purpose, swells the group of heights on which we stand — the crown of the St. Gothard chain, the central range of Europe, where her valleys run to meet each other, whence her rivers rise and flow to east and west, and over which the Frank and Teuton pass to Lombardy, while the Italian climbs towards Germany and France.

This central group of the St. Gothard chain, Hke other mountain systems, has her trough, her platform, and her cardinal peak.

Her trough is Urseren — the Uri valley — once an alpine lake, like that of Wallenstadt in form and size, but lying in a loftier bed. The lowest hamlet in this hollow stands four thousand and six hundred feet above the sea. A green but -treeless basin, into which the snow comes down with the September chills, and nestles in the clefts and gullies till the latest day of June, this trough is watered by the Reuss, a stream which, rising near the Furka, brawls past Be Alp, Hospenthal, and Andermatt, until it issues from the trough near Teufelstein. Some firs creep meekly up St. Ann's — an alp round which the last few flights of the St. Gothard road wind up — but they are dwarfed in size and thinned

14 THE SWTTZERS.

in mass by the exceeding cold. Some herdsmen, guides, and muleteers, who live by aiding people on their way, have built in Urseren the thorpes in which a passenger finds food and fire.

filer platform is not sharply marked by nature ; for the ridges flow into each other, and the ravines break these ridges here and there — as at St. Gothard, Six Madun, the Devil's Bridge, and Langis Grat ; but still, an oval, somewhat roughly drawn, with Re Alp for a central point, would sweep the edges of this platform. Draw a line from Rhone-stock by the Gersten-horn, across the valley of the Rhone to Saas-horn and Lucendro, round the Lago Sella to Six Madun, and thence to Toma, Aldez, Siiisen, Teufelstein, and by the Batzberg and the Spitzberg, through the Winter glacier to the Rhone-stock. In this oval, seven miles wide and fourteen long, are crowded peak, and source, and pass. The Rhone wells out below the Galen-stock ; the Rhine flows downward from the Toma lake ; the Reuss goes rattling past the Siedeln Alp ; the Toccia starts beneath the Saas-horn ; the Ticino drops from Lago Sella. All the greater lakes are fed from this one crown of earth ; Lake Constanz from the

ST. GOTHARD.

Six Madun ; Lake Leman from the Galen-stock • Lago Maggiore from the Sasso di Gottardo. (Three drops of rain, delivered from one drifting cloud, might fall into the Rhone,^ the Toccia, and the Rhine, and after filtering through Lake Leman, Lago Maggiore, and Lake Constanz, might run forward on their several ways into the sea, past Avignon, Cremona, and Cologne.

Her cardinal peak is Galen-stock — the peak now towering on our right — a fount of light and beauty in this sombre realm, which ancient shepherds, coming up the valleys of the Rhone and Reuss in search of fortune, called the Pillar of the Sun. He is the Saul of the St. Gothard group — above the tallest of his brethren : Gersten-horn, Lucendro, Mutt-horn, Spitz-berg, Six Madun — though all these mountains are of Anak breed. Three glaciers hang about his hoary neck and shiver down his sturdy sides ; the Tiefen glacier on his northern flank, the Siedeln glacier on his southern flank, and the Rhone glacier (which has many feeders) on his western flank. These glaciers drip by different ravines, and descend to different seas. Ab ove his summit floats a canopy of cloud, from under which at times leap fire, and wind, and hail, those rival demons of

THE SWITZEKS.

this upper air, which shake and daze the earth in their plutonic and magnetic strife. About his feet, low down among the ruts and wrecks of ice, lie caves of wondrous beauty and uncounted wealth. Three years ago a cave was entered by this Tiefen glacier, when the noblest crystals in the world were found. The rock was topaz. Fragments lay about in heaps, each broken piece a hundred pounds, two hundred pounds, in weight. Some fifteen tons of topaz were removed from this great hiding-place of nature in a single year. What sage can count the marvels yet in lurking near this pillar of the Sun ?

There — spent at last — the fiery orb is gone ! domes of cloud are rising round his couch. A faint green tinge still charms the upper sky, and specks of silver touch the highest peaks ; but all the ravines at our feet are veiled, and all the secondary alps are lost to sight. At such a time one feels how poets in the guise of shepherds, with an eye on straying goat and heifer, learned to call this central point of their converging tracks the pillar of the Sun. This peak is still a coronet of fire.

Far down, hi either of the valleys in our front and rear, as far as Biel in front, as far as Ander-

ST. GOTHARD.

matt in rear, the herdsmen raise their eyes at sunset and at sunrise towards this signal in the clouds, the first to catch, and last to hold, that radiance which is light and life to man. At Biel you see the villagers come out, long after sunset in their narrow trench, to watch the glowing tints die off this point, and augur from the depth of gold the fortunes of another day. At Andermatt the rustics turn to it at dawn, while yet the roadway up the Ober Alp, the ruined tower of Hospenthal, the fringe of forest on St. Ann s, are buried in profoundest gloom. Above Re Alp and Bulen-stock there is a flash, a star, a comet, which expands and colours to a pinnacle of flame. It is the pillar of the Sun, the central peak of the St. Gothard group.

c

Chapter III. Peopling The Alps

e We mount and mount/ the Bernese adds as we return into the chalet, numb with cold, but deep in the great question as to how these alps are crossed and kept ; ' we rise each year, and soon the summits will be crowned/ Excelsior !

A man who finds a pass and plants his foot upon a peak, secures that pass and peak. A second follows where he led ; his trail is worn into a track. Then guides and porters come to ply their trade. A shed is built, a cross set up ; in time that shed becomes an inn, that cross becomes a spire. A deed once done is easy to repeat. It is the first step only that is hard to face. When Whymper scaled the Matter-horn, and fortune took four lives as fine, all Europe shuddered at the tragic tale ; and he who came down victor from the

PEOPLING THE ALPS.

rocks, would never front that task again. Yet he had shown the way, and three days after his ascent, and while the bodies of the dead were still unfound, four guides went up and gained the perilous cone. Next year carne two ascents, and in the one next after, five. Now boys and girls go up that cone in sport. A week ago, two English damsels clambered to the ledge from which poor Hudson fell. Already there are hints of future roads. One track is worn from Zermatt up the German front ; another from La Breil up the Italian front. Two-thirds of the way from Zermatt to the peak, a hut has been erected by the guides. You find there wood and wraps, with pans for warming food, and- shelter from the sudden storm. A few years more, and what is now a lonely hut will be a pleasant, populous inn.

A man in search of food and fuel gains some ledge, and caps it with his hut and fence. The scrub is fired around him, and the tarns are drained of their abundant ooze. (As Nature owns her master, she retires before him step by step. The glacier drips and wastes, the snow-fields melt to mist, the larches creep beyond his axe, and plum and walnut flourish where those larches lately grew.

THE SWITZERS.

Not long ago, you found the firs and larches at Sierre, in Canton Valais ; now vou have to seek for them at Brieg. A vine will sprout to-day where pines would hardly cling some years ago. At Pontresina corn is grown ; at Chiamut corn is also grown ; and yet the lower of these alpine hamlets stands as high above the sea as Cader Idris would be piled upon the head of Skiddaw.

Two hundred years since Eigi was an unknown solitude. Old writers never name this mountain, though its beauty was the same in olden times as now ; from base to kulm a dream of scenic and botanic wealth ; with snowy ridge and slope above, with oleander, fig, and balsam near the water edge. At Yitznau, in the first week of October, when the Biirgen-stock and Ennet-horn are white with winter, grapes are hanging from the frames, and flowers and fruits are in Sicilian wealth and waste. On shelves of rock grow walnuts, and above them fir and larch. At Kaltbad there are ferns ; and over Kaltbad sloping grassy alps ; and then a stretch of snow-field to the kulm, with its unrivalled view of mountain, lake, and plain. Yet all this beauty is for man a thing of yesterday. The first who mentions Bigi was a seeker after rare and lovely

PEOPLING THE ALPS.

plants. He only wandered at her base and by the edges of her shining lakes. He left the Scheideck and the kulm alone, as heights too poor for him to name. Some cattle, straying up the hill, drew shepherds after them, when huts were built for shelter, and a citizen of Arth, a hamlet on Lake Zug, erected for these lonely men the Chapel of Our Lady in the Snow. This chapel of Our Lady made the Bigi famous ; for miraculous cures were heard of far and wide ; and pilgrims came from Altdorf and Luzern to pray for health. A flight of thirteen stages — as on Carmel — led from Unteres Dachli to Our Lady's shrine ; at every stage a pilgrim knelt and prayed, and took in mountain air, and felt himself a better man. In time, the cloisters, and the hospice, and the chapel of St. Malchus, were erected on the Rigi slopes ; but years on years elapsed before a hut was built for travellers near the kulm. Not until 1848 had any one the courage to erect an inn. This inn was but a small affair, and yet the landlord's neighbours thought him mad. His house was much enlarged in 1856 ; and fifteen years later we are driving railway engines almost to the chapel of Our Lady in the Snow.

' You mark/ observes the Engineer, ' how we

THE SWITZERS.

are climbing up. No sooner is that railway engine up the Bigi than a plan is laid for throwing it across the ridge, and down the other face, to Goldau, with a branch to Arth. Five years ago the passage from Luzern to Meyringen was by a bridle-path across the Briinig ; now there is a mountain-road, with busy traffic, and a scatter of good houses to the highest woods. But we are not content with such a road. We mean to have a railway line across the Briinig pass, and perhaps a branch to that black lake in which, according to the legend, Pilate drowned himself. Already surveys have been made ; a year hence men will be at work with spade and pole ; and in a little while the iron horses will be tearing past Brienz and Unterseen for Thun. You know the Schynige Platte below the Faul-horn, with its famous glimpse of Lauterbrunnen and the Grindenwald. It is a level higher than the Bigikulm. Among my papers are the plans for a new railway to the summit of this Platte, and surveys for a branch line to the Faul-horn ! Three years hence that line will be at work/

' Ah me ! ? sighs Sister Agnes, shrinking from the Engineer, whom she is ready to regard as one possessed, ' we kick this dust about our

PEOPLING THE ALPS.

feet and fancy we are taking heaven by storm ! More fit that we should fall upon our faces and confess our sins !'

( You nurse the spirit of your pilgrimage/ I venture to remark.

' Do not/ she says, with downcast eyes, ' believe that all of us are mad with this vain pride of life. Some souls are found, even yet, who will not sell their birthright in the future heavens for such a mess of herbs. A short time hence will be our Festival of the Rosary. Come over into Canton Schwyz, and meet the pilgrims at Our Lady's Shrine/

: In no long time/ retorts the Engineer — as fervent in his science as the Sister in her faith — ' our ridges will be pierced, our lakelets will be drained. At three great centres we are tapping through the granite walls ; the Spltigen, the Lukmanier, the St. Gothard ; in a dozen years the railway trains will roll from Hamburg and Vienna through these mountains on their way to Rome. Here runs the road from London to Brindisi, Cairo, and the Indian seas. A straight line drawn from London to Bologna passes through the hospice of St. Gothard, and a bee line is the pathway for an iron horse. Already