CHAPTER XXXIII
[We Climb Far--by Buggy]
The beautiful Giesbach Fall is near Interlaken, on the other side ofthe lake of Brienz, and is illuminated every night with those gorgeoustheatrical fires whose name I cannot call just at this moment. This wassaid to be a spectacle which the tourist ought by no means to miss. Iwas strongly tempted, but I could not go there with propriety, becauseone goes in a boat. The task which I had set myself was to walk overEurope on foot, not skim over it in a boat. I had made a tacit contractwith myself; it was my duty to abide by it. I was willing to make boattrips for pleasure, but I could not conscientiously make them in the wayof business.
It cost me something of a pang to lose that fine sight, but I lived downthe desire, and gained in my self-respect through the triumph. I hada finer and a grander sight, however, where I was. This was the mightydome of the Jungfrau softly outlined against the sky and faintlysilvered by the starlight. There was something subduing in the influenceof that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet theimmutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feelthe trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharplyby the contrast. One had the sense of being under the broodingcontemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a spiritwhich had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages, upon amillion vanished races of men, and judged them; and would judge amillion more--and still be there, watching, unchanged and unchangeable,after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacantdesolation.
While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it,toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in theAlps, and in no other mountains--that strange, deep, nameless influence,which, once felt, cannot be forgotten--once felt, leaves alwaysbehind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing which is likehomesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning which will plead, implore,and persecute till it has its will. I met dozens of people, imaginativeand unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from farcountries and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year--they couldnot explain why. They had come first, they said, out of idle curiosity,because everybody talked about it; they had come since because theycould not help it, and they should keep on coming, while they lived, forthe same reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, butit was futile; now, they had no desire to break them. Others came nearerformulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect rest andpeace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and worries andchafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of theAlps; the Great Spirit of the Mountain breathed his own peace upon theirhurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them; they could not think basethoughts or do mean and sordid things here, before the visible throne ofGod.
Down the road a piece was a Kursaal--whatever that may be--and we joinedthe human tide to see what sort of enjoyment it might afford. It was theusual open-air concert, in an ornamental garden, with wines, beer, milk,whey, grapes, etc.--the whey and the grapes being necessaries of life tocertain invalids whom physicians cannot repair, and who only continue toexist by the grace of whey or grapes. One of these departed spirits toldme, in a sad and lifeless way, that there is no way for him to live butby whey, and dearly, dearly loved whey, he didn't know whey he did, buthe did. After making this pun he died--that is the whey it served him.
Some other remains, preserved from decomposition by the grape system,told me that the grapes were of a peculiar breed, highly medicinal intheir nature, and that they were counted out and administered by thegrape-doctors as methodically as if they were pills. The new patient,if very feeble, began with one grape before breakfast, took threeduring breakfast, a couple between meals, five at luncheon, three in theafternoon, seven at dinner, four for supper, and part of a grape justbefore going to bed, by way of a general regulator. The quantity wasgradually and regularly increased, according to the needs and capacitiesof the patient, until by and by you would find him disposing of his onegrape per second all the day long, and his regular barrel per day.
He said that men cured in this way, and enabled to discard the grapesystem, never afterward got over the habit of talking as if they weredictating to a slow amanuensis, because they always made a pause betweeneach two words while they sucked the substance out of an imaginarygrape. He said these were tedious people to talk with. He said that menwho had been cured by the other process were easily distinguished fromthe rest of mankind because they always tilted their heads back, betweenevery two words, and swallowed a swig of imaginary whey. He said it wasan impressive thing to observe two men, who had been cured by the twoprocesses, engaged in conversation--said their pauses and accompanyingmovements were so continuous and regular that a stranger would thinkhimself in the presence of a couple of automatic machines. One findsout a great many wonderful things, by traveling, if he stumbles upon theright person.
I did not remain long at the Kursaal; the music was good enough, but itseemed rather tame after the cyclone of that Arkansaw expert. Besides,my adventurous spirit had conceived a formidable enterprise--nothingless than a trip from Interlaken, by the Gemmi and Visp, clear toZermatt, on foot! So it was necessary to plan the details, and get readyfor an early start. The courier (this was not the one I have just beenspeaking of) thought that the portier of the hotel would be able to tellus how to find our way. And so it turned out. He showed us the wholething, on a relief-map, and we could see our route, with all itselevations and depressions, its villages and its rivers, as clearly asif we were sailing over it in a balloon. A relief-map is a great thing.The portier also wrote down each day's journey and the nightly hotel ona piece of paper, and made our course so plain that we should never beable to get lost without high-priced outside help.
I put the courier in the care of a gentleman who was going to Lausanne,and then we went to bed, after laying out the walking-costumes andputting them into condition for instant occupation in the morning.
However, when we came down to breakfast at 8 A.M., it looked so muchlike rain that I hired a two-horse top-buggy for the first third of thejourney. For two or three hours we jogged along the level road whichskirts the beautiful lake of Thun, with a dim and dreamlike picture ofwatery expanses and spectral Alpine forms always before us, veiled ina mellowing mist. Then a steady downpour set in, and hid everything butthe nearest objects. We kept the rain out of our faces with umbrellas,and away from our bodies with the leather apron of the buggy; but thedriver sat unsheltered and placidly soaked the weather in and seemedto like it. We had the road to ourselves, and I never had a pleasanterexcursion.
The weather began to clear while we were driving up a valley called theKienthal, and presently a vast black cloud-bank in front of us dissolvedaway and uncurtained the grand proportions and the soaring loftiness ofthe Blumis Alp. It was a sort of breath-taking surprise; for we had notsupposed there was anything behind that low-hung blanket of sable cloudbut level valley. What we had been mistaking for fleeting glimpses ofsky away aloft there, were really patches of the Blumis's snowy crestcaught through shredded rents in the drifting pall of vapor.
We dined in the inn at Frutigen, and our driver ought to have dinedthere, too, but he would not have had time to dine and get drunkboth, so he gave his mind to making a masterpiece of the latter, andsucceeded. A German gentleman and his two young-lady daughters had beentaking their nooning at the inn, and when they left, just ahead of us,it was plain that their driver was as drunk as ours, and as happyand good-natured, too, which was saying a good deal. These rascalsoverflowed with attentions and information for their guests, and withbrotherly love for each other. They tied their reins, and took offtheir coats and hats, so that they might be able to give unencumberedattention to conversation and to the gestures necessary for itsillustration.
The road was smooth; it led up and over and down a continual successionof hills; but it was narrow, the horses were used to it, and couldnot well get out of it anyhow; so why shouldn't the d
rivers entertainthemselves and us? The noses of our horses projected sociably into therear of the forward carriage, and as we toiled up the long hills ourdriver stood up and talked to his friend, and his friend stood up andtalked back to him, with his rear to the scenery. When the top wasreached and we went flying down the other side, there was no changein the program. I carry in my memory yet the picture of that forwarddriver, on his knees on his high seat, resting his elbows on its back,and beaming down on his passengers, with happy eye, and flying hair, andjolly red face, and offering his card to the old German gentleman whilehe praised his hack and horses, and both teams were whizzing down along hill with nobody in a position to tell whether we were bound todestruction or an undeserved safety.
Toward sunset we entered a beautiful green valley dotted with chalets, acozy little domain hidden away from the busy world in a cloistered nookamong giant precipices topped with snowy peaks that seemed to float likeislands above the curling surf of the sea of vapor that severed themfrom the lower world. Down from vague and vaporous heights, littleruffled zigzag milky currents came crawling, and found their way to theverge of one of those tremendous overhanging walls, whence they plunged,a shaft of silver, shivered to atoms in mid-descent and turned to an airpuff of luminous dust. Here and there, in grooved depressions among thesnowy desolations of the upper altitudes, one glimpsed the extremity ofa glacier, with its sea-green and honeycombed battlements of ice.
Up the valley, under a dizzy precipice, nestled the village ofKandersteg, our halting-place for the night. We were soon there, andhoused in the hotel. But the waning day had such an inviting influencethat we did not remain housed many moments, but struck out and followeda roaring torrent of ice-water up to its far source in a sort of littlegrass-carpeted parlor, walled in all around by vast precipices andoverlooked by clustering summits of ice. This was the snuggest littlecroquet-ground imaginable; it was perfectly level, and not more than amile long by half a mile wide. The walls around it were so gigantic, andeverything about it was on so mighty a scale that it was belittled, bycontrast, to what I have likened it to--a cozy and carpeted parlor. Itwas so high above the Kandersteg valley that there was nothing betweenit and the snowy-peaks. I had never been in such intimate relations withthe high altitudes before; the snow-peaks had always been remote andunapproachable grandeurs, hitherto, but now we were hob-a-nob--if onemay use such a seemingly irreverent expression about creations so augustas these.
We could see the streams which fed the torrent we had followed issuingfrom under the greenish ramparts of glaciers; but two or three of these,instead of flowing over the precipices, sank down into the rock andsprang in big jets out of holes in the mid-face of the walls.
The green nook which I have been describing is called the Gasternthal.The glacier streams gather and flow through it in a broad and rushingbrook to a narrow cleft between lofty precipices; here the rushingbrook becomes a mad torrent and goes booming and thundering downtoward Kandersteg, lashing and thrashing its way over and among monsterboulders, and hurling chance roots and logs about like straws. Therewas no lack of cascades along this route. The path by the side ofthe torrent was so narrow that one had to look sharp, when he heard acow-bell, and hunt for a place that was wide enough to accommodate a cowand a Christian side by side, and such places were not always to be hadat an instant's notice. The cows wear church-bells, and that is agood idea in the cows, for where that torrent is, you couldn't hearan ordinary cow-bell any further than you could hear the ticking of awatch.
I needed exercise, so I employed my agent in setting stranded logs anddead trees adrift, and I sat on a boulder and watched them go whirlingand leaping head over heels down the boiling torrent. It was awonderfully exhilarating spectacle. When I had had enough exercise, Imade the agent take some, by running a race with one of those logs. Imade a trifle by betting on the log.
After dinner we had a walk up and down the Kandersteg valley, in thesoft gloaming, with the spectacle of the dying lights of day playingabout the crests and pinnacles of the still and solemn upper realmfor contrast, and text for talk. There were no sounds but the dulledcomplaining of the torrent and the occasional tinkling of a distantbell. The spirit of the place was a sense of deep, pervading peace; onemight dream his life tranquilly away there, and not miss it or mind itwhen it was gone.
The summer departed with the sun, and winter came with the stars. Itgrew to be a bitter night in that little hotel, backed up against aprecipice that had no visible top to it, but we kept warm, and woke intime in the morning to find that everybody else had left for Gemmithree hours before--so our little plan of helping that German family(principally the old man) over the pass, was a blocked generosity.