The Path to Rome (22 page)

You will observe that I have marked five clefts or valleys. A is that of the
Aar,
and the little white patch at the beginning is the lake of Brienz. B is that of the
Reuss.
C is that of the
Rhone;
and all these three are
north
of the great watershed or main chain, and all three are full of German-speaking people.

On the other hand, D is the valley of the
Toccia,
E of the
Maggia,
and

118

MORE GEOGRAPHY

F of the
Ticino.
All these three are
south
of the great watershed, and are inhabited by Italian-speaking people. All these three lead down at last to Lake Major, and so to Milan and so to Rome.

The straight line to Rome is marked on my map by a dotted line ending in an arrow, and you will see that it was just my luck that it should cross slap over that knot or tangle of ranges where all the rivers spring. The problem was how to negotiate a passage from the valley of the Aar to one of the three Italian valleys, without departing too far from my straight line. To explain my track I must give the names of all the high passes between the valleys. That between A and C is called the
Grimsel;
that between B and C the
Furka.
That between D and C is the
Gries
Pass, that between F and C the
Nufenen,
and that between E and F is not the easy thing it looks on the map; indeed it is hardly a pass at all but a scramble over very high peaks, and it is called the Crystalline Mountain. Finally, on the far right of my map, you see a high passage between B and F. This is the famous St Gothard.

The straightest way of all was (1) over the
Grimsel,
then, the moment I got into the valley of the Rhone (2), up out of it again over the
Nufenen,
then the moment I was down into the valley of the
Ticino
(F), up out of it again (3) over the Crystalline to the valley of the
Maggia
(E). Once in the Maggia valley (the top of it is called the
Val Bavona),
it is a straight path for the lakes and Rome. There were also these advantages: that I should be in a place very rarely visited--all the guide-books are doubtful on it; that I should be going quite straight; that I should be accomplishing a feat, viz. the crossing of those high passes one after the other (and you must remember that over the Nufenen there is no road at all).

But every one I asked told me that thus early in the year (it was not the middle of June) I could not hope to scramble over the Crystalline. No one (they said) could do it and live. It was all ice and snow and cold mist and verglas, and the precipices were smooth--a man would never get across; so it was not worth while crossing the Nufenen Pass if I was to be balked at the Crystal, and I determined on the Gries Pass. I said to myself: 'I will go on over the Grimsel, and once in the valley of the Rhone, I will walk a mile or two down to where the Gries Pass opens, and I will go over it into Italy.' For the Gries Pass, though not quite in the straight line, had this advantage, that once over it you are really in Italy. In the Ticino valley or in the Val Bavona, though the people are as Italian as Catullus, yet politically they count as part of Switzerland; and therefore if you enter Italy thereby, you are not suddenly introduced to that country, but, as it were, inoculated, and led on by degrees, which is a pity. For good things should come suddenly,

119

THE GRIMSEL BEGINS

like the demise of that wicked man, Mr
(deleted by the censor),
who had oppressed the poor for some forty years, when he was shot dead from behind a hedge, and died in about the time it takes to boil an egg, and there was an end of him.

Having made myself quite clear that I had a formed plan to go over the Grimsel by the new road, then up over the Gries, where there is no road at all, and so down into the vale of the Tosa, and having calculated that on the morrow I should be in Italy, I started out from Brienz after eating a great meal, it being then about midday, and I having already, as you know, crossed the Brienzer Grat since dawn.

The task of that afternoon was more than I could properly undertake, nor did I fulfil it. From Brienz to the top of the Grimsel is, as the crow flies, quite twenty miles, and by the road a good twenty-seven. It is true I had only come from over the high hills; perhaps six miles in a straight line. But what a six miles! and all without food. Not certain, therefore, how much of the pass I could really do that day, but aiming at crossing it, like a fool, I went on up the first miles.

For an hour or more after Brienz the road runs round the base of and then away from a fine great rock. There is here an alluvial plain like a continuation of the lake, and the Aar runs through it, canalized and banked and straight, and at last the road also becomes straight. On either side rise gigantic cliffs enclosing the valley, and (on the day I passed there) going up into the clouds, which, though high, yet made a roof for the valley. From the great mountains on the left the noble rock jutted out alone and dominated the little plain; on the right the buttresses of the main Alps all stood in a row, and between them went whorls of vapour high, high up--just above the places where snow still clung to the slopes. These whorls made the utmost steeps more and more misty, till at last they were lost in a kind of great darkness, in which the last and highest banks of ice seemed to be swallowed up. I often stopped to gaze straight above me, and I marvelled at the silence.

It was the first part of the afternoon when I got to a place called Meiringen, and I thought that there I would eat and drink a little more. So I steered into the main street, but there I found such a yelling and roaring as I had never heard before, and very damnable it was; as though men were determined to do common evil wherever God has given them a chance of living in awe and worship.

For they were all bawling and howling, with great placards and tickets, and saying, 'This way to the Extraordinary Waterfall; that way to the Strange Cave. Come with me and you shall see the never-to-be-forgotten Falls of

120

THE LOUD NOISE

the Aar,' and so forth. So that my illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this vulgarity and beastliness.

If a man goes to drink good wine he does not say, 'So that the wine be good I do not mind eating strong pepper and smelling hartshorn as I drink it,' and if a man goes to read a good verse, for instance, Jean Richepin, he does not say, 'Go on playing on the trombone, go on banging the cymbals; so long as I am reading good verse I am content.' Yet men now go into the vast hills and sleep and live in their recesses, and pretend to be indifferent to all the touts and shouters and hurry and hotels and high prices and abominations. Thank God, it goes in grooves! I say it again, thank God, the railways are trenches that drain our modern marsh, for you have but to avoid railways, even by five miles, and you can get more peace than would fill a nosebag. All the world is my garden since they built railways, and gave me leave to keep off them.

Also I vowed a franc to the Black Virgin of La Delivrande (next time I should be passing there) because I was delivered from being a tourist, and because all this horrible noise was not being dinned at me (who was a poor and dirty pilgrim, and no kind of prey for these cabmen, and busmen, and guides and couriers), but at a crowd of drawn, sad, jaded tourists that had come in by a train.

Soon I had left them behind. The road climbed the first step upwards in the valley, going round a rock on the other side of which the Aar had cut itself a gorge and rushed in a fall and rapids. Then the road went on and on weary mile after weary mile, and I stuck to it, and it rose slowly all the time, and all the time the Aar went dashing by, roaring and filling the higher valley with echoes.

I got beyond the villages. The light shining suffused through the upper mist began to be the light of evening. Rain, very fine and slight, began to fall. It was cold. There met and passed me, going down the road, a carriage with a hood up, driving at full speed. It could not be from over the pass, for I knew that it was not yet open for carriages or carts. It was therefore from a hotel somewhere, and if there was a hotel I should find it. I looked back to ask the distance, but they were beyond earshot, and so I went on.

My boots in which I had sworn to walk to Rome were ruinous. Already since the Weissenstein they had gaped, and now the Brienzer Grat had made the sole of one of them quite free at the toe. It flapped as I walked. Very

THE SNOW BLINK

soon I should be walking on my uppers. I limped also, and I hated the wet cold rain. But I had to go on. Instead of flourishing my staff and singing, I leant on it painfully and thought of duty, and death, and dereliction, and every other horrible thing that begins with a D. I had to go on. If I had gone back there was nothing for miles.

Before it was dark--indeed one could still read--I saw a group of houses beyond the Aar, and soon after I saw that my road would pass them, going over a bridge. When I reached them I went into the first, saying to myself, 'I will eat, and if I can go no farther I will sleep here.'

There were in the house two women, one old, the other young; and they were French-speaking, from the Vaud country. They had faces like Scotch people, and were very kindly, but odd, being Calvinist. I said, 'Have you any beans?' They said, 'Yes.' I suggested they should make me a dish of beans and bacon, and give me a bottle of wine, while I dried myself at their great stove. All this they readily did for me, and I ate heartily and drank heavily, and they begged me afterwards to stop the night and pay them for it; but I was so set up by my food and wine that I excused myself and went out again and took the road. It was not yet dark.

By some reflection from the fields of snow, which were now quite near at hand through the mist, the daylight lingered astonishingly late. The cold grew bitter as I went on through the gloaming. There were no trees save rare and stunted pines. The Aar was a shallow brawling torrent, thick with melting ice and snow and mud. Coarse grass grew on the rocks sparsely; there were no flowers. The mist overhead was now quite near, and I still went on and steadily up through the half-light. It was as lonely as a calm at sea, except for the noise of the river. I had overworn myself, and that sustaining surface which hides from us in our health the abysses below the mind--I felt it growing weak and thin. My fatigue bewildered me. The occasional steeps beside the road, one especially beneath a high bridge where a tributary falls into the Aar in a cascade, terrified me. They were like the emptiness of dreams. At last it being now dark, and I having long since entered the upper mist, or rather cloud (for I was now as high as the clouds), I saw a light gleaming through the fog, just off the road, through pine-trees. It was time. I could not have gone much farther.

To this I turned and found there one of those new hotels, not very large, but very expensive. They knew me at once for what I was, and welcomed me with joy. They gave me hot rum and sugar, a fine warm bed, told me I was the first that had yet stopped there that year, and left me to sleep very deep and yet in pain, as men sleep who are stunned. But twice that

HEAD OF THE PASS

night I woke suddenly, staring at darkness. I had outworn the physical network upon which the soul depends, and I was full of terrors.

Next morning I had fine coffee and bread and butter and the rest, like a rich man; in a gilded dining-room all set out for the rich, and served by a fellow that bowed and scraped. Also they made me pay a great deal, and kept their eyes off my boots, and were still courteous to me, and I to them. Then I bought wine of them--the first wine not of the country that I had drunk on this march, a Burgundy--and putting it in my haversack with a nice white roll, left them to wait for the next man whom the hills might send them.

The clouds, the mist, were denser than ever in that early morning; one could only see the immediate road. The cold was very great; my clothes were not quite dried, but my heart was high, and I pushed along well enough, though stiffly, till I came to what they call the Hospice, which was once a monk-house, I suppose, but is now an inn. I had brandy there, and on going out I found that it stood at the foot of a sharp ridge which was the true Grimsel Pass, the neck which joins the Bernese Oberland to the eastern group of high mountains. This ridge or neck was steep like a pitched roof--very high I found it, and all of black glassy rock, with here and there snow in sharp, even, sloping sheets just holding to it. I could see but little of it at a time on account of the mist.

Hitherto for all these miles the Aar had been my companion, and the road, though rising always, had risen evenly and not steeply. Now the Aar was left behind in the icy glen where it rises, and the road went in an artificial and carefully built set of zig-zags up the face of the cliff. There is a short cut, but I could not find it in the mist. It is the old mule-path. Here and there, however, it was possible to cut off long corners by scrambling over the steep black rock and smooth ice, and all the while the cold, soft mist wisped in and out around me. After a thousand feet of this I came to the top of the Grimsel, but not before I had passed a place where an avalanche had destroyed the road and where planks were laid. Also before one got to the very summit, no short cuts or climbing were possible. The road ran deep in a cutting like a Devonshire lane. Only here the high banks were solid snow.

Some little way past the summit, on the first zig-zag down, I passed the Lake of the Dead in its mournful hollow. The mist still enveloped all the ridge-side, and moved like a press of spirits over the frozen water, then--as suddenly as on the much lower Brienzer Grat, and (as on the Brienzer