The Spell of Switzerland

Back of Martigny-ville along the Dranse is a broad field with morasses; it belonged to the Abbey of the Great Saint-Bernard. It had little value even as pasturage as its surface was covered with all sorts of rubbish and scattered stones. In 1874 the artist, Raphael Ritz, was making excavations near the so-called trésor de la Deleyse. There was found the relics of a small amphitheatre with bones and teeth of wild animals which had been slaughtered there “to make a Roman holiday.” “Aux Morasses” gave up the remains of a colossal bronze statue with gilded garment, a huge oxhead, a laurel wreath with fine bronze leaves, smashed with blows from an ax and then sunk into the thick miry soil. It is supposed that early Christians may have treated these objects in such a manner because they regarded them as idols.

In 1895 systematic excavations were instituted and a wall sixty-three by thirty-one meters was discovered. It was the remains of a basilica which served as a trading-station or custom-house, while in front of it was the forum where once mingled Roman merchants, citizens, soldiers, officials, priests and natives. It was supported by thirteen large columns. On both sides of the square or piazza were narrow wings, each furnished with stalls for merchants and smiths. In front ran the Roman road, meant to last for all time; it is still here and there visible running up the valley. It was paved with large irregular stones. Along the southwest wing were a row of columns with enormous pedestals. The great building was divided into three halls. One ending in a semicircle, like the letter D, had a place for the statue of a god. In the north central wall were eight pilasters and in the niches skeletons were found.

Next to this was still another large building and beyond it was a private dwelling with marble floor, marble dado and painted walls. Any number of coins dating from the year one till three hundred and fifty a. d. were picked up. These buildings were covered with hollow tiles; and the hewn stones for the columns, the door-sills, the curb-stones, were all brought from the Jura. Some of the marble came from Italy, some from Greece; there was even porphyry from Egypt. All about Martigny were found these wonderful remains of Roman occupation. One capital of a temple was of colossal dimensions. They had drinking-water piped to the city.

At La Batiaz, where stands the old castle that belonged to the Bishop of Sion, but was dismantled nearly four hundred years ago, stood a Roman watch-tower and not far away the graveyard was found among the vineyards of Ravoire. We saw an inscription which was intensely interesting: —

SALVTI.SACRVMFOROCLAVDIENSES.VALLENSESCVMT.POMPONIOVICTOREPROC.AVGVSTORVM

This signified that Titus Pomponius had, with the aid of the inhabitants, erected an altar to the Goddess of Safety. It dated back to the time of Marcus Aurelius, the good emperor. At that day Wallis (which it must be remembered is still preserved in the very name Vaud) was united under the same government with the Graian Alps. The same Titus Pomponius, together with his family, is found mentioned on an altar to the god Sylvanus as a thank-offering for the conclusion of his term of service, and it preserves a poem addressing the god as hiding in the foliage of the sacred ash-tree, as the protector of the lofty green luxuriant forest. It thanks him for having brought them from a far land and over the immovable mountains of the Alps amid the sweet perfumes of the bushes; it says: – “I performed the duties of the office conferred upon me. Lead me and mine back to Rome, and let us under thy protection cultivate Italian fields. I vow that I will plant a thousand mighty trees to thee.”

The Bishop Theodorus lived here in 381 a. d. The Théodule pass is named for him. He built a Christian basilica on the site of the heathen temple. But the Dranse overflowed it and covered it deep with mud and stones. Fire finished it, and now all that is left of it is ashes, broken tiles, melted glass and bits of metal.

Martigny is another of the towns in which I should like to spend a month. There are so many excursions to be taken from it as a centre – up the Arpille, up to the Pierre à Voir from which one looks down into two river valleys and across to the Bernese and Valaisian Alps – a splendid view; to La Dent de Morcles, the Pissevache cascade and dozens of other trips for pleasant days.

The geology here also is particularly interesting. Here the Rhône once more proved that might made right. He turned at almost right angles and stole into the valley belonging to the Dranse. Here the glaciers of the ice-age polished the rock wall – “the most remarkable example of ice-action in the Alps.”

Above Martigny we find the real and only genuine valley of the Rhône: elsewhere it is a robber.

Still ascending the Rhône valley we reached Saxon with its picturesque ruined castle, and then crossing the Ardon and the Morge beyond Riddes reached the medieval city of Sion just at sunset. Approaching the famous old city it was like a dream – the castles on the hills so kindly left by the river; high up, the Château de Tourbillon, where for five hundred years the princely bishops used to luxuriate, looking down on a world of beauty.

Across a valley on a hill only twenty meters lower stands the old castle of Valeria taking the place of an earlier Roman fort; its towers glittered in the sunlight’s last rays. We went to it in the morning, and, on paying a fee, were admitted to the Thirteenth-Century church of Notre Dame, with its quaint Romanesque capitals, and Seventeenth-Century choir-stalls elaborately carved. And, of course, being devoted to antiquities, we looked into the cantonal museum next door. We went also into the Fifteenth-Century Gothic cathedral with its tower six hundred years older; and admired the carved ceiling in the splendid hall of the Super-saxo mansion.

CHAPTER XIX

A DETOUR TO ZERMATT

WHOM should we meet at the hotel at Sion but my friend, Lady Q. She immediately recognized me, and I had the pleasure of presenting to her my niece and her husband. She was on her way to Zermatt and she advised us to leave the car at Visp and take the State Railway over to the region of the Matterhorn. That name amused Will. He asked Lady Q. if we should not be permitted to see the original Vill of the Visp there. Of course Lady Q., being English, saw his joke in a second and thought it very bad, as we all did. The result of it was that we asked her to join us on this trip. But she was expecting friends from Geneva and therefore was obliged to forego the pleasure. So we started off without her, but we adopted her advice. Just above Sion we had a good view of the gorge through which rushes the turbulent Borgne coming down from the wild Val d’Hérens. We crossed the Liène at Saint-Léonard, and just as we reached Sierre we saw a company of pedestrians starting off for the pleasant plateau of Montana. I have seen it since standing up a thousand meters above the Rhône valley, with its charming lakes reflecting the mountains beyond and its splendid view of Mont Blanc and the Weisshorn and the heights between them.

Sierre has its interest to the student of geology; for all around it can be seen the remains of a tremendous rock-fall. It extended from Pfyn almost to the mouth of the Liena. It dammed up the valley and imprisoned the Rhône. But the Rhône, who had learned what he could do with his mighty forces, grew more and more indignant; he swelled his haughty breast, and, when he knew the right moment had come, he put forth his energy and burst his way through. All the forces of the sky helped him; the rains came to his aid, and the tempests and the sun beat down on the snow-fields and contributed to his release. What a sight it must have been when the rushing flood once more went roaring down the valley! What billows, what sheets of sparkling foam, what crashing of overturned forests and jangling of monstrous boulders rolled along to be the wonder of succeeding ages!

Perhaps the pretty little ponds near Sierre are the relics of this prehistoric freshet. All these regions too were haunted by the ancient Kelts. Many warriors were killed hereabouts and were buried in graves even now occasionally detected. I saw a beautifully designed bronze sword which was found in one on the hill of Tevent.

Visp has three names: in French it is Viège. We admired the view up the valley with its great snow pyramid, the Balfrin, more than twice as high as Mount Washington. From here on Teeth become Horns; there are any number of them: Schwarzhorn and Weisshorn and Rothorn, and Faulhorn, and Spitzhorn and Magenhorn and Trifthorn and Mittaghorn and Hohberghorn and the Brunegghorn and Täschhorn – all of them giants covered with eternal snow.

We left the car at a hotel garage and took the train. Up, up we climbed with the Visp River brawling at our left. Then crossing it we reached Stalden between the two branches of the Visp and with superb views. Here we were told was about the limit of the grape-culture. One would not think that fruit could ripen so high above the sea. The grade now and then becomes so steep that the rack and pinion has to help the engine; there are viaducts – the one over the Mühlebach being fifty meters high – and tunnels and long passages close to the precipices, now running straight for a short distance, then winding past sharp corners. The gorges of Kipfen and Selli are cluttered with gigantic blocks of gneiss, over and among which the Visp makes its precipitous way. Saint-Niklaus is almost sixteen hundred feet higher than Visp, and Randa is more than a thousand feet higher than Saint-Niklaus.

From Randa if one wanted to stop there is a convenient approach to the Dom, which is said to be the highest mountain belonging entirely to Switzerland. Its top is four thousand five hundred and fifty-four meters high and it affords one of the grandest views in the Alps. There are, however, others much more difficult; the Edelspitze on the Gabelhorn, though four thousand feet lower, was not conquered until 1904; Professor Tyndall was the first to climb the Weisshorn. But that was in 1861. He was nearly killed by the bombardment of rocks from above.

Above the little hamlet of Täsch the road, after following the right bank of the Visp, crosses it near the châlets of Zermettje, and, gradually mounting high and higher above the river, it enters an extraordinarily narrow defile, and, though every one is forewarned, at the end of it comes the grand surprise – at the right the first glimpse of the Matterhorn, or, as good Swiss like best to call it, Le Mont Cervin – just a tantalizing glimpse, no more; but who would not recognize it, standing up isolated and solitary like an enormously exaggerated Indian arrow-head, or rather the flint from which it comes?

If there is any one thing I detest in travelling it is tunnels; they are marvellous; the skill of man in digging them, in so calculating their direction and their level that though men start from opposite sides of a high mountain, as they did at Mont-Cenis, at the Loetschberg, at the Simplon, and at all the other great mountain-bores, is beyond all praise; but practically they shut one off from the light and the wide horizons.

We were landed safely at Zermatt and for two days we had most perfect views of that wonderful valley and its king of mountains. Here is the story of its conquest. Until 1858 it was regarded as unapproachable – in every sense of the word. But man is never satisfied with the eternal negative. For seven years the battle was waged, and, at last, in July, 1865, Edward Whymper, Lord Francis Douglas, David Hadow and Charles Hudson, with three guides, succeeded in attaining the top. Whymper related the story of the campaign in a volume.

A high price was paid for the success. Every one knows that it is easier to climb than it is to descend. This is particularly true of mountain-excursions. There is a buoyant exhilaration in mounting, especially for the first time; but in addition to the physical difficulties of the descent there is the anticlimax which is moral; so that often the last miles of the descent are sheer agony. “While during an enthusiastic ascent the hope of a steadily nearing goal lifts the climber over all difficulties, in descending only the difficulties remain, while the fatigue increases and the interest diminishes.”

In descending the Matterhorn Hadow lost his footing, and tumbled against Croz, who, not being prepared, lost his. They took with them Lord Francis and Hudson. Had not the rope to which they were attached broken probably Whymper and the two guides Taugwalder, father and son, would have all lost their lives. The survivors could see the doomed four struggling vainly to stop the terrible glissade. Then they disappeared over the precipice. Three of them fell on the Cervin glacier four thousand feet below; Lord Francis Douglas’s body was never recovered. Bringing the tragedy in their hearts the other three safely reached Zermatt.

Three days later Jean Antoine Carrel and Jean Baptiste Bich reached the top from the Italian side and they were followed by Professor Tyndall, who went up by the Breuil route and came down to Zermatt. He also wrote an account of it and one of the pics was named for him. That was in 1868, and since then, though it is still the most dangerous of the larger peaks, it has been attained by hundreds. In 1867 a young girl, the daughter of J. B. Carrel, reached within less than a hundred meters of the top, and the point where she was blocked has been named for her Le Col de Félicité. Miss Lucy Walker, of England, was the first woman to master the peak. She went up from the Zermatt side, returning the same way, July 22, 1871. Miss Brevoort, an American, was the first woman to make what is called the “traverse” from Switzerland to Italy; that was also in 1871.

The year before, Javelle, with only one guide, Nicolas Kubel, reached the top by remarkable good fortune, for no other ascent was made that whole year. At the edge of the Gorner glacier they found a bunch of Alpine roses, the highest arborescent vegetation they encountered. Like many other persons, Javelle supposed that Mont Cervin was “a simple giant pyramid unique in the boldness of its form, the hugeness of its bulk, the pride of its isolation.” It is really, as Mr. Coolidge says, “the butt end of a long ridge,” and not an isolated mass rising above a glacial plateau. When they reached the arête connecting the Hörnli with the base of the Cervin they rested for an hour.

When they reached the first wall of the pyramid a fierce north wind began to blow, but they scaled the rocks and then had to walk along an icy arête. When they got about half-way “the sound of a dull rumbling” reached them from above. It was the jealous Spirit of the Mountain who was trying to bombard them with stones. They had just time to flatten themselves against the crag, which, fortunately, hung over them. Great rocks and boulders bounded within a meter of their heads; for half an hour the baffled Spirit kept up his attack and then gave it up.

Visitors like ourselves, looking up to the Cervin, see a long couloir which looks smooth and easy. Javelle says that it is cut up by veritable ravines plowed by avalanches or worn in the strata of the rock, so that the whole surface is far more rugged than it appears. The adamantine gneiss with strata of serpentine schist wears but slowly; but sometime the proud apex will be undermined and fall with a world-shaking crash.

After they had climbed with much difficulty and fatigue for about an hour they discovered the hut which some enterprising guides had constructed of planks, walled up with stones. For a hundred feet the precipice is perpendicular and to reach it they had to cling with their fingers to the roughness of the rock. It is at a height of more than thirty-eight hundred meters.

They reached it, and, while the guide was preparing supper, Javelle went out to a hump in the crag to enjoy the spectacle: —

“My eyes turned first of all toward the summit of Le Cervin. The tawny head of the colossus rose just above us. Through the crystalline air of those upper regions it seemed scarcely five hundred feet away and the rock stood out in startling ruggedness. The mighty flank of the pyramid, tremendously seamed and naked, lay before me: Below lay the lonely white plains of the Furgg and the Théodule glaciers; in front beyond them Monte Rosa tossed up its magnificent cluster of peaks…

“From the hut on Le Cervin no disrespect to Monte Rosa is possible. The true sovereign is restored to rank and position. The mountain is seen to be vast, mighty, magnificent as it is not from any other point of view; its rivals are humbled, and its summit, gracious and noble rather than haughty, shines unquestionably the highest of all in the sky.”

Then came the sunset: —

“The vast triangular shadow of Le Cervin stretched before us across the Furgg and the Théodule glaciers as far as the Gorner glacier. At our left the Zermatt valley already lay in a bluish darkness; it seemed as if the night were emerging from those depths. A moment later and the whole amphitheater of snow-covered cliffs shone with a divine glory. Only two tints, but those graduated in a thousand delicate shades, were used in this mighty painting. One was a soft deep azure, the azure of the invading shadows; the other a pure ethereal gold flung forth by the last rays of the sun. In the sky the two tints intermingling, shed a splendid violet reflection on the zenith.”

A slight hint at the dangers to which the climber is exposed was afforded just before they had left the couloir for the shoulder. A projecting knob on which they had set foot slipped away and went bounding down the side a thousand meters: “The Cervin counted one more wrinkle!”

When they reached the arête they had their last chance for resting: – “Before us towered the escarpment of rugged red rocks and above them the last heights of Le Cervin, the crest of which was invisible. On both sides of the arête were blood-curdling abysses. Seated on a narrow ridge, surrounded by precipices and near the scene of one of the most tragic of Alpine accidents, we passed in silence one of those moments that refuse to be forgotten. About a hundred meters higher, on the steep slope, must have occurred the fall of the four unfortunates who were dashed to pieces during the first ascent. I tried to revisualize that dreadful drama. I failed; the abyss had resumed its eternal silence. What meant to it the fall of those four men, full of life, youth and intelligence? Only the least of the avalanches that furrow it in a season.”

The two men roped themselves together, and using the extremest care to get a foothold either in the ice or on bosses of the rock, they mounted to the very edge of the vertical wall which measured the whole height of the Cervin. The summit, says Javelle, is only the culminating point of a sharp, notched arête about a hundred meters long. On the south side is a frightful precipice out of sight. “It is impossible to stand on the slender summit; its crest is too sharp and the wind playing over it usually crowns it with needles of ice. With his ax Knubel made a hole in the ice a little lower down. This was our seat, and what monarch ever had such a throne?

“All around the summit lay an immense bottomless void, above which stood the circle of the giants of the Valais – Monte Rosa and her proud rivals, the Mischabel, the Weisshorn, the Rothorn, La Dent Blanche; then all the Alps with their maze of gigantic ramifications from the Viso group to considerably beyond the Ortler, an innumerable army of glittering or somber peaks, the immense undulating line of which was lost in the blue at the two ends of the horizon. To the north extended the unbroken profile of the Jura; then beyond, merging into the sky, the hills of France toward the Haute-Champagne or the Franche-Comté.”

After half an hour on the peak, Javelle and his guide started back and in safety reached the valley of Zermatt. Since then one might almost say familiarity with that wonderful peak has bred contempt. Javelle, himself, in a later article describing another ascent, complains: – “To-day alas! for the true lovers of the Cervin, the whole of this side of the noble mountain seems to be profaned.”

Already it has been planned to build a railway up Le Cervin. The day of conquering mighty peaks in the Alps is past. Scarcely one is now left for the adventurer to grapple with and the Alpine guides are finding profitable fields in the vastly mightier mountains of the Himalaya or the Canadian Rockies.

For the old and the lazy, for delicate women, the electric cars that climb Mont Blanc, and so many others of the Alpine mountains, give the effect of the height and the enormous stretch of horizon; but still, even though the Alpine Club builds shelters and attaches aerial ladders and climbing chains, there is something exhilarating in the actual climbing of lofty mountains, and that the danger is not wholly eliminated is shown by the reports that come every summer of some unfortunate parties who try to “negotiate” those jealous giants of the skies. And when one is standing or sitting on one of their peaks one can say with John Stuart Blackie: —

“I love the eye’s free sweep from craggy rim;I love the free bird poised at lofty easeAnd the free torrent’s far up-sounding hymn;I love to leave my littleness behindIn the low vale where little cares are great.”

CHAPTER XX

THE VALE OF CHAMONIX

WE saw everything that there was to see at Zermatt – the relics of the early climbers in the little museum; the pathetic graveyard where the victims of their mad ambition are commemorated, and the Imfeld relief-maps of the surrounding region. Here I had my first experience in what one might call mountain-climbing by proxy; we took the electric train up to the Gornergrat. Sir John Lubbock says: —

“It is impossible to give any idea in words of the beauty of these high snow-fields. The gently curving surfaces, which break with abrupt edges into dark abysses or sink gently to soft depressions or meet one another in ridges, the delicate shadows in the curved hollows, the lines of light on the crests, the suggestion of easy movement in the forms, with the sensation of complete repose to the eye, the snowy white with an occasional tinge of the most delicate pink, make up a scene of which no picture or photograph can give more than a very inadequate impression, and form an almost irresistible attraction to all true lovers of nature.”

It is perfectly true: words fail to express one’s feelings.

Just earth and rocks and snow and ice and light and shade. What power must have been exerted to squeeze those mighty strata and tip them up and bend them over and hurl them against one another. Everything is relative, and I find I can imagine what an ant might feel when climbing over the furrows of a plowed field. The earth itself seems so small when poised in the universe – just a microscopic atom, and the mightiest mountains are only the wrinkles of an apple. Yet here we were ten thousand feet above the sea with a vast panorama of mountains on every side. More than a score of Horns, besides Jochs and Cime and Grats and Gabeln; twenty of them are more than four thousand meters high; Monte Rosa topping them all with her four thousand six hundred and thirty-eight meters. Somehow mountains do not sound so high when expressed in meters, but one does not belong to Metrical Societies without being consistent! A dozen immense glaciers pour their cracking, dazzling, monstrous streams of liquid solidity down, for ever changing yet, like rivers of waters, for ever the same. Year after year appear the great crevasses where the glacier tumbles over a precipice and becomes a cataract of ice, yet remains the same. Verily the mountains themselves, seen by the great eye of the Father of Time are moving; he sees that the whole crest of the Alps is slowly moving northward: this is proved by the fact that one side is steeper than the other.

It is rather amusing to see how many persons have been disgusted with their first view of a glacier. They are covered, in many cases, with mud, and look dirty and unkempt. They plow out the rocks; great showers of boulders fall down on them, and especially where they have flowed down to the melting level and begun to deposit their freight, making what are called terminal moraines, they are not white and glittering. But, seen from a distance, the glaciers of the high Alps are most impressive. And to think that a very slight lowering of the average temperature of the year would bring these great cold snaky monsters over the habitations of men again. The ice-age might once more be renewed and wipe out our civilization.