brieg—through the upper rhone valley by char to the rhone glacier—hôtel du glacier du rhône
happy the man whose wish and care
a few paternal acres bound;
content to breathe his native air
on his own ground.
whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
whose flocks supply him with attire;
whose trees in summer yield him shade,
in winter fire.—pope.
my first hour at brieg was spent in finding the single barber of the place. he was an idle fellow; and, having it all his own way, was, as it appeared, in the habit of devoting his mornings to society and amusement. his evenings, also, we may suppose, were not allowed, like his business, to run entirely to waste. at last by despatching three little boys, in different directions, to search for him, the finder to be rewarded with half a franc, i succeeded in bringing him back to his razors: mine were in the sac i had lost sight of through having lost sight of self. i had 141breakfasted; had had a little talk with two or three people in the hotel; had looked over the place—no great labour, but the conclusion to which the inspection brought me was that things appear to be better organised in it, and life to be pitched at a higher level, than in places of equal smallness amongst ourselves; had traced the saltine down to its junction with the rhone; had had some talk with a woman who was regulating the irrigation of a meadow; and had, having thus exhausted everything local, just retired to my room with a cigar and a book, when the blue boy burst open the door to report himself, like the armies of the old romans, before he had been expected. when i had left saas, the calculation had been that my wife and he would not reach brieg till the evening of this day; and that that might also be the time of my own arrival. we were both before our time. in such calculations, however, it is wise to allow some margin for ‘the unforeseen,’ and for the imperfections and uncertainties of the human machine. as it happened, had i not lost an afternoon at domo d’ossola—i shall for the future in all such deliberations, instinctively, eliminate irrelevant matter—i should have slept in brieg last night; though, indeed, under the circumstances, there would have been in that no particular gain.
during my absence my wife, and the little man, had made two excursions; one to the trift glacier 142with young andermatten for guide—the youth who in the first hours of the same day had carried my sac into macugnaga, and had then forthwith returned to saas; and the other, without a guide, to the mattmark see. knowing that their thoughts were turned in this direction, i had sent them a note from the mattmark see, pencilled on the night of the 5th, begging them not to attempt it, as the road was quite too rough and steep, in the latter part, for a child who had shown no great capacity for mountaineering. they did not get my note till they were on the way. my prudence, however, was no match for their enterprise. they managed to get to the mattmark see hotel; and, after dinner, to return the same evening to saas. as the little man was not ten years old, i accept the seven hours they were on foot as an augury of future endurance. i had almost thought, but i ought to have known better, that my note would have deterred them from going; and so, as i tramped along to ponte grande, i had not pictured them to myself, as now i did, toiling up the open mountain, and trudging along the lonely shore of the dark mattmark see, in the very centre of the alpine world, without another breathing thing in sight.
on the morning of this day (the 9th) my wife had walked from saas to visp, fourteen miles. the little boy had ridden. from visp to brieg they had come on in the diligence.
143september 10.—as it was thirty miles of, we may call it, high road, and that not particularly interesting, from brieg to the rhone glacier, for which we were bound, we took a voiture for the day. it was a three-horse affair. the driver was an ill-conditioned fellow; but not without some redeeming qualities, for he was the only one of his kind we met with throughout our excursion; and in the afternoon, when bonne main had become the uppermost thought in what mind he had, he showed some capacity for the rudiments of civilisation. at viesch he insisted on stopping for two hours; two hours that were an age, as there was nothing to see there, and nothing that we could do, having just breakfasted at brieg. it was an aggravation to see at least a dozen one-horse vehicles pass by without one of them halting. at munster we stopped again, for an hour and a half: but that was for dinner.
this was the first time i had been on wheels since getting upon my own legs at visp, on august 29. if we had had time enough, it would have been better to have walked this morning to the belle alp, giving to it one day; then on to the eggishorn, for the great aletsch glacier; two days more: and thus reaching the rhone glacier on the fourth day. but as we could hardly have spared the time for this, we were satisfied with what we did. to refuse to take a carriage on a carriage road, when much time is saved 144by taking it, and every object along the road can be seen as well from a carriage as on foot, is the pedantry of pedestrianism, which sacrifices the substance of one’s object for useless consistency.
in the upper part of the rhone valley there are considerable expanses of good grass land, particularly about munster; and the villages are numerous, and close together. each of these villages, as seen from a little distance, is a cluster of châlets, without any visible internal spaces, and without any apparent differences in their dimensions, or structure. they have no suburbs; there is no shading off; the bright green meadow is not gradually lost in the dark brown village. the houses do not gradually thin out in the fields. there are no fields; no detached houses. there is nothing but the expanse of grass, and these clusters of châlets, each like a piece of honeycomb laid upon it; and as distinct from each other as so many communities of bees. each village looks as if it were something that had dropped from heaven upon the grass; or like a compact, homogeneous excrescence upon the grass—a kind of brobdingnagian fungus. there is, however, one exception to the general uniformity of the excrescence, and that is the church tower. it stands above the rest, just as its shaft would, if the brobdingnagian fungus were turned upside down.
here you have, apparently without disturbing elements, as perfect a picture, as could now be seen, of 145the old rationale of religion; that it is a power among men, equally above all, interpreting to all their moral nature, and proclaiming the interpretation to all with an authoritative voice; and obliging all, by its constant authoritative iteration, to receive the proclamation; and to allow its reception to form within themselves, even if they were such as by nature would have been without conscience, the ideas and sentiments requisite for society. you see that this arcadian application of the function of religion may have been completely, and undisturbedly realised, in times past, in such isolated and self-contained villages; and that you are at the moment looking upon one in which it is still being realised to some extent. but you, who belong to the outside world, and know it, too; its large cities, its wealth, its poverty, its estranged classes, its mental activity, its social and controversial battle-shouts, its pæans of short-lived triumph, its cries of agonising defeat, its individualism, are aware that the day for such an exhibition of religion is gone by. your religion, if you are religious, will be in the form, and after the kind, needed now in that outside world. it will have stronger roots, that seek their nutriment at greater distances; a firmer knit stem, such as a tree will have that has grown up in the open, exposed to many gales; and more wide-spreading branches, such as those far-travelling roots, and that firm-knit stem, can alone support. and this will enable you to understand, 146and, if you do understand, will save you from despising, the religion of the alpine village before you: for you will find that it is the same as your own, only in embryo.
at oberwald, three and a half miles from the rhone glacier, the road leaves the grassy valley, and begins to ascend the zig-zags on the mountain-side. we here found the inclination to leave the carriage, and walk, irresistible. this road, which is carried over the furca pass to andermatt, is a grand achievement, for which the country, and those who travel in it, have to thank the modern, more centralised and democratised government. to it also their thanks are due for the new coinage, the most simple in the world, whereas the old cantonal coinages it superseded were the most confusing, and the worst; for the postal arrangements, which are very good; for the telegraph; and even for the railways. and, furthermore it must be credited with many advances, and improvements, that have been made in the swiss system of education.
the rhone glacier is a broad and grand river of ice. as it descends from the mountains on a rapid incline you see a great deal of it from below, and are disposed to regard it as worthy to be the parent of a great historic river. the rhone, however, itself issues from it, at present, in a very feeble and disappointing fashion. it slips out from beneath the ice so quietly, and inconspicuously, that you might pass by it, as 147doubtless many do, without observing it. it steals off, as if it were ashamed of its parentage; of which, rather, it might well be proud.
a word about the hôtel du glacier du rhône. it has plenty of pretension; but i never passed a night in a house i was so glad to leave in the morning. nowhere did one ever meet with such a plague of flies, flies so swarming, and so persecuting; and nowhere did one ever meet with such revolting stenches. what produces the stenches is what produces the flies; that is want of drainage, and the non-removal of unclean accumulations. at first, on account of the stench which pervaded the gallery—it was that of the first and chief floor, i refused to take the room i was shown to; and only, after a time, consented on the assurance that this matter could, and should be set right. this assurance was utterly fallacious; for, though i kept my window wide open, from the time i entered the room till i left it, i soon sickened, and was afflicted with uninterrupted nausea throughout the whole night. want of proper drainage, the cause of these horrors, is very common in swiss hotels. their pretentious character, which, with many thoughtless people, atones for much, ought, on the contrary, to intensify one’s sense of such shameful neglect. the larger the house is the larger are the gains of the landlord, and the greater is the number of people exposed to the mischief. i do not at all join in the cry 148against the rise in the charges of the monster hotels of southern switzerland. landlords, like other people, have a right to charge what they can get, when the commodity they deal in is much in demand. but, as their charges are certainly remunerative, there can be no reason for forbearing to denounce manifest and disgraceful disregard of necessary sanitary arrangements. i heard the next morning from one, who spoke from that day’s personal experience, that matters were no better at the neighbouring hotel of the grimsel hospice. strange is it that man should be so careless about poisoning the very air nature has made so pure!
