I Was Therefore Dry, Ready And Contented When I Entered By Mid Morning
The Curious Town Of Brienz, Which Is All One Long Street, And Of Which
The Population Is Protestant.
I say dry, ready and contented; dry in
my clothes, ready for food, contented with men and nature.
But as I
entered I squinted up that interminable slope, I saw the fog wreathing
again along the ridge so infinitely above me, and I considered myself
a fool to have crossed the Brienzer Grat without breakfast. But I
could get no one in Brienz to agree with me, because no one thought I
had done it, though several people there could talk French.
The Grimsel Pass is the valley of the Aar; it is also the eastern
flank of that great _massif,_ or bulk and mass of mountains called the
Bernese Oberland. Western Switzerland, you must know, is not (as I
first thought it was when I gazed down from the Weissenstein) a plain
surrounded by a ring of mountains, but rather it is a plain in its
northern half (the plain of the lower Aar), and in its southern half
it is two enormous parallel lumps of mountains. I call them 'lumps',
because they are so very broad and tortuous in their plan that they
are hardly ranges. Now these two lumps are the Bernese Oberland and
the Pennine Alps, and between them runs a deep trench called the
valley of the Rhone. Take Mont Blanc in the west and a peak called the
Crystal Peak over the Val Bavona on the east, and they are the
flanking bastions of one great wall, the Pennine Alps.
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