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 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 Grat) to the southward and the sun, the clouds lifted
and wreathed up backward and were gone, and where there had just been
fulness was only an immensity of empty air and a sudden sight of clear
hills beyond and of little strange distant things thousands and
thousands of feet below.
LECTOR. Pray are we to have any more of that fine writing?
AUCTOR. I saw there as in a cup things that I had thought (when I
first studied the map at home) far too spacious and spread apart to go
into the view. Yet here they were all quite contained and close
together, on so vast a scale was the whole place conceived. It was the
comb of mountains of which I have written; the meeting of all the
valleys.
There, from the height of a steep bank, as it were (but a bank many
thousands of feet high), one looked down into a whole district or
little world. On the map, I say, it had seemed so great that I had
thought one would command but this or that portion of it; as it was,
one saw it all.
And this is a peculiar thing I have noticed in all mountains, and have
never been able to understand - - namely, that if you draw a plan or
section to scale, your mountain does not seem a very important thing.
One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to
feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in
one's hand - yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to
us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at
the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its
greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in
theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height to the
distances one views from them, they ought to claim no such effect, and
that they can produce that effect is related to another thing - the way
in which they exaggerate their own steepness.
