Then
They Brought Me Food, And As I Did Not Know The Names Of The Different
Kinds Of Food, I Had To Eat What They Chose; And The Angel Of That
Valley Protected Me From Boiled Mutton.
I knew, however, the word
Wein, which is the same in all languages, and so drank a quart of it
consciously and of a set purpose.
Then I slept, and next morning at
dawn I rose up, put on my thin, wet linen clothes, and went
downstairs. No one was about. I looked around for something to fill my
sack. I picked up a great hunk of bread from the dining-room table,
and went out shivering into the cold drizzle that was still falling
from a shrouded sky. Before me, a great forbidding wall, growing
blacker as it went upwards and ending in a level line of mist, stood
the Brienzer Grat.
To understand what I next had to do it is necessary to look back at
the little map on page 105.
You will observe that the straight way to Rome cuts the Lake of Brienz
rather to the eastward of the middle, and then goes slap over
Wetterhorn and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called Ulrichen.
That is how a bird would do it, if some High Pope of Birds lived in
Rome and needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk; or if some
old primal relic sacred to birds was connected therewith, as, for
instance, the bones of the Dodo.... But I digress. The point is that
the straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over the lake, and
then over the Wetterhorn. That was manifestly impossible. But whatever
of it was possible had to be done, and among the possible things was
clambering over the high ridge of the Brienzer Grat instead of going
round like a coward by Interlaken. After I had clambered over it,
however, needs must I should have to take a pass called the Grimsel
Pass and reach the Rhone Valley that way. It was with such a
determination that I had come here to the upper waters of the Emmen,
and stood now on a moist morning in the basin where that stream rises,
at the foot of the mountain range that divided me from the lake.
The Brienzer Grat is an extraordinary thing. It is quite straight; its
summits are, of course, of different heights, but from below they seem
even, like a ridge: and, indeed, the whole mountain is more like a
ridge than any other I have seen. At one end is a peak called the 'Red
Horn', the other end falls suddenly above Interlaken, and wherever you
should cut it you would get a section like this, for it is as steep as
anything can be short of sheer rock. There are no precipices on it,
though there are nasty slabs quite high enough to kill a man - I saw
several of three or four hundred feet.
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