It was the first part of the afternoon when I got to a place called
Meiringen, and I thought that there I would eat and drink a little
more. So I steered into the main street, but there I found such a
yelling and roaring as I had never heard before, and very damnable it
was; as though men were determined to do common evil wherever God has
given them a chance of living in awe and worship.
For they were all bawling and howling, with great placards and
tickets, and saying, 'This way to the Extraordinary Waterfall; that
way to the Strange Cave. Come with me and you shall see the
never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar,' and so forth. So that my
illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very
quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as
to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this
vulgarity and beastliness.
If a man goes to drink good wine he does not say, 'So that the wine be
good I do not mind eating strong pepper and smelling hartshorn as I
drink it,' and if a man goes to read a good verse, for instance, Jean
Richepin, he does not say, 'Go on playing on the trombone, go on
banging the cymbals; so long as I am reading good verse I am content.'
Yet men now go into the vast hills and sleep and live in their
recesses, and pretend to be indifferent to all the touts and shouters
and hurry and hotels and high prices and abominations. Thank God, it
goes in grooves! I say it again, thank God, the railways are trenches
that drain our modern marsh, for you have but to avoid railways, even
by five miles, and you can get more peace than would fill a nosebag.
All the world is my garden since they built railways, and gave me
leave to keep off them.
Also I vowed a franc to the Black Virgin of La Delivrande (next time I
should be passing there) because I was delivered from being a tourist,
and because all this horrible noise was not being dinned at me (who
was a poor and dirty pilgrim, and no kind of prey for these cabmen,
and busmen, and guides and couriers), but at a crowd of drawn, sad,
jaded tourists that had come in by a train.
Soon I had left them behind. The road climbed the first step upwards
in the valley, going round a rock on the other side of which the Aar
had cut itself a gorge and rushed in a fall and rapids.
