If any body wanted to stop in the wildest and lonesomest place he
could find in the Alps, so as to be saturated with a sense of
savageness and desolation, I would recommend this hotel. The chambers
are reasonably comfortable, and the beds of a good quality - a point
which S. and I tested experimentally soon after our arrival. I thought
I should like to stay there a week, to be left there alone with
Nature, and see what she would have to say to me.
But two or three hours' ride in the hot sun, on a mule's back,
indisposes one to make much of the grandest scenes, insomuch that we
were glad to go to sleep; and on awaking we were glad to get some
dinner, such as it was.
Well, after our dinner, which consisted of a dish of fried potatoes
and some fossiliferous bread, such as prevails here at the small
hotels in Switzerland, we proceeded onward. After an intolerably hot
ride for half an hour we began to ascend a mountain called the
Forclaz.
There is something magnificent about going up these mountains,
appalling as it seems to one's nerves, at particular turns and angles
of the road, where the mule stops you on the very "brink of forever,"
as one of the ladies said.
Well, at last we reached the top, and began to descend; and there, at
our feet, as if we were looking down at it out of a cloud, lay the
whole beautiful valley of the Rhone. I did not know then that this was
one of the things put down in the guide book, that we were expected to
admire, as I found afterwards it was; but nothing that I saw any where
through the Alps impressed me as this did. It seemed to me more like
the vision of "the land that is very far off" than any thing earthly.
I can see it now just as distinctly as I saw it then; one of these
flat, Swiss valleys, green as a velvet carpet, studded with buildings
and villages that looked like dots in the distance, and embraced on
all sides by these magnificent mountains, of which those nearest in
the prospect were distinctly made out, with their rocks, pine trees,
and foliage.
The next in the receding distance were fainter, and of a purplish
green; the next of a vivid purple; the next, lilac; while far in the
fading view the crystal summits and glaciers of the Oberland Alps rose
like an exhalation.
The afternoon sun was throwing its level beams in between these
many-colored ranges, and on one of them the ruins of an old Roman
tower stood picturesquely prominent.
