But I Doubted If They Ever Had Much Real Fun,
Outside Of The Mere Magnificent Exhilaration Of The
Tramp Through The Green Valleys And The Breezy Heights;
For They Were Almost Always Alone, And Even The Finest
Scenery Loses Incalculably When There Is No One To Enjoy
It With.
All the morning an endless double procession of mule-mounted
tourists filed past us along the narrow path - the one
procession going, the other coming.
We had taken
a good deal of trouble to teach ourselves the kindly
German custom of saluting all strangers with doffed hat,
and we resolutely clung to it, that morning, although it
kept us bareheaded most of the time and was not always
responded to. Still we found an interest in the thing,
because we naturally liked to know who were English
and Americans among the passers-by. All continental
natives responded of course; so did some of the English
and Americans, but, as a general thing, these two races
gave no sign. Whenever a man or a woman showed us
cold neglect, we spoke up confidently in our own tongue
and asked for such information as we happened to need,
and we always got a reply in the same language.
The English and American folk are not less kindly than
other races, they are only more reserved, and that comes
of habit and education. In one dreary, rocky waste,
away above the line of vegetation, we met a procession
of twenty-five mounted young men, all from America.
We got answering bows enough from these, of course,
for they were of an age to learn to do in Rome as Rome does,
without much effort.
At one extremity of this patch of desolation, overhung by bare
and forbidding crags which husbanded drifts of everlasting
snow in their shaded cavities, was a small stretch
of thin and discouraged grass, and a man and a family
of pigs were actually living here in some shanties.
Consequently this place could be really reckoned as
"property"; it had a money value, and was doubtless taxed.
I think it must have marked the limit of real estate
in this world. It would be hard to set a money value
upon any piece of earth that lies between that spot
and the empty realm of space. That man may claim the
distinction of owning the end of the world, for if there
is any definite end to the world he has certainly found it.
From here forward we moved through a storm-swept
and smileless desolation. All about us rose gigantic
masses, crags, and ramparts of bare and dreary rock,
with not a vestige or semblance of plant or tree or
flower anywhere, or glimpse of any creature that had life.
The frost and the tempests of unnumbered ages had battered
and hacked at these cliffs, with a deathless energy,
destroying them piecemeal; so all the region about
their bases was a tumbled chaos of great fragments
which had been split off and hurled to the ground.
Soiled and aged banks of snow lay close about our path.
The ghastly desolation of the place was as tremendously
complete as if Dor'e had furnished the working-plans
for it. But every now and then, through the stern
gateways around us we caught a view of some neighboring
majestic dome, sheathed with glittering ice, and displaying
its white purity at an elevation compared to which
ours was groveling and plebeian, and this spectacle
always chained one's interest and admiration at once,
and made him forget there was anything ugly in the world.
I have just said that there was nothing but death
and desolation in these hideous places, but I forgot.
In the most forlorn and arid and dismal one of all,
where the racked and splintered debris was thickest,
where the ancient patches of snow lay against the very path,
where the winds blew bitterest and the general aspect was
mournfulest and dreariest, and furthest from any suggestion
of cheer or hope, I found a solitary wee forget-me-not
flourishing away, not a droop about it anywhere,
but holding its bright blue star up with the prettiest
and gallantest air in the world, the only happy spirit,
the only smiling thing, in all that grisly desert.
She seemed to say, "Cheer up! - as long as we are here,
let us make the best of it." I judged she had earned
a right to a more hospitable place; so I plucked her up
and sent her to America to a friend who would respect
her for the fight she had made, all by her small self,
to make a whole vast despondent Alpine desolation stop
breaking its heart over the unalterable, and hold up its
head and look at the bright side of things for once.
We stopped for a nooning at a strongly built little inn
called the Schwarenbach. It sits in a lonely spot among
the peaks, where it is swept by the trailing fringes
of the cloud-rack, and is rained on, and snowed on,
and pelted and persecuted by the storms, nearly every day
of its life. It was the only habitation in the whole
Gemmi Pass.
Close at hand, now, was a chance for a blood-curdling
Alpine adventure. Close at hand was the snowy mass
of the Great Altels cooling its topknot in the sky
and daring us to an ascent. I was fired with the idea,
and immediately made up my mind to procure the necessary
guides, ropes, etc., and undertake it. I instructed
Harris to go to the landlord of the inn and set him
about our preparations. Meantime, I went diligently
to work to read up and find out what this much-talked-of
mountain-climbing was like, and how one should go about
it - for in these matters I was ignorant. I opened
Mr. Hinchliff's SUMMER MONTHS AMONG THE ALPS (published
1857), and selected his account of his ascent of Monte Rosa.
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