Part 71

I suggested the banquette as desirable, if it could be obtained, and the German was equally willing to give it to us. Descending from the omnibus at the hotel, in a drizzling rain, and amidst a crowd of porters and postilions and runners, the "man who spoke English" immediately presented himself; and upon him the American pounced with a torrent of questions. He was a willing, lively little waiter, with his moony face on the top of his head; and he jumped round in the rain like a parching pea, rolling his head about in the funniest manner.

The American steadied the little man by the collar, and began, "I want to secure two seats in the coupe of the diligence in the. morning."

"Yaas," jumping round, and looking from one to another. "Diligence, coupe, morning."

"I--want--two seats--in--coupe. If I can't get them, two--in --banquette."

"Yaas banquette, coupe,--yaas, diligence."

"Do you understand? Two seats, diligence, Simplon, morning. Will you get them?"

"Oh, yaas! morning, diligence. Yaas, sirr."

"Hang the fellow! Where is the office?" And the gentleman left the spry little waiter bobbing about in the middle of the street, speaking English, but probably comprehending nothing that was said to him. I inquired the way to the office of the conductor: it was closed, but would soon be open, and I waited; and at length the official, a stout Frenchman, appeared, and I secured places in the interior, the only ones to be had to Visp. I had seen a diligence at the door with three places in the coupe, and one perched behind; no banquette. The office is brightly lighted; people are waiting to secure places; there is the usual crowd of loafers, men and women, and the Frenchman sits at his desk. Enter the American.

"I want two places in coupe, in the morning. Or banquette. Two places, diligence." The official waves him off, and says something.

"What does he say?"

"He tells you to sit down on that bench till he is ready."

Soon the Frenchman has run over his big waybills, and turns to us.

"I want two places in the diligence, coupe," etc, etc, says the American.

This remark being lost on the official, I explain to him as well as I can what is wanted, at first,--two places in the coupe.

"One is taken," is his reply.

"The gentleman will take two," I said, having in mind the diligence in the yard, with three places in the coupe.

"One is taken," he repeats.

"Then the gentleman will take the other two."

"One is taken!" he cries, jumping up and smiting the table,--"one is taken, I tell you!"

"How many are there in the coupe?"

"TWO."

"Oh! then the gentleman will take the one remaining in the coupe and the one on top."

So it is arranged. When I come back to the hotel, the Americans are explaining to the lively waiter "who speaks English" that they are to go in the diligence at half-past five, and that they are to be called at half-past four and have breakfast. He knows all about it, --"Diligence, half-past four breakfast, Oh, yaas!" While I have been at the diligence-office, my companions have secured room and gone to them; and I ask the waiter to show m to my room. First, however, I tell him that we three two ladies and myself, who came together, are going in the diligence at half-past five, and want to be called and have breakfast. Did he comprehend?

"Yaas," rolling his face about on the top of his head violently. "You three gentleman want breakfast. What you have?"

I had told him before what we would I have, an now I gave up all hope of keeping our parties separate in his mind; so I said, "Five persons want breakfast at five o'clock. Five persons, five hours. Call all of them at half-past four." And I repeated it, and made him repeat it in English and French. He then insisted on putting me into the room of one of the American gentlemen and then he knocked at the door of a lady, who cried out in indignation at being disturbed; and, finally, I found my room. At the door I reiterated the instructions for the morning; and he cheerfully bade me good-night. But he almost immediately came back, and poked in his head with,--

"Is you go by de diligence?"

"Yes, you stupid."

In the morning one of our party was called at halfpast three, and saved the rest of us from a like fate; and we were not aroused at all, but woke early enough to get down and find the diligence nearly ready, and no breakfast, but "the man who spoke English" as lively as ever. And we had a breakfast brought out, so filthy in all respects that nobody could eat it. Fortunately, there was not time to seriously try; but we paid for it, and departed. The two American gentlemen sat in front of the house, waiting. The lively waiter had called them at half-past three, for the railway train, instead of the diligence; and they had their wretched breakfast early. They will remember the funny adventure with "the man who speaks English," and, no doubt, unite with us in warmly commending the Hotel Lion d'Or at Sion as the nastiest inn in Switzerland.

A WALK TO THE GORNER GRAT

When one leaves the dusty Rhone Valley, and turns southward from Visp, he plunges into the wildest and most savage part of Switzerland, and penetrates the heart of the Alps. The valley is scarcely more than a narrow gorge, with high precipices on either side, through which the turbid and rapid Visp tears along at a furious rate, boiling and leaping in foam over its rocky bed, and nearly as large as the Rhone at the junction. From Visp to St. Nicolaus, twelve miles, there is only a mule-path, but a very good one, winding along on the slope, sometimes high up, and again descending to cross the stream, at first by vineyards and high stone walls, and then on the edges of precipices, but always romantic and wild. It is noon when we set out from Visp, in true pilgrim fashion, and the sun is at first hot; but as we slowly rise up the easy ascent, we get a breeze, and forget the heat in the varied charms of the walk.

Everything for the use of the upper valley and Zermatt, now a place of considerable resort, must be carried by porters, or on horseback; and we pass or meet men and women, sometimes a dozen of them together, laboring along under the long, heavy baskets, broad at the top and coming nearly to a point below, which are universally used here for carrying everything. The tubs for transporting water are of the same sort. There is no level ground, but every foot is cultivated. High up on the sides of the precipices, where it seems impossible for a goat to climb, are vineyards and houses, and even villages, hung on slopes, nearly up to the clouds, and with no visible way of communication with the rest of the world.

In two hours' time we are at Stalden, a village perched upon a rocky promontory, at the junction of the valleys of the Saas and the Visp, with a church and white tower conspicuous from afar. We climb up to the terrace in front of it, on our way into the town. A seedy-looking priest is pacing up and down, taking the fresh breeze, his broad-brimmed, shabby hat held down upon the wall by a big stone. His clothes are worn threadbare; and he looks as thin and poor as a Methodist minister in a stony town at home, on three hundred a year. He politely returns our salutation, and we walk on. Nearly all the priests in this region look wretchedly poor,--as poor as the people. Through crooked, narrow streets, with houses overhanging and thrusting out corners and gables, houses with stables below, and quaint carvings and odd little windows above, the panes of glass hexagons, so that the windows looked like sections of honey-comb,--we found our way to the inn, a many-storied chalet, with stairs on the outside, stone floors in the upper passages, and no end of queer rooms; built right in the midst of other houses as odd, decorated with German-text carving, from the windows of which the occupants could look in upon us, if they had cared to do so; but they did not. They seem little interested in anything; and no wonder, with their hard fight with Nature. Below is a wine-shop, with a little side booth, in which some German travelers sit drinking their wine, and sputtering away in harsh gutturals. The inn is very neat inside, and we are well served. Stalden is high; but away above it on the opposite side is a village on the steep slope, with a slender white spire that rivals some of the snowy needles. Stalden is high, but the hill on which it stands is rich in grass. The secret of the fertile meadows is the most thorough irrigation. Water is carried along the banks from the river, and distributed by numerous sluiceways below; and above, the little mountain streams are brought where they are needed by artificial channels. Old men and women in the fields were constantly changing the direction of the currents. All the inhabitants appeared to be porters: women were transporting on their backs baskets full of soil; hay was being backed to the stables; burden-bearers were coming and going upon the road: we were told that there are only three horses in the place. There is a pleasant girl who brings us luncheon at the inn; but the inhabitants for the most part are as hideous as those we see all day: some have hardly the shape of human beings, and they all live in the most filthy manner in the dirtiest habitations. A chalet is a sweet thing when you buy a little model of it at home.

After we leave Stalden, the walk becomes more picturesque, the precipices are higher, the gorges deeper. It required some engineering to carry the footpath round the mountain buttresses and over the ravines. Soon the village of Emd appears on the right,--a very considerable collection of brown houses, and a shining white church-spire, above woods and precipices and apparently unscalable heights, on a green spot which seems painted on the precipices; with nothing visible to keep the whole from sliding down, down, into the gorge of the Visp. Switzerland may not have so much population to the square mile as some countries; but she has a population to some of her square miles that would astonish some parts of the earth's surface elsewhere. Farther on we saw a faint, zigzag footpath, that we conjectured led to Emd; but it might lead up to heaven. All day we had been solicited for charity by squalid little children, who kiss their nasty little paws at us, and ask for centimes. The children of Emd, however, did not trouble us. It must be a serious affair if they ever roll out of bed.

Late in the afternoon thunder began to tumble about the hills, and clouds snatched away from our sight the snow-peaks at the end of the valley; and at length the rain fell on those who had just arrived and on the unjust. We took refuge from the hardest of it in a lonely chalet high up on the hillside, where a roughly dressed, frowzy Swiss, who spoke bad German, and said he was a schoolmaster, gave us a bench in the shed of his schoolroom. He had only two pupils in attendance, and I did not get a very favorable impression of this high school. Its master quite overcame us with thanks when we gave him a few centimes on leaving. It still rained, and we arrived in St. Nicolaus quite damp.

There is a decent road from St. Nicolaus to Zermatt, over which go wagons without springs. The scenery is constantly grander as we ascend. The day is not wholly clear; but high on our right are the vast snow-fields of the Weishorn, and out of the very clouds near it seems to pour the Bies Glacier. In front are the splendid Briethorn, with its white, round summit; the black Riffelhorn; the sharp peak of the little Matterhorn; and at last the giant Matterhorn itself rising before us, the most finished and impressive single mountain in Switzerland. Not so high as Mont Blanc by a thousand feet, it appears immense in its isolated position and its slender aspiration. It is a huge pillar of rock, with sharply cut edges, rising to a defined point, dusted with snow, so that the rock is only here and there revealed. To ascend it seems as impossible as to go up the Column of Luxor; and one can believe that the gentlemen who first attempted it in 1864, and lost their lives, did fall four thousand feet before their bodies rested on the glacier below.

We did not stay at Zermatt, but pushed on for the hotel on the top of the Riffelberg,--a very stiff and tiresome climb of about three hours, an unending pull up a stony footpath. Within an hour of the top, and when the white hotel is in sight above the zigzag on the breast of the precipice, we reach a green and widespread Alp where hundreds of cows are feeding, watched by two forlorn women,--the "milkmaids all forlorn" of poetry. At the rude chalets we stop, and get draughts of rich, sweet cream. As we wind up the slope, the tinkling of multitudinous bells from the herd comes to us, which is also in the domain of poetry. All the way up we have found wild flowers in the greatest profusion; and the higher we ascend, the more exquisite is their color and the more perfect their form. There are pansies; gentians of a deeper blue than flower ever was before; forget-me-nots, a pink variety among them; violets, the Alpine rose and the Alpine violet; delicate pink flowers of moss; harebells; and quantities for which we know no names, more exquisite in shape and color than the choicest products of the greenhouse. Large slopes are covered with them,--a brilliant show to the eye, and most pleasantly beguiling the way of its tediousness. As high as I ascended, I still found some of these delicate flowers, the pink moss growing in profusion amongst the rocks of the GornerGrat, and close to the snowdrifts.

The inn on the Riffelberg is nearly eight thousand feet high, almost two thousand feet above the hut on Mount Washington; yet it is not so cold and desolate as the latter. Grass grows and flowers bloom on its smooth upland, and behind it and in front of it are the snow-peaks. That evening we essayed the Gorner-Grat, a rocky ledge nearly ten thousand feet above the level of the sea; but after a climb of an hour and a half, and a good view of Monte Rosa and the glaciers and peaks of that range, we were prevented from reaching the summit, and driven back by a sharp storm of hail and rain. The next morning I started for the GornerGrat again, at four o'clock. The Matterhorn lifted its huge bulk sharply against the sky, except where fleecy clouds lightly draped it and fantastically blew about it. As I ascended, and turned to look at it, its beautifully cut peak had caught the first ray of the sun, and burned with a rosy glow. Some great clouds drifted high in the air: the summits of the Breithorn, the Lyscamm, and their companions, lay cold and white; but the snow down their sides had a tinge of pink. When I stood upon the summit of the Gorner-Grat, the two prominent silver peaks of Monte Rosa were just touched with the sun, and its great snow-fields were visible to the glacier at its base. The Gorner-Grat is a rounded ridge of rock, entirely encirled by glaciers and snow-peaks. The panorama from it is unexcelled in Switzerland.

Returning down the rocky steep, I descried, solitary in that great waste of rock and snow, the form of a lady whom I supposed I had left sleeping at the inn, overcome with the fatigue of yesterday's tramp. Lured on by the apparently short distance to the backbone of the ridge, she had climbed the rocks a mile or more above the hotel, and come to meet me. She also had seen the great peaks lift themselves out of the gray dawn, and Monte Rosa catch the first rays. We stood awhile together to see how jocund day ran hither and thither along the mountain-tops, until the light was all abroad, and then silently turned downward, as one goes from a mount of devotion.

THE BATHS OF LEUK

In order to make the pass of the Gemmi, it is necessary to go through the Baths of Leuk. The ascent from the Rhone bridge at Susten is full of interest, affording fine views of the valley, which is better to look at than to travel through, and bringing you almost immediately to the old town of Leuk, a queer, old, towered place, perched on a precipice, with the oddest inn, and a notice posted up to the effect, that any one who drives through its steep streets faster than a walk will be fined five francs. I paid nothing extra for a fast walk. The road, which is one of the best in the country, is a wonderful piece of engineering, spanning streams, cut in rock, rounding precipices, following the wild valley of the Dala by many a winding and zigzag.

The Baths of Leuk, or Loeche-les-Bains, or Leukerbad, is a little village at the very head of the valley, over four thousand feet above the sea, and overhung by the perpendicular walls of the Gemmi, which rise on all sides, except the south, on an average of two thousand feet above it. There is a nest of brown houses, clustered together like bee-hives, into which the few inhabitants creep to hibernate in the long winters, and several shops, grand hotels, and bathing-houses open for the season. Innumerable springs issue out of this green, sloping meadow among the mountains, some of them icy cold, but over twenty of them hot, and seasoned with a great many disagreeable sulphates, carbonates, and oxides, and varying in temperature from ninety-five to one hundred and twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Italians, French, and Swiss resort here in great numbers to take the baths, which are supposed to be very efficacious for rheumatism and cutaneous affections. Doubtless many of them do up their bathing for the year while here; and they may need no more after scalding and soaking in this water for a couple of months.

Before we reached the hotel, we turned aside into one of the bath-houses. We stood inhaling a sickly steam in a large, close hall, which was wholly occupied by a huge vat, across which low

## partitions, with bridges, ran, dividing it into four compartments.

When we entered, we were assailed with yells in many languages, and howls in the common tongue, as if all the fiends of the pit had broken loose. We took off our hats in obedience to the demand; but the clamor did not wholly subside, and was mingled with singing and horrible laughter. Floating about in each vat, we at first saw twenty or thirty human heads. The women could be distinguished from the men by the manner of dressing the hair. Each wore a loose woolen gown. Each had a little table floating before him or her, which he or she pushed about at pleasure. One wore a hideous mask; another kept diving in the opaque pool and coming up to blow, like the hippopotamus in the Zoological Gardens; some were taking a lunch from their tables, others playing chess; some sitting on the benches round the edges, with only heads out of water, as doleful as owls, while others roamed about, engaged in the game of spattering with their comrades, and sang and shouted at the top of their voices. The people in this bath were said to be second class; but they looked as well and behaved better than those of the first class, whom we saw in the establishment at our hotel afterward.

It may be a valuable scientific fact, that the water in these vats, in which people of all sexes, all diseases, and all nations spend so many hours of the twenty-four, is changed once a day. The temperature at which the bath is given is ninety-eight. The water is let in at night, and allowed to cool. At five in the morning, the bathers enter it, and remain until ten o'clock,--five hours, having breakfast served to them on the floating tables, "as they sail, as they sail." They then have a respite till two, and go in till five. Eight hours in hot water! Nothing can be more disgusting than the sight of these baths. Gustave Dore must have learned here how to make those ghostly pictures of the lost floating about in the Stygian pools, in his illustrations of the Inferno; and the rocks and cavernous precipices may have enabled him to complete the picture. On what principle cures are effected in these filthy vats, I could not learn. I have a theory, that, where so many diseases meet and mingle in one swashing fluid, they neutralize each other. It may be that the action is that happily explained by one of the Hibernian bathmen in an American water-cure establishment. "You see, sir," said he, "that the shock of the water unites with the electricity of the system, and explodes the disease." I should think that the shock to one's feeling of decency and cleanliness, at these baths, would explode any disease in Europe. But, whatever the result may be, I am not sorry to see so many French and Italians soak themselves once a year.

Out of the bath these people seem to enjoy life. There is a long promenade, shaded and picturesque, which they take at evening, sometimes as far as the Ladders, eight of which are fastened, in a shackling manner, to the perpendicular rocks,--a high and somewhat dangerous ascent to the village of Albinen, but undertaken constantly by peasants with baskets on their backs. It is in winter the only mode Leukerbad has of communicating with the world; and in summer it is the only way of reaching Albinen, except by a long journey down the Dala and up another valley and height. The bathers were certainly very lively and social at table-d'hote, where we had the pleasure of meeting some hundred of them, dressed. It was presumed that the baths were the subject of the entertaining conversation; for I read in a charming little work which sets forth the delights of Leuk, that La poussee forms the staple of most of the talk. La poussee, or, as this book poetically calls it, "that daughter of the waters of Loeche," "that eruption of which we have already spoken, and which proves the action of the baths upon the skin,"--becomes the object, and often the end, of all conversation. And it gives specimens of this pleasant converse, as:

"Comment va votre poussee?"

"Avez-vous la poussee?"

"Je suis en pleine poussee"

"Ma poussee s'est fort bien passee!"