Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands Volume Ii Part 19

"And don't you want to go to America?" said I, after hearing him praise the good land.

"Ah, no," he said, with a smile.

"Why not?" said I; "it is a much easier country to live in."

He gave a look at the circle of mountains around, and said, "I love Chamouni." The good soul! I was much of his opinion. If I had been born within sight of glorious Mont Blanc, with its apocalyptic clouds, and store of visions, not all the fat pork and flat prairies of Indiana and Ohio could tempt me. No wonder the Swiss die for their native valleys! I would if I were they. I asked him about education.

He said his children went to a school kept by Catholic sisters, who taught reading, writing, and Latin. The dialect of Chamouni is a patois, composed of French and Latin. He said that provision was very scarce in the winter. I asked how they made their living when there were no travellers to be guided up Mont Blanc. He had a trade at which he wrought in winter months, and his wife did tailoring.

I must not forget to say that the day before there had been some confidential pa.s.sages between us, which began by his expressing, interrogatively, the opinion that "mademoiselle was a young lady, he supposed." When mademoiselle had a.s.sured him, on the contrary, that she was a venerable matron, mother of a thriving family, then followed a little comparison of notes as to numbers. Madame he ascertained to have six, and he had four, if my memory serves me, as it generally does not in matters of figures. So you see it is not merely among us New Englanders that the unsophisticated spirit of curiosity exists as to one's neighbors. Indeed, I take it to be a wholesome development of human nature in general. For my part, I could not think highly of any body who could be brought long into connection with another human being and feel no interest to inquire into his history and surroundings.

As we stopped, going down the descent, to rest the mules, I looked up above my head into the crags, and saw a flock of goats browsing. One goat, in particular, I remember, had gained the top of a kind of table rock, which stood apart from the rest, and which was carpeted with lichens and green moss. There he stood, looking as unconscious and contemplative as possible, the wicked fellow, with his long beard! He knew he looked picturesque, and that is what he stood there for. But, as they say in New England, he did it "_as nat'ral as a pictur!_"

By the by, the girls with strawberries, milk, and knitting work were on hand on the way down, and met us just where a cool spring gushed out at the roots of a pine tree; and of course I bought some more milk and strawberries.

How dreadfully hot it was when we got down to the bottom! for there we had the long, shadeless ride home, with the burning lenses of the glaciers concentrated upon our defenceless heads. I was past admiring any thing, and glad enough for the shelter of a roof, and a place to lie down.

After dinner, although the Glacier de Boisson had been spoken of as the appointed work for the afternoon, yet we discovered, as the psalm book says, that

"The force of nature could no farther go"

[Ill.u.s.tration: _of an ice climbing party scaling a large serac._]

What is Glacier de Boisson, or glacier any thing else, to a person used up entirely, with no sense or capability left for any thing but a general aching? No; the Glacier de Boisson was given up, and I am sorry for it now, because it is the commencement of the road up Mont Blanc; and, though I could not go to the top thereof, I should like to have gone as far as I could. In fact, I should have been glad to sleep one night at the Grands Mulets: however, that was impossible.

To look at the apparently smooth surface of the mountain side, one would never think that the ascent could be a work of such difficulty and danger. Yet, look at the picture of crossing a _creva.s.se_, and compare the size of the figures with the dimensions of the blocks of ice. Madame d'Angeville told me that she was drawn across a _creva.s.se_ like this, by ropes tied under her arms, by the guides. The depth of some of the _creva.s.ses_ may be conjectured from the fact stated by Aga.s.siz, that the thickest parts of the glaciers are over one thousand feet in depth.

JOURNAL--(CONTINUED.)

Friday, July 8.--Chamouni to Martigny, by Tete Noir. Mules _en avant_. We set off in a _caleche_. After a two hours' ride we came to "_those mules_." On, to the pa.s.s of Tete Noir, by paths the most awful. As my mule trod within six inches of the verge, I looked down into an abyss, so deep that tallest pines looked like twigs; yet, on the opposite side of the pa.s.s, I looked up the steep precipice to an equal height, where giant trees seemed white fluttering fringe. A dizzy sight. We swept round an angle, entered a dark tunnel blasted out through the solid rock, emerged, and saw before us, on our right, the far-famed Tete Noir, a black ledge, on whose face, so high is the opposite cliff, the sun never s.h.i.+nes. A few steps brought us to a hotel. William and I rolled down some avalanches, by way of getting an appet.i.te, while dinner was preparing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _of the rearing head and neck of a bridled mule._]

After dinner we commenced descending towards Martigny, alternately riding and walking. Here, while I was on foot, my mule took it into his head to run away. I was never more surprised in my life than to see that staid, solemn, meditative, melancholy beast suddenly perk up both his long ears, thus, and hop about over the steep paths like a goat. Not more surprised should I be to see some venerable D. D. of Princeton leading off a dance in the Jardin Mabille. We chased him here, and chased him there. We headed him, and he headed us. We said, "Now I have you," and he said, "No, you don't!"

until the affair began to grow comically serious. "_Il se moque de vous!_" said the guide. But, at that moment, I sprang and caught him by the bridle, when, presto! down went his ears, shut went the eyes, and over the entire gay brute spread a visible veil of stolidity. And down he plodded, _slunging_, shambling, pivotting round zigzag corners, as before, in a style which any one that ever navigated such a craft down hill knows without further telling. After that, I was sure that the old fellow kept up a "terrible thinking," in spite of his stupid looks, and knew a vast deal more than he chose to tell.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _of a mule's head lowered, with ears flattened._]

At length we opened on the Rhone valley; and at seven we reached Hotel de la Tour, at Martigny. Here H. and S. managed to get up two flights of stone stairs, and sank speechless and motionless upon their beds. I must say they have exhibited spirit to-day, or, as Mr. C. used to say, "pluck." After settling with our guides,--fine fellows, whom we hated to lose,--I ordered supper, and sought new guides for our route to the convent. Our only difficulty in reaching there, they say, is the _snow_. The guides were uncertain whether mules could get through so early in the season. Only to think! To-day, riding broilingly through hay-fields--to-morrow, stuck in snow drifts!

LETTER x.x.xV.

Dear Henry:--

You cannot think how beautiful are these Alpine valleys. Our course, all the first morning after we left Chamouni, lay beside a broad, hearty, joyous mountain torrent, called, perhaps from the darkness of its waters, Eau Noire. Charming meadows skirted its banks. All the way along I could think of nothing but Bunyan's meadows beside the river of life, "curiously adorned with lilies." _These_ were curiously adorned, broidered, and inwrought with flowers, many and brilliant as those in a western prairie. Were I to undertake to describe them, I might make an inventory as long as Homer's list of the s.h.i.+ps. There was the Canterbury bell of our garden; the white meadow sweet; the blue and white campanula; the tall, slender harebell, and a little, short-tufted variety of the same, which our guide tells me is called "Les Clochettes," or the "little bells"--fairies might ring them, I thought. Then there are whole beds of the little blue forget-me-not, and a white flower which much resembles it in form. I also noticed, hanging in the clefts of the rocks around Tete Noir, the long golden tresses of the laburnum. It has seemed to me, when I have been travelling here, as if every flower I ever saw in a garden met me some where in rocks or meadows.

There is a strange, unsatisfying pleasure about flowers, which, like all earthly pleasure, is akin to pain. What can you do with them?--you want to do something, but what? Take them all up, and carry them with you? You cannot do that. Get down and look at them? What, keep a whole caravan waiting for your observations! That will never do. Well, then, pick and carry them along with you. That is what, in despair of any better resource, I did. My good old guide was infinite in patience, stopping at every new exclamation point of mine, plunging down rocks into the meadow land, climbing to the points of great rocks, and returning with his hands filled with flowers. It seemed almost sacrilegious to tear away such fanciful creations, that looked as if they were votive offerings on an altar, or, more likely, living existences, whose only conscious life was a continued exhalation of joy and praise.

These flowers seemed to me to be earth's raptures and aspirations --her better moments--her lucid intervals. Like every thing else in our existence, they are mysterious.

In what mood of mind were they conceived by the great Artist? Of what feelings of his are they the expression--springing up out of the dust, in these gigantic, waste, and desolate regions, where one would think the sense of his almightiness might overpower the soul? Born in the track of the glacier and the avalanche, they seem to say to us that this Almighty Being is very pitiful, and of tender compa.s.sion; that, in his infinite soul, there is an exquisite gentleness and love of the beautiful, and that, if we would be blessed, his will to bless is infinite.

The greatest men have always thought much of flowers. Luther always kept a flower in a gla.s.s, on his writing table; and when he was waging his great public controversy with Eckius, he kept a flower in his hand. Lord Bacon has a beautiful pa.s.sage about flowers. As to Shakspeare, he is a perfect Alpine valley--he is full of flowers; they spring, and blossom, and wave in every cleft of his mind. Witness the Midsummer Night's Dream. Even Milton, cold, serene, and stately as he is, breaks forth into exquisite gushes of tenderness and fancy when he marshals the flowers, as in Lycidas and Comus.

But all this while the sun has been withering the flowers the guide brought me; how they look! blue and white Canterbury bells, harebells, clochettes, all bedraggled and wilted, like a young lady who has been up all night at a ball.

"No, no," say I to the guide; "don't pick me any more. I don't want them. The fact is, if they are pretty I cannot help it. I must even take it out in looking as I go by."

One thing is evident; He who made the world is no utilitarian, no despiser of the fine arts, and no condemner of ornament; and those religionists, who seek to restrain every thing within the limits of cold, bare utility, do not imitate our Father in heaven.

Cannot a bonnet cover your head, without the ribbon and the flowers, say they? Yes; and could not a peach tree bear peaches without a blossom? What a waste is all this colored corolla of flowers, as if the seed could not mature without them! G.o.d could have created the fruit in good, strong, homely bushel baskets, if he had been so disposed.

"Turn off my eyes from beholding vanity," says a good man, when he sees a display of graceful ornament. What, then, must he think of the Almighty Being, all whose useful work is so overlaid with ornament?

There is not a fly's leg, nor an insect's wing, which is not polished and decorated to an extent that we should think positive extravagance in finis.h.i.+ng up a child's dress. And can we suppose that this Being can take delight in dwellings and modes of life or forms of wors.h.i.+p where every thing is reduced to cold, naked utility? I think not. The instinct to adorn and beautify is from him; it likens us to him, and if rightly understood, instead of being a siren to beguile our hearts away, it will be the closest affiliating band.

If this power of producing the beautiful has been always so fascinating that the human race for its sake have bowed down at the feet even of men deficient in moral worth, if we cannot forbear loving the painter, poet, and sculptor, how much more shall we love G.o.d, who, with all goodness, has also all beauty!

But all this while we have been riding on till we have pa.s.sed the meadows, and the fields, and are coming into the dark and awful pa.s.s of the Tete Noir, which C. has described to you.

One thing I noticed which he did not. When we were winding along the narrow path, bearing no more proportion to the dizzy heights above and below than the smallest insect creeping on the wall, I looked across the chasm, and saw a row of shepherds' cottages perched midway on a narrow shelf, that seemed in the distance not an inch wide. By a very natural impulse, I exclaimed, "What does become of the little children there? I should think they would all fall over the precipice!"

My guide looked up benevolently at me, as if he felt it his duty to quiet my fears, and said in a soothing tone, "O, no, no, no!"

Of course, I might have known that little children have their angels there, as well as every where else. "When they have funerals there,"

said he, "they are obliged to carry the dead along that road,"

pointing to a road that resembled a thread drawn on the rocky wall.

What a strange idea--such a life and death! It seemed to me, that I could see a funeral train creeping along; the monks, with their black cloaks, carrying tapers, and singing psalms; the whole procession together not larger in proportion than a swarm of black gnats; and yet, perhaps, hearts there wrung with an infinite sorrow. In that black, moving point, may be a soul, whose convulsions and agonies cannot be measured or counted by any thing human, so impossible is it to measure souls by s.p.a.ce.

What can they think of, these creatures, who are born in this strange place, half way between heaven and earth, to whom the sound of avalanches is a cradle hymn, and who can never see the sun above the top of the cliff on either side, till he really gets into the zenith?

What they can be thinking of I cannot tell. Life, I suppose, is made up of the same prosaic material there that it is every where. The mother thinks how she shall make her goat's milk and black bread hold out. The grandmother knits stockings, and runs out to see if Jaques or Pierre have not tumbled over the precipice. Jaques and Pierre, in return, tangle grandmother's yarn, upset mother's milk bucket, pull the goat's beard, tear their clothes to pieces on the bushes and rocks, and, in short, commit incredible abominations daily, just as children do every where.

In the night how curiously this little nest of houses must look, lighted up, winking and blinking at the solitary traveller, like some mysterious eyes looking out of a great eternity! There they all are fast asleep, Pierre, and Jaques, and grandmother, and the goats. In the night they hear a tremendous noise, as if all nature was going to pieces; they half wake, open one eye, say, "Nothing but an avalanche!"

and go to sleep again.

This road, through the pa.s.s of the Tete Noir, used to be dangerous; a very narrow bridle-path, undefended by any screen whatever. To have pa.s.sed it in those old days would have had too much of the sublime to be quite agreeable to me. The road, as it is, is wide enough, I should think, for three mules to go abreast, and a tunnel has been blasted through what seemed the most difficult and dangerous point, and a little beyond this tunnel is the Hotel de la Couronne.

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.