The Bernese Oberland [pp. 193-207]

The Bernese Oberland.
slippery side of the abrupt declivity. Had
he gone down, there would have been no
hope either for him or ourselves. It
made us shudder to look even at the footprints left by us in climbing to the inn,
after we had seen the light from the windows.
When we had descended 1200 feet, we
entered a valley, at the end of which,
perhaps four miles distant, rose the icy
rocks of the Gallenstock. Our path was
now a level one, and walking at leisure,
we could survey the grandeurs of the
scene without fear of accident. Dis quite in advance of the rest of us,we can see him, a mile or more off, distinctly against the immense mass of the
mountain, about the size of a puppet
in an exhibition of Italian fantoccini.
All at once he turns around, and is gesticulating as frantically as the same
puppet, when, to express some startling
emotion, such as despair at losing his
sweetheart, the wires are worked with
the greatest possible violence. What can
he mean? Now he makes signs for us to
advance more rapidly, and we can just
hear a faint call floating through the
valley on the vapours o f t he morning.
We accelerate our steps, and reaching the
spot where we had observed his signals,
but where he no longer remains, there
bursts upon our view, brilliant with sunlight,
" aI hav e y et see n none but gentlemen
here, sir, and I have no fear of them."
I was thinking what a brute a man
must be who could wound so gentle a
cr eature, when she suddenly left us, and
the guid e i nterposed to say that it wa s all
gammnon about her never intending to
marry, since a rich proprietor of the
Rhine was going to mak e her his wife in
the ensuing October.. But he was eloque nt in her praises, and named her the
Flower of the Alps,-a r ose growing on
t he ve rge of the avalanche-in all of
which we fully acquiesced.
Mo rning came like the marble Venus,
lovely but cold. Thickly wrapped in overcoats we sa llied out to " hail the rising
sun," which was glancing from Alp to
Alp around us, long before it illumined
the snow beneath our feet. Far in the
valley, t he fogs lay like an oce an whose
fleecy waves dashed up high against the
mountains. At last the orb of day is
visible t o us, and makes the little perc h
of the Furca Inn a throne of majesty.
But except le it isi t o the summits rising out of the
s ea of mist and crested with g old, there
i s n othing to behold-we are shut off entir ely f rom the world below.
The landlady comes af te r breakfast with
a book, a nd beg s that we will enter our
name s and add anything t hat w e may b e
good enough to say of the comforts of
the inn. It would be worth while for
any future visitor to the Furca to look
back over the l eave s of t he R e gister and
see how we complied with her wishes.
H e w ould find Scherer's poetic conceit
about the rose done up with grateful
commendation s of the coffee, an d the
little flowers of sentiment mingled-with
pleasant mention of the eggs, in a sort of
literary omelette aux fines herbes. The
landlady took the book-read the compliments-blushed, and followe d us to the
door, wish ing us a b on v oyag e that was
better than the notes of the bulbul.
Ten minutes' gymnastics with the
alpenstock brings us to the scene of our
accident the night previous. There are
the tracks in the snow indicating our-deviation from the path, and there is the
ledge over which the guide fell, but saved
himself by clinging to a rock upon the
200
[SEPTF,MBF.R
0
THE GLACIER OF THE RHONE.
It was the first glacier we bad seen,
and so f-,ir exceeded -tll our expectations
of a glacier, that we could only stop and
look upon it in bewildered amazement.
I had beard this superb, work of nature
most frequently described as a frozen
sea; but here was a terraced city of ice,
range rising above range of glittering
and elaborate architecture, domes and
towers of marvellous glory,
A wilderness of spires and crystal pile
Of rampart tipon rampart, don-le on dome,
Illimitable range of battlement
On battlement, and the Imperial height
Of canopy o'er canopied.
I recollect in an old co-py of Banyan,
one of the picture-oks of my infancy,