Switzerland Part 4

Another of the same brood used to supply himself with animal food by drinking the blood from slaughtered beasts, whenever he got permission to indulge his appet.i.te that way. I was informed that this comparative vampire developed into the stoutest and comeliest fellow of the set; and indeed blood, drunk warm from the veins of a sheep or bullock, ought to be highly nutritious.

That is, I suppose, the harshest side of a Swiss peasant's life--an example of the very poor folk. But in no case is it luxurious. From that sort of life the young Swiss, going to carry burdens in a French hotel of the lower cla.s.s, or act as waiter and _factotum_ at a Bloomsbury boarding-house, finds hardly any degree of hardship unendurable. It is astonishing to note on how little food, how little sleep, how little human comfort the poor Swiss on the bottom rung of the ladder can keep soul and body together. Afterwards, when he gets on in the world, the Swiss sometimes takes his revenge. The rapacious Swiss hotel-keeper of a tourist resort whose exactions infuriate the traveller, is perhaps only paying back to the world the bitter lessons he was taught as the slave of some poor house of accommodation. Not, of course, that the Swiss hotel-keeper is always, or even generally a brigand. Indeed he is very rarely so in Switzerland. It is _verboten_.

But they are always keen, and if dishonest are more keenly dishonest than any others. In their own country regulations safeguard the tourist fairly effectively.

Hotel-keeping is the chief apparent occupation of the Switzerland known to the tourist. But there is apart from that in the towns a busy industrial life. Since the use of water-power for generating electricity has come to be understood Switzerland has progressed more and more as a manufacturing country. So great are the demands of the new factories that the emigration of the Swiss begins to dwindle and there is an immigration of artisans from abroad into the country. In the rural districts, away from the towns, among the Alpine villages, the chief industry is the rearing of sheep, goats, and cows. Swiss milk, in a preserved form, and Swiss cheese go all over the world.

The life of the Alpine villages rarely comes under the notice of the tourist unless he is a pedestrian without the craze for rock or glacier climbing, and willing to use his legs for the exploring of rough hill paths. In these villages life is very quiet and peaceful.

It is not uncommon to find in them very old men living in the houses in which their great-grandfathers had been born and died. They do not know who built these snuff-coloured huts, but only that their ancestors dwelt in them.

In an Alpine village the two princ.i.p.al buildings are the inn and the white stone church. There is no street. A rough track leads past the dozen or so brown houses. They are two or three stories in height, low ceilinged, lined with pine and built of small pine or hemlock logs dressed smooth and square, laid close and dovetailed at the corners.

Often the exteriors are carved. The shingle roof is kept in place with heavy stones, and projects 4 to 8 feet beyond the walls. Some houses have shingled roofs a dozen layers thick. The windows are many and very small. Around the village are sloping meadows, high mountains, steep waterfalls, perhaps a fair blue lake. The short summer is spent in growing a few potatoes, herding the goats, cows, or sheep, pressing the cheese, and cutting and carrying in the gra.s.s. Winter is spent in eating up the little that summer gave, and in a struggle to keep from freezing.

In the high villages the flocks are usually of goats. To save the trouble of each villager herding his own goats, a single shepherd is employed who leads the village drove into the higher Alps each day.

When the flock return at eve, each goat seeks its familiar home, enters, and bleats to be milked and stalled.

In the better country of the valleys the herds are of cows, and it is the custom each summer to drive them to the higher Alps to follow the lush gra.s.ses of the spring as it climbs up the mountains with the waxing of the sun's power. This general and gradual movement of the cattle from the valleys to the Alp pastures is a picturesque business.

The herds are a.s.sembled in procession, each preceded by its herdsman, and a flock of goats. The herdsmen wear white shirts, broad leather suspenders adorned with images of cows and goats in bright metal, scarlet waistcoats, knee breeches of bright yellow, white stockings, and low shoes. A round black hat bound with flowers, and one long bra.s.s ear-ring consisting of a chain carrying a tiny milk-pail, usually complete the costume. After the herdsman come three or more heifers, each wearing a huge bell from a brightly garlanded collar.

Then come the cattle, with herd-boys to keep them in line. Each herd-file is closed by a waggon containing a great copper cheese-kettle and wooden utensils for milk and b.u.t.ter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN ALPINE VILLAGE, GRINDELWALD.]

Mr. Symonds pictures the joy of man and beast at these annual pilgrimages in the footsteps of the spring:

The whole village is astir long before daybreak; and the animals, who know well what a good time is in store for them, are as impatient as their masters. The procession sets forth in a long train, cows lowing, bells tinkling, herdsmen shouting, old men and women giving the last directions about their favourite beasts to the herdsmen. Rude pictures of the _Zug auf die Alpen_, as it is called, may sometimes be seen pasted, like a frieze or bas-relief, along the low panelled walls of mountain cottages. These are the work, in many cases, of the peasants themselves, who write the names of the cattle over the head of each, attach preposterously huge bells to the proud leaders of the herd, and burden the hinds with vast loads of bread and household gear, and implements for making cheese. How many happy memories of summer holidays have been worked into those clumsy but symbolic forms by uncouth fingers in the silence of winter evenings, when possibly Phyllis sat by and wondered at her Damon's draughtsmanship! It takes two whole days and nights at least to get from Emsenau to the Panixer Alp. But when this journey is accomplished, the human part of the procession installs itself delightfully in little wooden huts, which allow the pure air from the glaciers to whistle through every cranny. The tired cows spread themselves over pastures which the snows have lately left, feeding ravenously on the delicious young gra.s.s, starred with gentians and primulas, and hosts of bright-eyed tiny flowers. And then begins a rare time for men and cattle.

It is a pity that our British race has lost the habit of making festivals of the great events of the pastoral and agricultural year. I have seen in Australia the annual moving of the sheep from the Monaro tableland to the "snow leases" of the Australian Alps, when the hot sun had scorched away all the herbage of the plains. It gives just as much inspiration for joy and thankfulness. But there is no festival.

The sheep huddle along, the dogs at their heels. Brown-tanned, eager-eyed men ride beside, with the gladness of the expectation of the mountain fastnesses in their hearts but hardly a word of it on their lips. In England--which was once "Merrie Englande" because of its cheery rustic life--harvest festivals and rural feasts have almost vanished.

In many places the Alp-horn is still used to call the cows home at milking-time. It is a huge wooden trumpet, often six feet in length, and a Swiss can draw deep and powerful notes from its wide throat. Its compa.s.s consists of only a few notes, but when these ring and echo from height to height the effect is very striking and beautiful.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALPINE HERDSMAN. The Piz Kesch in the distance.]

Most striking is it at the hour of sunset. On the loftier Alps, to which no sounds of evening bell can climb, the Alp-horn proclaims the vesper hour. As the sun drops behind the distant snowy summits, the herdsman takes his huge horn and sends pealing along the mountain-side the first few notes of the Psalm "Praise ye the Lord." From Alp to Alp he is answered by his brother herdsmen, and the deep, strong notes echo from crag to crag in solemn melody. It is the signal for the evening prayer and for repose.

Around their dairying industry centres the best of the Swiss nation, and it is fitting that the "Ranz des Vaches" which calls the cattle home should be the national song of the Swiss. It is no single air, it is the "cow-call" developed by herdsmen through generations, and it varies in nearly every valley. Its common property is the shrill falsetto intonation of the chorus--the curious twist of the throat that results in the yodel. It is singularly sweet heard in Alpine air. There is a story that once a regiment of Swiss soldiers hired by France deserted, and made for their homes, when the band played the "Ranz des Vaches." The desertion was not a shameful one. The same men could have been driven away from their mercenary standards by no threat of death.

The rural industries of Switzerland are fostered with great care. In particular the forests, which protect the soil from being swept away and are ramparts to the villages against avalanches, are jealously preserved. No one may cut down a tree, even his own tree, in Switzerland without the authority of a forestry official. The Department of Forestry supervises carefully the wooded lands and marks those trees which can be felled without harm to the wood.

The organisation of the national services, posts, roads, railways, etc., is also shaped to secure the greatest degree of comfort possible for the small land-holders. It is a wise policy. These rustic people, living almost exclusively on their own resources, eating food which they have produced, wearing clothes which they have spun, demanding so little from the outside world, are the very backbone of the Swiss nation, and they are the rock-foundations of the national patriotism.

The Swiss are not bound together by the ties of a common race, a common language, a common religion. Their nation is in a sense an artificial one. Its cementing bond is an hereditary instinct, nourished among the peasants of these mountain pastures, to keep the mountain slopes free.

The town life of the Swiss, affected a good deal as it must be by the hotel life of the tourists, is not so admirable as the village life.

It is in some aspects irritatingly petty-minded; in others invitingly well-educated. The Swiss are interested only in the Swiss, and (in a strictly commercial way) the strangers who come to visit and enrich Switzerland. A Swiss newspaper tells little or nothing of the doings of the outside world. Its columns are filled with long accounts of the doings of Swiss shooting clubs and gymnastic societies. Yet Swiss trading and professional people are, in the general rule, astonishingly well versed in foreign languages and foreign literature.

Offering asylum as it does to political and social rebels of all countries, Switzerland is a kind of international clearing-house for thought. The Gallic, the Teutonic, the Slavonic new thought of the day--all are understood and discussed in Switzerland, and the Swiss book-shops are the most cosmopolitan and representative in the world.

The use of national costume dwindles in Switzerland as it does in every other part of the world. The peasant women have, however, still a characteristic head-dress, the maidens wearing black caps, the matrons white ones. The caps are two slips of upright lace, which, coming from behind over the head, meet on the forehead, the whole having the air of a b.u.t.terfly with wings half outspread. Between these, the girls' tresses are puffed and held back by a silver pin--called a _Rosenadel_, from its head resembling a rosebud. The matrons only vary this mode in covering their hair with an embroidered piece of silk. For the festivals attending the movement of the cattle to the hills, the hay-cutting, and the vintage, the peasants also don gay national costume.

Traces of the old sumptuary laws of the Calvinist communities still linger in the habits of the people, and show, too, in the absence of pomp at public ceremonies or representative meetings. A Communal a.s.sembly looks like a cla.s.s-room. The universities carry on their work with a sober absence of pomp, and uniforms are rare. The great amus.e.m.e.nt of the people in many quarters is still religious disputation and invective. The most popular place in all Geneva for the Swiss inhabitants is the Victoria Hall, where "revivalist"

preachers of the most d.a.m.natory forms of religion hold forth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HAY HAULING ON THE ALPINE SNOW.]

CHAPTER VIII

ALPINE CLIMBING

Though Switzerland does not contain within its borders more than one-third of the Alps, and the greatest height of the Alpine range (Mount Blanc) is wholly within France, the Alps are always a.s.sociated with Switzerland in the popular mind; and with good reason, for the country is particularly and almost wholly Alpine in its character, and its national existence has been largely shaped by the mountain ranges which have given people differing from one another in racial origin, in language, and in religion a bond of unity.

The most famous mountain range of the world historically, the Alps are far from being the greatest in height, and they are by no means the oldest of the world's mountains, though they are older probably than the Himalayas, older certainly than the _parvenu_ peaks of the South Seas, some of which were born amid thunders and lightnings only yesterday, considering Time in geological periods. The form of a mountain range and its height give usually some surface indications of its age. New mountains, like those of the South Seas, are very sharp and jagged in their outlines. Old mountains have been usually smoothed down by erosion. The oldest mountains probably of the world, the Australian Alps, are near neighbours of the youngest, the fiery volcanoes of the Straits of Sunda.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SUNSET ON MONT BLANC FROM GENEVA.]

A mountain's first birthday is marked by a movement towards old age.

As soon as it begins to live it begins to die. If it is of volcanic origin its term of life is usually short; it comes to being suddenly with a wild upheaval of the Earth, and at once the eating rain, and the splitting frost, and the destroying wind set to work to cut away its peak and pull it down to the level of the plain again. If the mountain is of more slow creation, the result of a gradual up-wrinkling of a crease of the Earth as she readjusts her surface to the cooling of her bulk, the mountain may go on growing whilst also it goes on dying. From below inward forces are pushing it higher towards the sky. From above the rains and snows and winds are chiselling away its rocks and bearing them to the plains. In time the process of pushing up ceases; the process of grinding down goes on remorselessly, never pausing for a moment.

So the mountains are eternal only in the figurative sense. Actually their term of existence is strictly finite. Once the Australian Alps had their tremendous peaks, and hills of unmelting ice. To-day they have been ground down to below the line of perpetual snow, and along the gentle grades of the chief peak it is possible to drive a carriage to the very summit. The European Alps are being subjected to-day to the same process of softening of outline and lowering of height.

But for many generations yet they will lift white peaks to the skies.

This though it is clear that the ice area upon them is steadily dwindling. This is a result, however, not of erosion, but of a warming of the climate of Europe, indeed of the whole northern hemisphere.

Some measurements in 1912 by the Swiss Alpine Club confirm the recession of the Swiss glaciers. The largest of the glaciers, "L'Aletsch," had retreated 10 feet, following on nearly 60 feet in 1911, and rather more than that in 1910. The Rhine Glacier had gone back 34 feet, in addition to the 70 feet lost in the previous two years. An exception to the general rule appeared at first to be furnished by the two glaciers of Grindelwald, which had increased since last year; but the advance did not compensate for the loss of the previous year, and since 1893 the two glaciers have lost nearly a quarter of a mile. Their temporary advance is attributable solely to the inclement weather during 1912. Nearly all the smaller glaciers, out of the fifty-two surveyed by the Alpine Club, show some retreat, and the largest loss appears to be that of the Palu Glacier, near Bernina, which is losing regularly 70 feet a year.

This dwindling is not confined to Swiss glaciers. A survey of Canadian glaciers which was made five years ago shows that other glaciers in the northern hemisphere are retreating. The Victoria Glacier is doing so; and the only slight exception appeared at that time to be the Yoho Glacier, which was retreating, but not nearly so fast as it had been in previous years. M. Charles Rabot a.s.serts that the glaciers in Argentina are also retreating, and surmises, from data perhaps not so well established, that there has been a general retreat of glaciers during the last half of the nineteenth century throughout Spitzbergen, Iceland, Central Asia, and Alaska. He suggests that the cause is a present tendency towards equalisation of the earth's temperature.

Others more boldly affirm that the Swiss glaciers, as well as other great ice ma.s.ses existing on the globe, are remnants of the last Ice Age, and are all doomed to disappear as the cycle works round for the full heat of the next Warm Age. But the disappearance, if it is to come, will not come quickly, and the doom of ice-climbing in Switzerland is too remote a threat to disturb the Alpinist.

To the inexpert a glacier is a glacier all the world over, but the expert knows that the glaciers of different mountains have the same variations of character as the streams of different countries. Sir Martin Conway describes Swiss Alpine glaciers as

of the medium type, lying as they do half-way between the Arctic and tropical extremes. They have not the rapid flow of the Arctic nor the dry rigidity of the tropical sort. Their walls are not silent as in the Central Andes, nor thundered over by continual avalanches like those of the upper Baltoro.

They are of medium size also. In a single day almost any of them may be ascended from snout to snow-field, and descended again. To explore their remotest recesses no elaborately equipped expedition is required. Yet they are large enough to be imposing, and penetrate deep enough into the heart of the hills to isolate their votaries completely from the world of human habitation. It is to this medium quality that the Alps owe much of their charm. This, too, it is that makes them an almost perfect mountain playground. Were they but a little smaller, how much they would lose that is most precious! Were they larger, how many persons that now can afford the cost and the strength to explore them would have to linger at their gates wistfully looking in. In area, too, they are large enough for grandeur and yet small enough for easy access. No part of them is beyond the range of a summer holiday, yet a commanding view of them is as apparently limitless as is the view from the greatest Asiatic peaks which, thus far, have been climbed. They are the only range of snow-mountains in the world thus blessed with moderation.

The Alps to-day attract geologists and meteorologists from all parts of the world, but their first earnest student was a Genevan, Horace de Saussure, whose writings about his native mountains have a charm from their style as well as from their record of exact observations. Born in 1740, he was appointed at the age of twenty-one Professor of Philosophy at Geneva University. He ascended Mount Blanc in 1760 at the age of forty-seven, and spent all his leisure before and after that date in geological exploration of the various peaks.

"The one aim," he writes in his journals, "of most of the travellers who call themselves naturalists is the collection of curiosities. They walk, or rather they creep about, with their eyes fixed upon the earth, picking up a specimen here and a specimen there, without any eye to a generalization. They remind me of an antiquary scratching the ground at Rome, in the midst of the Pantheon or the Coliseum, looking for fragments of coloured gla.s.s, without ever turning to look at the architecture of these magnificent edifices."

This pioneer of geology died in 1799. There had been before him some few Alpine climbers, and there were after him some few more; but the twentieth-century tourist to Switzerland--who is chiefly interested in the Alps as difficult mountains to climb, presenting great problems of ice and cliff traverses, seasoning the joy of difficult achievement with a p.r.o.nounced spice of danger--follows a sport so modern that there are men now living who were born before the pa.s.sion for Alpine climbing came to birth. Certainly the Alps were traversed of old. But strictly not for pleasure. The most accessible pa.s.ses, not the most difficult peaks, were sought out; and the burdens and terrors of the pa.s.sage, not the joys of it, were uppermost in the minds of travellers. There is not extant any expression of pleasure from Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Suwarow, or any other of those famous conquerors of this mountain barrier. If any references at all to the crossing of the Alps come down from past times they are of complaint.

An English monk of the Middle Ages, for example, writes to his brethren of Canterbury:

Pardon me for not writing. I have been on the Mount of Jove--on the one hand looking up at the heaven of the mountains, on the other shuddering at the h.e.l.l of the valleys, feeling myself so much nearer heaven that I was more sure my prayer would be heard. Lord, I said, restore me to my brethren, that I may tell them, that they come not into this place of torment. Place of torment indeed, where the marble pavement of the stony ground is ice, and you cannot set your foot safely; where, strange to say, although it is so slippery that you cannot stand, the death (into which there is every facility to fall) is certain death. I put my hand in my scrip that I might scratch out a syllable or two to your sincerity--lo! I found my ink-bottle filled with a dry ma.s.s of ice; my fingers too refused to write, my beard was stiff with frost, and my breath congealed into a long icicle. I could not write the news I wished!

In the days, nearer to our own time, of the _salons_ of Coppet and Ferney, no one of the distinguished writers and thinkers who visited Switzerland gave a thought to mountain-climbing as a pleasure. Indeed all seemed insensible that there was any particular charm in the mountains' grandeur. The first of the great company of hill-climbers for pleasure, so far as I can discover, was that very typical Englishman, Mr. Albert Smith, who in 1851 climbed Mount Blanc, and devoted six years of profitable life afterwards to describing how he did it, to audiences at the Egyptian Hall, London. A nation which had already invented Arctic exploration was quick to seize upon Alpine climbing as an outlet for superfluous energy and love of danger. Mr.

Albert Smith was the forerunner of a great herd of climbers from this country and--the fashion spreading, as all English fashions do, to Europe--from many other countries: though truly I suspect that the Continental mind approves at heart more thoroughly the spirit of that amusing satire, _Tartarin de Tarascon sur les Alpes_, than the solemn records of the Alpine Club.

Switzerland has not so far raised a national memorial to Mr. Albert Smith, nor do Swiss hotel-keepers make pilgrimages to his grave in Brompton Cemetery. But he has his monument surely in Mount Blanc, the mountain which he "invented," according to the sober pages of the _Dictionary of National Biography_. Sir Leslie Stephen, of whom it was said "He walked from Alp to Alp like a pair of one-inch compa.s.ses over a large map," systematised, though he had not invented, Alpine climbing. He was one of the leading spirits of the Alpine Club, which encourages, records, and organises the climbing of Alps.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PALu GLACIER.]