Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Volume 2

In fact, my guide informed me that the Arve, like most other mountain streams, had many troublesome and inconvenient personal habits, such as rising up all of a sudden, some night, and whisking off houses, cattle, pine trees; in short, getting up sailing parties in such a promiscuous manner that it is neither safe nor agreeable to live in his neighborhood. He showed me, from time to time, the traces of such Kuhleborn pranks.

We were now descending rapidly through the valley of Chamouni, by a winding road, the scenery becoming every moment more and more impressive. The path was so steep and so stony that our guide was well enough contented to have us walk. I was glad to walk on alone; for the scenery was so wonderful that human sympathy and communion seemed to be out of the question. The effect of such scenery to our generally sleeping and drowsy souls, bound with the double chain of earthliness and sin, is like the electric touch of the angel on Peter, bound and sleeping. They make us realize that we were not only made to commune with God, but also what a God he is with whom we may commune. We talk of poetry, we talk of painting, we go to the ends of the earth to see the artists and great men of this world; but what a poet, what an artist is God! Truly said Michael Angelo, "The true painting is only a copy of the divine perfections—a shadow of his pencil."

I was sitting on a mossy trunk of an old pine, looking up admiringly on the wonderful heights around me—crystal peaks sparkling over dark pine trees—shadowy, airy distances of mountain heights, rising crystalline amid many-colored masses of cloud; while, looking out over my head from green hollows, I saw the small cottages, so tiny, in their airy distance, that they seemed scarcely bigger than a squirrel's nut, which he might have dropped in his passage. A pretty Savoyard girl, I should think about fifteen years old, came up to me.

"Madame admires the mountains," she said.

I assented.

"Yes," she added, "strangers always admire our mountains."

"And don't you admire them?" said I, looking, I suppose, rather amused into her bright eyes.

"No," she said, laughing. "Strangers come from hundreds of miles to see them all the time; but we peasants don't care for them, no more than the dust of the road."

I could but half believe the bright little puss when she said so; but there was a lumpish, soggy fellow accompanying her, whose nature appeared to be sufficiently unleavened to make almost any thing credible in the line of stupidity. In fact, it is one of the greatest drawbacks to the pleasure with which one travels through this beautiful country, to see what kind of human beings inhabit it. Here in the Alps, heaven above and earth beneath, tree, rock, water, light and shadow, every form, and agent, and power of nature, seem to be exerting themselves to produce a constant and changing poem and romance; every thing is grand, noble, free, and yet beautiful: in all these regions there is nothing so repulsive as a human dwelling.

A little further on we stopped at a village to refresh the horses. The auberge where we stopped was built like a great barn, with an earth floor, desolate and comfortless. The people looked poor and ground down, as if they had not a thought above the coarsest animal wants. The dirty children, with their hair tangled beyond all hope of combing, had the begging whine, and the trick of raising their hands for money, when one looked at them, which is universal in the Catholic parts of Switzerland. Indeed, all the way from the Sardinian frontier we had been dogged by beggars continually. Parents seemed to look upon their children as valuable only for this purpose; the very baby in arms is taught to make a pitiful little whine, and put out its fat hand, if your eye rests on it. The fact is, they are poor—poor because invention, enterprise, and intellectual vigor—all that surrounds the New England mountain farmer with competence and comfort—are quenched and dead, by the combined influence of a religion and government whose interest it is to keep people stupid that they may be manageable. Yet the Savoyards, as a race, it seems to me, are naturally intelligent; and I cannot but hope that the liberal course lately adopted by the Sardinian government may at last reach them. My heart yearns over many of the bright, pretty children, whose little hands have been up, from time to time, around our carriage. I could not help thinking what good schools and good instruction might do for them. It is not their fault, poor little things, that they are educated to whine and beg, and grow up rude, uncultured, to bring forth another set of children just like themselves; but what to do with them is the question. One generally begins with giving money; but a day or two of experience shows that it would be just about as hopeful to feed the locusts of Egypt on a loaf of bread. But it is hard to refuse children, especially to a mother who has left five or six at home, and who fancies she sees, in some of these little eager, childish faces, something now and then that reminds her of her own. For my part, I got schooled so that I could stand them all, except the little toddling three-year olds—they fairly overcame me. So I supplied my pocket with a quantity of sugar lozenges, for the relief of my own mind. I usually found the little fellows looked exceedingly delighted when they discovered the nature of the coin. Children are unsophisticated, and like sugar better than silver, any day.

In this auberge was a little chamois kid, of which fact we were duly apprised, when we got out, by a board put up, which said, "Here one can see a live chamois." The little live representative of chamoisdom came skipping out with the most amiable unconsciousness, and went through his paces for our entertainment with as much propriety as a New England child says his catechism. He hopped up on a table after some green leaves, which were then economically used to make him hop down again. The same illusive prospect was used to make him jump over a stick, and perform a number of other evolutions. I could not but admire the sweetness of temper with which he took all this tantalizing, and the innocence with which he chewed his cabbage leaf after he got it, not harboring a single revengeful thought at us for the trouble we had given him. Of course the issue of the matter was, that we all paid a few sous for the sight—not to the chamois, which would have been the most equitable way, but to those who had appropriated his gifts and graces to eke out their own convenience.

"Where's his mother?" said I, desiring to enlarge my sphere of natural history as much as possible.

"On a tué sa mere"—"They have killed his mother," was the reply, cool enough.

There we had the whole story. His enterprising neighbors had invaded the domestic hearth, shot his mother, and eaten her up, made her skin into chamois leather, and were keeping him till he got big enough for the same disposition, using his talents meanwhile to turn a penny upon; yet not a word of all this thought he; not a bit the less heartily did he caper; never speculated a minute on why it was, on the origin of evil, or any thing of the sort; or, if he did, at least never said a word about it. I gave one good look into his soft, round, glassy eyes, and could see nothing there but the most tranquil contentment. He had finished his cabbage leaf, and we had finished our call; so we will go on.

It was now drawing towards evening, and the air began to be sensibly and piercingly cold. One effect of this mountain air on myself is, to bring on the most acute headache that I ever recollect to have felt. Still, the increasing glory and magnificence of the scenery overcame bodily fatigue. Mont Blanc, and his army of white-robed brethren, rose before us in the distance, glorious as the four and twenty elders around the great white throne. The wonderful gradations of coloring in this Alpine landscape are not among the least of its charms. How can I describe it? Imagine yourself standing with me on this projecting rock, overlooking a deep, piny gorge, through which flow the brawling waters of the Arve. On the other side of this rise mountains whose heaving swells of velvet green, cliffs and dark pines, are fully made out and colored; behind this mountain, rises another, whose greens are softened and shaded, and seem to be seen through a purplish veil; behind that rises another, of a decided cloud-like purple; and in the next still the purple tint changes to rosy lilac; while above all, like another world up in the sky, mingling its tints with the passing clouds, sometimes obscured by them, and then breaking out between them, lie the glacier regions. These glaciers, in the setting sun, look like rivers of light pouring down from the clouds. Such was the scene, which I remember with perfect distinctness as enchaining my attention on one point of the road.

We had now got up to the valley of Chamouni. I looked before me, and saw, lying in the lap of the green valley, a gigantic pile of icy pillars, which, seen through the trees, at first suggested the idea of a cascade.

"What is that?" said I to the guide.

"The Glacier de Boisson."

I may as well stop here, and explain to you, once for all, what a glacier is. You see before you, as in this case, say thirty or forty mountain peaks, and between these peaks what seem to you frozen rivers. The snow from time to time melting, and dripping down the sides of the mountain, and congealing in the elevated hollows between the peaks, forms a half-fluid mass—a river of ice—which is called a glacier.

As it lies upon the slanting surface, and is not entirely solid throughout, the whole mass is continually pushing, with a gradual but imperceptible motion, down into the valleys below.

At a distance these glaciers, as I have said before, look like frozen rivers; when one approaches nearer, or where they press downward into the valley, like this Glacier de Boisson, they look like immense crystals and pillars of ice piled together in every conceivable form. The effect of this pile of ice, lying directly in the lap of green grass and flowers, is quite singular. The village of Chamouni itself has nothing in particular to recommend it. The buildings and every thing about it have a rough, coarse appearance. Before we had entered the valley this evening the sun had gone down; the sky behind the mountains was clear, and it seemed for a few moments as if darkness was rapidly coming on. On our right hand were black, jagged, furrowed walls of mountain, and on our left Mont Blanc, with his fields of glaciers and worlds of snow; they seemed to hem us in, and almost press us down. But in a few moments commenced a scene of transfiguration, more glorious than any thing I had witnessed yet. The cold, white, dismal fields of ice gradually changed into hues of the most beautiful rose color. A bank of white clouds, which rested above the mountains, kindled and glowed, as if some spirit of light had entered into them. You did not lose your idea of the dazzling, spiritual whiteness of the snow, yet you seemed to see it through a rosy veil. The sharp edges of the glaciers, and the hollows between the peaks, reflected wavering tints of lilac and purple. The effect was solemn and spiritual above every thing I have ever seen. These words, which had been often in my mind through the day, and which occurred to me more often than any others while I was travelling through the Alps, came into my mind with a pomp and magnificence of meaning unknown before—"For by Him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers; all things are by him and for him; and he is before all things, and by him all things subsist."

In this dazzling revelation I saw not that cold, distant, unfeeling fate, or that crushing regularity of power and wisdom, which was all the ancient Greek or modern Deist can behold in God; but I beheld, as it were, crowned and glorified, one who had loved with our loves, and suffered with our sufferings. Those shining snows were as his garments on the Mount of Transfiguration, and that serene and ineffable atmosphere of tenderness and beauty, which seemed to change these dreary deserts into worlds of heavenly light, was to me an image of the light shed by his eternal love on the sins and sorrows of time, and the dread abyss of eternity.

LETTER XXXIII

MY DEAR:—

Well, I waked up this morning, and the first thought was, "Here I am in the valley of Chamouni, right under the shadow of Mont Blanc, that I have studied about in childhood and found on the atlas." I sprang up, and ran to the window, to see if it was really there where I left it last night. Yes, true enough, there it was! right over our heads, as it were, blocking up our very existence; filling our minds with its presence; that colossal pyramid of dazzling snow! Its lower parts concealed by the roofs, only the three rounded domes of the summit cut their forms with icy distinctness on the intense blue of the sky!

On the evening before I had taken my last look at about nine o'clock, and had mentally resolved to go out before daybreak and repeat Coleridge's celebrated hymn; but I advise any one who has any such liturgic designs to execute them over night, for after a day of climbing one acquires an aptitude for sleep that interferes with early rising. When I left last evening its countenance was "filled with rosy light," and they tell us, that hours before it is daylight in the valley this mountain top breaks into brightness, like that pillar of fire which enlightened the darkness of the Israelites.

I rejoice every hour that I am among these scenes in my familiarity with the language of the Bible. In it alone can I find vocabulary and images to express what this world of wonders excites. Mechanically I repeat to myself, "The everlasting mountains were scattered; the perpetual hills did bow; his ways are everlasting." But as straws, chips, and seaweed play in a thousand fantastic figures on the face of the ocean, sometimes even concealing the solemn depths beneath, so the prose of daily existence mixes itself up with the solemn poetry of life, here as elsewhere.

You must have a breakfast, and then you cannot rush out and up Mont Blanc ad libitum; you must go up in the regular appointed way, with mule and guides. This matter of guides is perfectly systematized here; for, the mountains being the great overpowering fact of life, it follows that all that enterprise and talent which in other places develop themselves in various forms, here take the single channel of climbing mountains. In America, if a man is a genius he strikes out a new way of cleaning cotton; but in Chamouni, if he is a genius he finds a new way of going up Mont Blanc.

As a sailor knows every timber, rope, and spar of his ship, and seems to identify his existence with her, so these guides their mountains. The mountains are their calendar, their book, their newspaper, their cabinet, herbarium, barometer, their education, and their livelihood.

In fine, behold us about eight o'clock, C., S., W., little G., and self, in all the bustle of fitting out in the front of our hotel. Two guides, Balmat and Alexandre, lead two mules, long-eared, slow-footed, considerate brutes, who have borne a thousand ladies over a thousand pokerish places, and are ready to bear a thousand more. Equipped with low-backed saddles, they stand, their noses down, their eyes contemplatively closed, their whole appearance impressing one with an air of practical talent and reliableness. Your mule is evidently safe and stupid as any conservative of any country; you may be sure that no erratic fires, no new influx of ideas will ever lead him to desert the good old paths, and tumble you down precipices. The harness they wear is so exceedingly ancient, and has such a dilapidated appearance, as if held together only by the merest accident, that I could not but express a little alarm on mounting.

"Those girths—won't they break?"

"O, no, no, mademoiselle!" said the guides. In fact, they seem so delighted with their arrangements, that I swallow my doubts in silence. A third mule being added for the joint use of the gentlemen, and all being equipped with iron-pointed poles, off we start in high spirits.

A glorious day; air clear as crystal, sky with as fixed a blue as if it could not think a cloud; guides congratulate us, "Qu'il fait trčs beau!" We pass the lanes of the village, our heads almost on a level with the flat stone-laden roofs; our mules, with their long rolling pace, like the waves of the sea, give to their riders a facetious wag of the body that is quite striking. Now the village is passed, and see, a road banded with green ribands of turf. S.'s mule and guide pass on, and head the party. G. rides another mule. C. and W. leap along trying their alpenstocks; stopping once in a while to admire the glaciers, as their brilliant forms appear through the pines.

Here a discussion commences as to where we are going. We had agreed among ourselves that we would visit the Mer de Glâce. We fully meant to go there, and had so told the guide on starting; but it appears he had other views for us. There is a regular way of seeing things, orthodox and appointed; and to get sight of any thing in the wrong way would be as bad as to get well without a scientific physician, or any other irregular piece of proceeding.

It appeared from the representations of the guide that to visit Mer de Glâce before we had seen La Flégčre, would no more answer than for Jacob to marry Rachel before he had married Leah. Determined not to yield, as we were, we somehow found ourselves vanquished by our guide's arguments, and soberly going off his way instead of ours, doing exactly what we had resolved not to do. However, the point being yielded we proceeded merrily.

As we had some way, however, to trot along the valley before we came to the ascending place, I improved the opportunity to cultivate a little the acquaintance of my guide. He was a tall, spare man, with black eyes, black hair, and features expressive of shrewdness, energy, and determination. Either from paralysis, or some other cause, he was subject to a spasmodic twitching of the features, producing very much the effect that heat lightning does in the summer sky—it seemed to flash over his face and be gone in a wink; at first this looked to me very odd, but so much do our ideas depend on association, that after I had known him for some time, I really thought that I liked him better with, than I should without it. It seemed to give originality to the expression of his face; he was such a good, fatherly man, and took such excellent care of me and the mule, and showed so much intelligence and dignity in his conversation, that I could do no less than like him, heat lightning and all.

This valley of Chamouni, through which we are winding now, is every where as flat as a parlor floor. These valleys in the Alps seem to have this peculiarity—they are not hollows, bending downward in the middle, and imperceptibly sloping upward into the mountains, but they lie perfectly flat. The mountains rise up around them like walls almost perpendicularly.

"Voilŕ!" says my guide, pointing to the left, to a great, bare ravine, "down there came an avalanche, and knocked down those houses and killed several people."

"Ah!" said I; "but don't avalanches generally come in the same places every year?"

"Generally, they do."

"Why do people build houses in the way of them?" said I.

"Ah! this was an unusual avalanche, this one here."

"Do the avalanches ever bring rocks with them?"

"No, not often; nothing but snow."

"There!" says my guide, pointing to an object about as big as a good-sized fly, on the side of a distant mountain, "there's the auberge, on La Flégčre, where we are going."

"Up there?" say I, looking up apprehensively, and querying in my mind how my estimable friend the mule is ever to get up there with me on his back.

"O yes," says my guide, cheerily, "and the road is up through that ravine."

The ravine is a charming specimen of a road to be sure, but no matter—on we go.

"There," says a guide, "those black rocks in the middle of that glacier on Mont Blanc are the Grands Mulets, where travellers sleep going up Mont Blanc."

We wind now among the pine tree still we come almost under the Mer de Glâce. A most fairy-like cascade falls down from under its pillars of ice over the dark rocks,—a cloud of feathery foam,—and then streams into the valley below.