United States or Tuvalu ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I had brandy there, and on going out I found that it stood at the foot of a sharp ridge which was the true Grimsel Pass, the neck which joins the Bernese Oberland to the eastern group of high mountains. This ridge or neck was steep like a pitched roof very high I found it, and all of black glassy rock, with here and there snow in sharp, even, sloping sheets just holding to it.
The blue lake lay at our feet on the right, and beyond it the Niesen stood, with wonted grandeur, guarding its subject valleys; more in front, as we ascended transversely, the well-known snow-peaks of the Bernese Oberland glittered high above the nearer foreground, and, sheer above us, on the left, rose the ragged precipices whose flank we were to turn.
The dogmatical, but well-meaning bailiff; though usually jealous of his Bernese origin, and alive on system to the necessity of preserving the superiority of the great canton by all the common observances of dignity and reserve, yielded to the general movement, and shouted with the rest, under favor of a pair of lungs that nature had admirably fitted to sustain the chorus of a mountain song.
I took the advice of a man in the club whose name I now forget if ever I knew it, a dark man with a scar and went up to the Schwarzegg Hut above Grindelwald, and over the Strahlegg to the Grimsel. I had never been up into the central mass of the Bernese Oberland before, and I was amazed and extraordinarily delighted by the vast lonely beauty of those interminable uplands of ice.
The field-chaplain Kolb spake thus to the assembled soldiery: "Your forefathers in a like case would have swum through the Rhine to attack the enemy; at the slightest call they marched to battle; the Gospel itself does not move you." These words were uttered with impunity; but yet they produced no effect. The men of Solothurn, Basel, Schaffhausen, Biel and Muehlhausen also joined the Bernese.
Would you say that a Bernese is not free, because he is subject to the sumptuary laws, which he himself had made." "Well, well, I wish the people made the laws everywhere." After this lively answer, he abruptly asked me what part I came from. "From Roche," said I. "I should have been very sorry to leave Switzerland without seeing the famous Haller.
You have no doubt read that, after lulling the Government of Berne into security by repeated proposals of accommodation, he attacked the Swiss and Bernese troops during a truce, and obtained by treachery successes which his valour did not promise him. The pillage, robberies, and devastations in Helvetia added several more millions to his previously great riches.
The intervention of the Directory in the affairs of Switzerland was equally lucrative. The inhabitants of the district of Vaud, in their struggles against the oppressive rule of the Bernese oligarchy, had offered to the French Government the excuse for interference: and a force invading that land, overpowered the levies of the central cantons.
In the camp itself undoubtedly lay the chief causes of the crippled condition of affairs, the confusion and the unfortunate results. Not only did a continual strife prevail between the Bernese and Zurichan commanders, but the latter stood isolated among his own people.
On the other side of the vale rise the steeps of the Aiguilles Rouges and the Brevent. To the north towers the Croix de Fer, and to the north-east is seen the entire chain of the Bernese Alps, rising like a mighty white leviathan, with a bristling back of pinnacles. Splendid though the view was, however, Lewis did not for a moment forget his mission.
Word Of The Day