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Updated: June 4, 2025
When the snow has driven everybody home again from the Oberland and the Rigi and all the Swiss hotel-keepers have resumed their original dignity as Landammans of their various cantons, it is a little amusing to reflect how much of the pleasure of one's holiday has been due to one's own countrymen.
Finally we decided to go to Geneva and then choose some resting place in the Alps. Brigitte was enthusiastic about the lake; I thought I could already breathe the air which floats over its surface, and the odor of the verdure-clad valley; already I beheld Lausanne, Vevey, Oberland, and in the distance the summits of Monte Rosa and the immense plain of Lombardy.
It was cut out of the red crumbling rock, and at the summit passed through a guard-house. Undoubtedly the present Treppe should be similarly fortified. It was built by the government in 1834. During the smuggling days, it is said, an Englishman rode up to the Oberland, and the apparition so shocked an old woman, who had never seen a horse before, that she fell senseless to the ground.
On the Unterland are the principal streets and shops, on the Oberland are many of the best hotels and government-house.
Erlach fled to Thun, in order to place himself at the head of the people of the Oberland, who descended in thick masses from the mountains; but, on his addressing the brave Senn peasantry in French, according to the malpractice of the Bernese, they mistook him for a French spy and struck him dead in his carriage.
Then again, what ready wit flashed forth in his retort to a deputy who objected to the Bernese Oberland forming part of the Canton of Berne: "Where do you take your cattle and your cheese?" "To Berne." "Whence do you get your grain, cloth, and iron?" "From Berne." "Very well: 'To Berne, from Berne' you consequently belong to Berne."
Brigitte was enthusiastic about the lake; I thought I could already breathe the air which floats over its surface and the odor of the verdure-clad valley; already Lausanne, Vevay, Oberland and beyond the summits of Monte Rosa and the immense plain of Lombardy; already, oblivion, repose, flight, all the delights of happy solitude, invited us; already, when in the evening with joined hands, we looked at one another in silence, we felt rising within us that sentiment of strange grandeur which takes possession of the heart on the eve of a long journey, mysterious and indescribable vertigo, which has in it something of the terrors of exile and the hopes of a pilgrimage.
Words would have jarred like a discord upon the ear. What the Bernese Oberland range is to the Alps, this Kinchinjunga group is to the sky-reaching Himalayas. The former, however, are but pygmies compared with these giants at Darjeeling. One gazes in amazement at the peaks, and almost doubts that they belong to the earth upon which he stands.
My friend, it is twenty-four miles, a road somewhat hilly, with splendid views of Mont Blanc in the morning, and of the Bernese Oberland range in the afternoon, when you descend into Martigny, a hot place in the dusty Rhone Valley, which has a comfortable hotel, with a pleasant garden, in which you sit after dinner and let the mosquitoes eat you.
"I met at Geneva an Englishman, who was as morose as myself. We vented our spleen in common and were both bored together. We travelled thus through the Oberland and the best part of Valais; we were often rolled up in our travelling robes in the depths of the carriage, and fast asleep when the most beautiful points of interest were in sight.
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