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"Poor fellow, I pity him; he has, at least, never had the happiness of strolling on the shores of Como and the islands of Laggo Maggiore in your company, or of studying the wonders of the Pitti and the Vatican." "If I must confess all, he journeyed with us on foot and in boats an entire month, among the wonders of the Oberland, and across the Wallenstadt.
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.
It so fell that one dark evening in the month of June I was belated in the Bernese Oberland. Dusk overtook me toiling along the great Chamounix Road, and in the heart of a most desolate gorge, whose towering snow-flung walls seemed as the day sucked inwards to a point secret as a leech's mouth to close about me like a monstrous amphitheatre of ghosts.
On one side the Oberland Alps stretched along the horizon their pale, blue-white peaks. Other mountains, indistinct in color and outline, chained round the whole horizon. Yes, "the sleeping rocks did dream" all over the wide expanse, as they slumbered on their cloudy pillow, and their dream was of the coming dawn.
The view of the Oberland chain, as you see it from the garden of the hotel, really butters one's bread most handsomely; and here are I don't know how many hundred Cook's tourists a day looking at it through the smoke of their pipes. Is it really the "masses," however, that I see every day at the table d'hote? They have rather too few h's to the dozen, but their good-nature is great.
From the balcony of our rooms at the Bellevue, the long range of the Bernese Oberland shows its white summits for a moment in the slant sunshine, and then the clouds shut down, not to lift again for two days. Yet it looks warmer on the snow-peaks than in Berne, for summer sets in in Switzerland with a New England chill and rigor.
The people of Zurich were heavily mulcted by Massena for having aided the Austrians to the utmost in their power. Zschokke, who was at that time in the pay of France, wrote against the "Imperialism" of the Swiss. Rotenburg on the Tauber, on the contrary, wiped off the disgrace with which she had covered herself during the thirty years' war. The Bernese Oberland again fell to Berne.
During this very summer of 1838, therefore, while Agassiz was tracing the ancient limits of the ice in the Bernese Oberland and the Haut Valais, and later, in the valley of Chamounix, Guyot was studying the structure and movement of the ice during a six weeks' tour in the central Alps.
The inferior mountains on each side of the pass form a sort of frame for the picture of their dread lord, and close in the view so completely that no other prominent feature in the Oberland is visible from this BONG-A-BONG; nothing withdraws the attention from the solitary grandeur of the Finsteraarhorn and the dependent spurs which form the abutments of the central peak.
Was he in the mystic ordering of common events the ambassador of my future, sent out to turn the scale at a critical moment on the top of an Alpine pass, with the peaks of the Bernese Oberland for mute and solemn witnesses? His glance, his smile, the unextinguishable and comic ardour of his striving-forward appearance helped me to pull myself together.
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