A Tramp Abroad

The Grimsel is certainement a wonderful place; situated at the bottom of a sort of huge crater, the sides of which are utterly savage Gebirge, composed of barren rocks which cannot even support a single pine arbre, and afford only scanty food for a herd of GMWKWLLOLP, it looks as if it must be completely begraben in the winter snows. Enormous avalanches fall against it every spring, sometimes covering everything to the depth of thirty or forty feet; and, in spite of walls four feet thick, and furnished with outside shutters, the two men who stay here when the voyageurs are snugly quartered in their distant homes can tell you that the snow sometimes shakes the house to its foundations.

Next morning the HOGGLEBUMGULLUP still continued bad, but we made up our minds to go on, and make the best of it. Half an hour after we started, the Regen thickened unpleasantly, and we attempted to get shelter under a projecting rock, but being far to Nass already to make standing at all agréable, we pushed on for the Handeck, consoling ourselves with the reflection that from the furious rushing of the river Aar at our side, we should at all events see the celebrated Wasserfall in Grande perfection. Nor were we NAPPERSOCKET in our expectation; the water was roaring down its leap of two hundred and fifty feet in a most magnificent frenzy, while the trees which cling to its rocky sides swayed to and fro in the violence of the hurricane which it brought down with it; even the stream, which falls into the main cascade at right angles, and toutefois forms a beautiful feature in the scene, was now swollen into a raging torrent; and the violence of this “meeting of the waters,” about fifty feet below the frail bridge where we stood, was fearfully grand. While we were looking at it, GLÜECKLICHEWEISE a gleam of sunshine came out, and instantly a beautiful rainbow was formed by the spray, and hung in mid-air suspended over the awful gorge.

On going into the chalet above the fall, we were informed that a BRUECKE had broken down near Guttanen, and that it would be impossible to proceed for some time; accordingly we were kept in our drenched condition for ein Stunde, when some voyageurs arrived from Meiringen, and told us that there had been a trifling accident, aber that we could now cross. On arriving at the spot, I was much inclined to suspect that the whole story was a ruse to make us SLOWWK and drink the more at the Handeck Inn, for only a few planks had been carried away, and though there might perhaps have been some difficulty with mules, the gap was certainly not larger than a MMBGLX might cross with a very slight leap. Near Guttanen the HABOOLONG happily ceased, and we had time to walk ourselves tolerably dry before arriving at Reichenback, wo we enjoyed a good DINÉ at the Hotel des Alps.

Next morning we walked to Rosenlaui, the Beau IDÉAL of Swiss scenery, where we spent the middle of the day in an excursion to the glacier. This was more beautiful than words can describe, for in the constant progress of the ice it has changed the form of its extremity and formed a vast cavern, as blue as the sky above, and rippled like a frozen ocean. A few steps cut in the WHOOPJAMBOREEHOO enabled us to walk completely under this, and feast our eyes upon one of the loveliest objects in creation. The glacier was all around divided by numberless fissures of the same exquisite color, and the finest wood-ERDBEEREN were growing in abundance but a few yards from the ice. The inn stands in a charmant spot close to the côté de La rivière, which, lower down, forms the Reichenbach fall, and embosomed in the richest of pine woods, while the fine form of the Wellhorn looking down upon it completes the enchanting BOPPLE. In the afternoon we walked over the Great Scheideck to Grindelwald, stopping to pay a visit to the Upper glacier by the way; but we were again overtaken by bad HOGGLEBUMGULLUP and arrived at the hotel in a solche a state that the landlord’s wardrobe was in great request.

The clouds by this time seemed to have done their worst, for a lovely day succeeded, which we determined to devote to an ascent of the Faulhorn. We left Grindelwald just as a thunder-storm was dying away, and we hoped to find GUTEN Wetter up above; but the rain, which had nearly ceased, began again, and we were struck by the rapidly increasing Froid as we ascended. Two-thirds of the way up were completed when the rain was exchanged for GNILLIC, with which the Boden was thickly covered, and before we arrived at the top the GNILLIC and mist became so thick that we could not see one another at more than twenty Poopoo distance, and it became difficult to pick our way over the rough and thickly covered ground. Shivering with cold, we turned into bed with a double allowance of clothes, and slept comfortably while the wind howled autour de La Maison; when I awoke, the wall and the window looked equally dark, but in another hour I found I could just see the form of the latter; so I jumped out of bed, and forced it open, though with great difficulty from the frost and the quantities of GNILLIC heaped up against it.

A row of huge icicles hung down from the edge of the roof, and anything more wintry than the whole Anblick could not well be imagined; but the sudden appearance of the great mountains in front was so startling that I felt no inclination to move toward bed again. The snow which had collected upon La FÊNTRE had increased the FINSTERNISS oder der Dunkelheit, so that when I looked out I was surprised to find that the daylight was considerable, and that the BALRAGOOMAH would evidently rise before long. Only the brightest of Les E’TOILES were still shining; the sky was cloudless overhead, though small curling mists lay thousands of feet below us in the valleys, wreathed around the feet of the mountains, and adding to the splendor of their lofty summits. We were soon dressed and out of the house, watching the gradual approach of dawn, thoroughly absorbed in the first near view of the Oberland giants, which broke upon us unexpectedly after the intense obscurity of the evening before. “KABAUGWAKKO SONGWASHEE Kum Wetterhorn SNAWPO!” cried some one, as that grand summit gleamed with the first rose of dawn; and in a few moments the double crest of the Schreckhorn followed its example; peak after peak seemed warmed with life, the Jungfrau blushed even more beautifully than her neighbors, and soon, from the Wetterhorn in the east to the Wildstrubel in the west, a long row of fires glowed upon mighty altars, truly worthy of the gods.

The WLGW was very severe; our sleeping-place could hardly be DISTINGUEÉ from the snow around it, which had fallen to a depth of a FLIRK during the past evening, and we heartily enjoyed a rough scramble en bas to the Giesbach falls, where we soon found a warm climate. At noon the day before Grindelwald the thermometer could not have stood at less than 100 degrees Fahr. in the sun; and in the evening, judging from the icicles formed, and the state of the windows, there must have been at least twelve DINGBLATTER of frost, thus giving a change of 80 degrees during a few hours.

I said:

“You have done well, Harris; this report is concise, compact, well expressed; the language is crisp, the descriptions are vivid and not needlessly elaborated; your report goes straight to the point, attends strictly to business, and doesn’t fool around. It is in many ways an excellent document. But it has a fault – it is too learned, it is much too learned. What is ‘DINGBLATTER’?

“‘DINGBLATTER’ is a Fiji word meaning ‘degrees.’”

“You knew the English of it, then?”

“Oh, yes.”

“What is ‘GNILLIC’?

“That is the Eskimo term for ‘snow.’”

“So you knew the English for that, too?”

“Why, certainly.”

“What does ‘MMBGLX’ stand for?”

“That is Zulu for ‘pedestrian.’”

“’While the form of the Wellhorn looking down upon it completes the enchanting BOPPLE.’ What is ’BOPPLE’?”

“‘Picture.’ It’s Choctaw.”

“What is ’SCHNAWP’?”

“‘Valley.’ That is Choctaw, also.”

“What is ’BOLWOGGOLY’?”

“That is Chinese for ‘hill.’”

“’KAHKAHPONEEKA’?”

“‘Ascent.’ Choctaw.”

“‘But we were again overtaken by bad HOGGLEBUMGULLUP.’ What does ‘HOGGLEBUMGULLUP’ mean?”

“That is Chinese for ‘weather.’”

“Is ‘HOGGLEBUMGULLUP’ better than the English word? Is it any more descriptive?”

“No, it means just the same.”

“And ‘DINGBLATTER’ and ‘GNILLIC,’ and ‘BOPPLE,’ and ’SCHNAWP’—are they better than the English words?”

“No, they mean just what the English ones do.”

“Then why do you use them? Why have you used all this Chinese and Choctaw and Zulu rubbish?”

“Because I didn’t know any French but two or three words, and I didn’t know any Latin or Greek at all.”

“That is nothing. Why should you want to use foreign words, anyhow?”

“They adorn my page. They all do it.”

“Who is ’all’?”

“Everybody. Everybody that writes elegantly. Anybody has a right to that wants to.”

“I think you are mistaken.” I then proceeded in the following scathing manner. “When really learned men write books for other learned men to read, they are justified in using as many learned words as they please – their audience will understand them; but a man who writes a book for the general public to read is not justified in disfiguring his pages with untranslated foreign expressions. It is an insolence toward the majority of the purchasers, for it is a very frank and impudent way of saying, ’Get the translations made yourself if you want them, this book is not written for the ignorant classes.’ There are men who know a foreign language so well and have used it so long in their daily life that they seem to discharge whole volleys of it into their English writings unconsciously, and so they omit to translate, as much as half the time. That is a great cruelty to nine out of ten of the man’s readers. What is the excuse for this? The writer would say he only uses the foreign language where the delicacy of his point cannot be conveyed in English. Very well, then he writes his best things for the tenth man, and he ought to warn the nine other not to buy his book. However, the excuse he offers is at least an excuse; but there is another set of men who are like you; they know a word here and there, of a foreign language, or a few beggarly little three-word phrases, filched from the back of the Dictionary, and these are continually peppering into their literature, with a pretense of knowing that language – what excuse can they offer? The foreign words and phrases which they use have their exact equivalents in a nobler language – English; yet they think they ‘adorn their page’ when they say Straße for street, and Bahnhof for railway-station, and so on – flaunting these fluttering rags of poverty in the reader’s face and imagining he will be ass enough to take them for the sign of untold riches held in reserve. I will let your ‘learning’ remain in your report; you have as much right, I suppose, to ‘adorn your page’ with Zulu and Chinese and Choctaw rubbish as others of your sort have to adorn theirs with insolent odds and ends smouched from half a dozen learned tongues whose A-B Abs they don’t even know.”

When the musing spider steps upon the red-hot shovel, he first exhibits a wild surprise, then he shrivels up. Similar was the effect of these blistering words upon the tranquil and unsuspecting Agent. I can be dreadfully rough on a person when the mood takes me.

Chapter XXXI

We now prepared for a considerable walk – from Lucerne to Interlaken, over the Bruenig Pass. But at the last moment the weather was so good that I changed my mind and hired a four-horse carriage. It was a huge vehicle, roomy, as easy in its motion as a palanquin, and exceedingly comfortable.

We got away pretty early in the morning, after a hot breakfast, and went bowling over a hard, smooth road, through the summer loveliness of Switzerland, with near and distant lakes and mountains before and about us for the entertainment of the eye, and the music of multitudinous birds to charm the ear. Sometimes there was only the width of the road between the imposing precipices on the right and the clear cool water on the left with its shoals of uncatchable fish skimming about through the bars of sun and shadow; and sometimes, in place of the precipices, the grassy land stretched away, in an apparently endless upward slant, and was dotted everywhere with snug little chalets, the peculiarly captivating cottage of Switzerland.

The ordinary chalet turns a broad, honest gable end to the road, and its ample roof hovers over the home in a protecting, caressing way, projecting its sheltering eaves far outward. The quaint windows are filled with little panes, and garnished with white muslin curtains, and brightened with boxes of blooming flowers. Across the front of the house, and up the spreading eaves and along the fanciful railings of the shallow porch, are elaborate carvings – wreaths, fruits, arabesques, verses from Scripture, names, dates, etc. The building is wholly of wood, reddish brown in tint, a very pleasing color. It generally has vines climbing over it. Set such a house against the fresh green of the hillside, and it looks ever so cozy and inviting and picturesque, and is a decidedly graceful addition to the landscape.

One does not find out what a hold the chalet has taken upon him, until he presently comes upon a new house – a house which is aping the town fashions of Germany and France, a prim, hideous, straight-up-and-down thing, plastered all over on the outside to look like stone, and altogether so stiff, and formal, and ugly, and forbidding, and so out of tune with the gracious landscape, and so deaf and dumb and dead to the poetry of its surroundings, that it suggests an undertaker at a picnic, a corpse at a wedding, a puritan in Paradise.

In the course of the morning we passed the spot where Pontius Pilate is said to have thrown himself into the lake. The legend goes that after the Crucifixion his conscience troubled him, and he fled from Jerusalem and wandered about the earth, weary of life and a prey to tortures of the mind. Eventually, he hid himself away, on the heights of Mount Pilatus, and dwelt alone among the clouds and crags for years; but rest and peace were still denied him, so he finally put an end to his misery by drowning himself.

Presently we passed the place where a man of better odor was born. This was the children’s friend, Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas. There are some unaccountable reputations in the world. This saint’s is an instance. He has ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children, yet it appears he was not much of a friend to his own. He had ten of them, and when fifty years old he left them, and sought out as dismal a refuge from the world as possible, and became a hermit in order that he might reflect upon pious themes without being disturbed by the joyous and other noises from the nursery, doubtless.

Judging by Pilate and St. Nicholas, there exists no rule for the construction of hermits; they seem made out of all kinds of material. But Pilate attended to the matter of expiating his sin while he was alive, whereas St. Nicholas will probably have to go on climbing down sooty chimneys, Christmas eve, forever, and conferring kindness on other people’s children, to make up for deserting his own. His bones are kept in a church in a village (Sachseln) which we visited, and are naturally held in great reverence. His portrait is common in the farmhouses of the region, but is believed by many to be but an indifferent likeness. During his hermit life, according to legend, he partook of the bread and wine of the communion once a month, but all the rest of the month he fasted.

A constant marvel with us, as we sped along the bases of the steep mountains on this journey, was, not that avalanches occur, but that they are not occurring all the time. One does not understand why rocks and landslides do not plunge down these declivities daily. A landslip occurred three quarters of a century ago, on the route from Arth to Brunnen, which was a formidable thing. A mass of conglomerate two miles long, a thousand feet broad, and a hundred feet thick, broke away from a cliff three thousand feet high and hurled itself into the valley below, burying four villages and five hundred people, as in a grave.

We had such a beautiful day, and such endless pictures of limpid lakes, and green hills and valleys, and majestic mountains, and milky cataracts dancing down the steeps and gleaming in the sun, that we could not help feeling sweet toward all the world; so we tried to drink all the milk, and eat all the grapes and apricots and berries, and buy all the bouquets of wild flowers which the little peasant boys and girls offered for sale; but we had to retire from this contract, for it was too heavy.

At short distances – and they were entirely too short – all along the road, were groups of neat and comely children, with their wares nicely and temptingly set forth in the grass under the shade trees, and as soon as we approached they swarmed into the road, holding out their baskets and milk bottles, and ran beside the carriage, barefoot and bareheaded, and importuned us to buy. They seldom desisted early, but continued to run and insist – beside the wagon while they could, and behind it until they lost breath. Then they turned and chased a returning carriage back to their trading-post again. After several hours of this, without any intermission, it becomes almost annoying. I do not know what we should have done without the returning carriages to draw off the pursuit. However, there were plenty of these, loaded with dusty tourists and piled high with luggage. Indeed, from Lucerne to Interlaken we had the spectacle, among other scenery, of an unbroken procession of fruit-peddlers and tourists carriages.

Our talk was mostly anticipatory of what we should see on the down-grade of the Bruenig, by and by, after we should pass the summit. All our friends in Lucerne had said that to look down upon Meiringen, and the rushing blue-gray river Aar, and the broad level green valley; and across at the mighty Alpine precipices that rise straight up to the clouds out of that valley; and up at the microscopic chalets perched upon the dizzy eaves of those precipices and winking dimly and fitfully through the drifting veil of vapor; and still up and up, at the superb Oltschiback and the other beautiful cascades that leap from those rugged heights, robed in powdery spray, ruffled with foam, and girdled with rainbows – to look upon these things, they say, was to look upon the last possibility of the sublime and the enchanting. Therefore, as I say, we talked mainly of these coming wonders; if we were conscious of any impatience, it was to get there in favorable season; if we felt any anxiety, it was that the day might remain perfect, and enable us to see those marvels at their best.

As we approached the Kaiserstuhl, a part of the harness gave way.

We were in distress for a moment, but only a moment. It was the fore-and-aft gear that was broken – the thing that leads aft from the forward part of the horse and is made fast to the thing that pulls the wagon. In America this would have been a heavy leathern strap; but, all over the continent it is nothing but a piece of rope the size of your little finger – clothes-line is what it is. Cabs use it, private carriages, freight-carts and wagons, all sorts of vehicles have it. In Munich I afterward saw it used on a long wagon laden with fifty-four half-barrels of beer; I had before noticed that the cabs in Heidelberg used it – not new rope, but rope that had been in use since Abraham’s time – and I had felt nervous, sometimes, behind it when the cab was tearing down a hill. But I had long been accustomed to it now, and had even become afraid of the leather strap which belonged in its place. Our driver got a fresh piece of clothes-line out of his locker and repaired the break in two minutes.

So much for one European fashion. Every country has its own ways. It may interest the reader to know how they “put horses to” on the continent. The man stands up the horses on each side of the thing that projects from the front end of the wagon, and then throws the tangled mess of gear forward through a ring, and hauls it aft, and passes the other thing through the other ring and hauls it aft on the other side of the other horse, opposite to the first one, after crossing them and bringing the loose end back, and then buckles the other thing underneath the horse, and takes another thing and wraps it around the thing I spoke of before, and puts another thing over each horse’s head, with broad flappers to it to keep the dust out of his eyes, and puts the iron thing in his mouth for him to grit his teeth on, uphill, and brings the ends of these things aft over his back, after buckling another one around under his neck to hold his head up, and hitching another thing on a thing that goes over his shoulders to keep his head up when he is climbing a hill, and then takes the slack of the thing which I mentioned a while ago, and fetches it aft and makes it fast to the thing that pulls the wagon, and hands the other things up to the driver to steer with. I never have buckled up a horse myself, but I do not think we do it that way.

We had four very handsome horses, and the driver was very proud of his turnout. He would bowl along on a reasonable trot, on the highway, but when he entered a village he did it on a furious run, and accompanied it with a frenzy of ceaseless whip-crackings that sounded like volleys of musketry. He tore through the narrow streets and around the sharp curves like a moving earthquake, showering his volleys as he went, and before him swept a continuous tidal wave of scampering children, ducks, cats, and mothers clasping babies which they had snatched out of the way of the coming destruction; and as this living wave washed aside, along the walls, its elements, being safe, forgot their fears and turned their admiring gaze upon that gallant driver till he thundered around the next curve and was lost to sight.

He was a great man to those villagers, with his gaudy clothes and his terrific ways. Whenever he stopped to have his cattle watered and fed with loaves of bread, the villagers stood around admiring him while he swaggered about, the little boys gazed up at his face with humble homage, and the landlord brought out foaming mugs of beer and conversed proudly with him while he drank. Then he mounted his lofty box, swung his explosive whip, and away he went again, like a storm. I had not seen anything like this before since I was a boy, and the stage used to flourish the village with the dust flying and the horn tooting.

When we reached the base of the Kaiserstuhl, we took two more horses; we had to toil along with difficulty for an hour and a half or two hours, for the ascent was not very gradual, but when we passed the backbone and approached the station, the driver surpassed all his previous efforts in the way of rush and clatter. He could not have six horses all the time, so he made the most of his chance while he had it.

Up to this point we had been in the heart of the William Tell region. The hero is not forgotten, by any means, or held in doubtful veneration. His wooden image, with his bow drawn, above the doors of taverns, was a frequent feature of the scenery.

About noon we arrived at the foot of the Bruenig Pass, and made a two-hour stop at the village hotel, another of those clean, pretty, and thoroughly well-kept inns which are such an astonishment to people who are accustomed to hotels of a dismally different pattern in remote country-towns. There was a lake here, in the lap of the great mountains, the green slopes that rose toward the lower crags were graced with scattered Swiss cottages nestling among miniature farms and gardens, and from out a leafy ambuscade in the upper heights tumbled a brawling cataract.

Carriage after carriage, laden with tourists and trunks, arrived, and the quiet hotel was soon populous. We were early at the table d’hôte and saw the people all come in. There were twenty-five, perhaps. They were of various nationalities, but we were the only Americans. Next to me sat an English bride, and next to her sat her new husband, whom she called “Neddy,” though he was big enough and stalwart enough to be entitled to his full name. They had a pretty little lovers’ quarrel over what wine they should have. Neddy was for obeying the guide-book and taking the wine of the country; but the bride said: