CHAPTER X

FROM AROSA TO BELLINZONA OVER THE BERNARDINO PASS

The Arosa Information Bureau--The hospitality of sanatorium guests--The allurements of loneliness--Whither the spirit leads--Avalanche weather--The Spring god and King Frost--The source of the Rhine--The post sleigh in a winter storm--The Bernardino pass--Brissago.

Badenin Aargau is a flourishing watering-place, whence I was glad to make my escape a few years ago in the last days of March.

I had wired to the information bureau at Arosa, asking how long I might expect to find good snow. The answer came: “Till the middle of May,” which sounded boastful, in fact rather alarming, by promising so very much. But why should I malign those good people? I found heaps and heaps of snow, enough to satisfy all reasonable requirements till the middle of June.

My little daughter kept then a small paper box, in which she stored up all the fine weather I might wish to apply for. On fair terms of purchase she “let out” a certain number of fine days--as many as she thought I might be allowed--to take me to Arosa and thence to Bellinzona, where I was to join her and her mother on the way to Brissago on Lago Maggiore.

There certain open-air orange and lemon groves I knew of awaited us and a blossoming aloe near by on the way to Ascona.

To swoop down the Bernardino pass upon Mesocco on ski and land a few hours later on the banks of Lago Maggiore, after crossing the Rhaetic Alps from Arosa to Hinterrhein, tickled my fancy. My line would be from Arosa to Lenzerheide, along the Oberhalbstein valley to Stalla, otherwise called Bivio, thence to Cresta Avers, and somehow along the Madesimo pass to the Splügen road, and then east to Hinterrhein, and across the Bernardino pass through the village of that name to Mesocco. The whole thing could be done on ski. It would nowhere take me over glaciers. I should do this alone, carrying my pack, sleeping every night in a comfortable bed, and tramping by day on ski like any ordinary summer vagabond wasting his shoe-leather on the hard high road.

I could imagine nothing pleasanter. I should not take off my ski till the last strip of snow sticking to the edge of the Mesocco road gave way and should bring my navigation to a standstill upon the characteristic mixture of mud and gravel found on post-roads during the spring thaw. There is no small charm in slithering upon snow getting thinner and thinner till it is from two to three inches deep and tapering in the end to the bare inch, which is enough for the expert runner.

Spring has a delightful way of creeping and sneaking up the Alpine passes, using against King Frost every seduction that a soft, tender heart can devise to disarm a fierce, unrelenting spirit. It threads its way delicately from one warm, protected nook to another, and throws out feelers that stretch forth tremblingly from the rock crannies into the rough air.

Flowerets peep out here and there. The eggs of frogs float about in slimy masses upon pools of warm water banked in with snow. The released springs and waterfalls throw off their transparent scarves of iridescent crystal ice. The blackbirds hop about from branch to branch piping upon bare trees that are still sunny through and through, but do not yet venture to chill their feet by touching the ground still encumbered with deep snow.

The hard winter god, gradually coaxed into a softer mood, relaxes his hold upon the crust of the earth. What more delightful than this mixture of two seasons? Under one’s feet all is winter still. Above, spring skies, a scented air. Within one’s breast a heart yielding gently to the suggestions of a new atmosphere. To enhance the contrast and accelerate its phases, the spring god artfully turned the head of my ski full south straight in the face of the sun.

Thus it is within any one’s power to rewrite in this way for himself Hesiod’s “Book of Days,” and he will do it best if alone.

It was a peculiar thing to pass from Arosa, still lying under six feet of snow, over the south brim of the cup and to swoop down upon Lenzerheide, while the steamy fog of incipient spring hung over the moving, thawing masses, and the man who had brought me up so far shrank back. There were cracklings round about and dull thuds. A roar and clang came up from the bottom of the gorge as the snowbanks crashed in upon the stream whose reawakening had soaked and eaten away their supports. Something had gone wrong with a ski-binding. Thus a kindly word may be spoken in time by the mountain fiend before he strikes. He plays fair. Go away, he says, unless you know that you have the luck of the Evil One. The brim of that snow cup was a parting line. One pair of ski carried its man back the way he had come. The other carried its man forward whither the spirit led.

I left Arosa with a pang of regret. I had lived there some perfectly happy and health-giving days in an abode reserved for so many who are sick beyond human help. I was alone, and went from table to table as a guest bidden to dinner. My hosts would, if I may apply this figure of speech to a moral attitude, seek me out for my strength, and I found, in the proximity of their illness, the shadow of our common human plight falling across my path, bringing with it a kind of excuse for my rude temporary immunity from physical ills in which in time we all share alike, but which seem to create such unfair contrasts.

Some were there, so to say, for a last throw of the dice in this Monte Carlo of consumptives. On the return of some to health depended the future of a home, wife, children, awaiting anxiously the physician’s verdict upon their chief, for whose cure the last moneys of the family were now being staked upon the double card, Arosa Davos.

A powerfully built Englishman, among others, I got to know. On the next day he was to be told whether he could go home or not. He was writing to his wife in the last hour of that day, about that hour of the next which would hail his return to life, duty, and love, or bring down upon his head another of those blows for which there is no other remedy than the infinite serenity of the children of God.

Then he came up to me, spoke of the impending interview and of all that was at stake.

I looked at him and said, “You are as sound as a bell.” The words were magnetic. They were posted to London that night, and the next day the happy father and husband, released by the professional man’s verdict, prepared to pack.

There are two tragedies that to my mind are particularly pathetic, both Alpine--that of the lung patient whom the Alpine sun cannot save, and that of the Alp worshipper in bounding health for whom the Alps have become as a car of Juggernaut.

I have seen dead, handsome young men, for whom the avalanche had woven a shroud of snow, and I have beheld wasted frames for whom the sun could not weave fresh physical tissues.

Of the Arosa scenes I carried a keen remembrance as I passed, safe and sure, from ice-cold slope to sun-baked slope, whether the northern blast froze my moustache, or the Ausonian breeze loosened the rigidity of the air into balmy wafts. But Arosa was not without its moments of fun. There was a parson there who gave me his Christian name to guess. It began with B, and that was to be the clue. But I suggested Bradshaw, Bradlaw, and Beelzebub before his obliging wife put me on the way to the right spelling, Bible.

Of all places that suggest Chaos, a poor bare beginning of things, that place is the desolate spot in which the Hinter Rhine takes its rise. It is called Paradise, and if ever man required to cheer himself with a euphemism, it might be here. From Splügen to Hinterrhein extends a flat tract of country on every inch of which nature has left an impression as of exhausted powers. And yet, under those external marks of sterility, lurks the beginning of a great thing, the Rhine, its fruitful valleys, its grandeur, its world-renowned towns. You may “tail” behind a post-horse from Splügen to Hinterrhein for an hour in the gathering dusk, and wonder whether the next moment will not drop you over the edge of the world.

But a comfortable inn will open its homely rooms. You will tumble among children learning their lessons around the stove. A place will be made for you beside the young mother with her youngest hanging at her breast. The father will walk in with the proud gait of him who bears himself with grace and kindness in his sense of manly power.

“Crossing the Bernardino,” he says, “to-morrow, alone!”

“Why not? I am on ski; the post-sleigh does its service in all weathers.”

“Yes, but two men go together with the sledge and the horses.”

Indeed, I saw them the next day. I left at a reasonably late hour, and they left still later, catching me up along the flat. Then I passed them up the slope. They took all the windings, I cut across. It was a terribly bleak day. The wind blew the snow in wreaths, and these laid themselves across the old hard wreaths. Sleigh and horses cut through them, throwing out the two men. They rose again, and got back into their seat to cut through the next wreath. This time the sleigh was overturned. The horses--harnessed tandem fashion--plunged, reared upon their sinking hind-quarters, ploughing the snow with their breasts, while their hoofs pawed about for a footing. Then they came off with a rush, once more taking the sledge through. It was a long, narrow sleigh, just wide enough to hold two men, with the mail bags boxed in behind them--more like a torpedo than anything else.

It seemed impossible to distinguish the causeway under the wreaths of snow, in the snow dust blown up by the wind and with strips of fog flying and curling about. Yet the horses kept to the winter track, and all that plunging and kicking was the ordinary business of every day. The _Cantonieri_ stationed from league to league in stone sheds all along the pass, kept guard in the worst places, and came out with spade and shovel to expedite the mail.

I saw all that, hovering about like a stormy petrel, unable to make out whether my hoverings were looked upon as of bad or good augury. I expect the latter, for if there is a gift that mountaineers seldom lack, it is that of jovial good humour. To talk and exchange impressions would not be the question, till we might “foregather” in Bernardino village, where horses would be changed and men might rest. But long before the mail came down I was swinging through the empty village, between its deserted hotels, leaving the storm behind me and opening my coat to the sun-rays that brought the snow down in trickles from the roofs.

On and on I went, staying at last my course on the edge of a wood above Mesocco. There I sat on the corner of a stone wall, riding it as a lady’s saddle, with one ski dangling and the other hanging down as a stirrup, lost in contemplation. The contrast was so complete, so wonderful, knotting together as it were in one bow the most opposite aspects of nature.

There I rested, snow-man and sun-man in one.

A peasant came slowly and stolidly by, making a mess of the thin snow with his heavy boots. He looked at me with great sympathy, stopped, and let out that one word in the Italian tongue, “_Stanco!_” (“Tired!”)

A few hours later my ski were stowed away in an attic room at Brissago. Their time was up. But I would take them out again on the return of the appointed hour. “Jamais pressé, toujours prêt.”