Part 2
“So-and-so now thinks of trying the Zimba. Are you going to let him have it his own way? Is he to get all the glory? Now’s your chance,” or else: “How about the Zimba? Still afraid? What a scandal. Ah, if I were only a few years younger!”
At last my father could bear it no longer and slunk out of the house one afternoon on his usual pretext--when anything risky had to be done--of going after chamois. He rolled himself in his blanket at the Sarotla alp, near the foot of the peak, and next day, somehow or other, set foot on the virgin summit. Imagine his disgust on finding there a _Steinmandl_, a cairn, containing a bottle with an affectionate letter to himself from “Bühel-Toni” who had sneaked up ages ago, all by himself, without saying a word to any one.
That is the history of the Zimba, which is now climbed by numerous tourists every year. No wonder; since all the difficult places have been made easy. Even so, the mountain has claimed its victims--three, within the last few years; one of them a tough old gentleman who, to test his nerve and muscle, insisted on “doing” the Zimba once a year. It was a sporting notion; the Zimba did him, in the end; he lies buried in the new Protestant cemetery at Bludenz. And if you like to scramble up from the Rellsthal flank, you may still have some fun. Not long ago a tourist actually died of fright while climbing down here. He had gone up by the ordinary route to the satisfaction of his guide who, being from the Montavon valley and anxious to get home as soon as possible (this is my own assumption) took him down by this almost perpendicular “short cut.” At a certain point the tourist declared that he could go neither forwards nor backwards, and was going to die then and there. Which he straightway proceeded to do, rather foolishly. But there are no limits to what a real tourist can accomplish. Along the extremely convenient track which scales the cliff between the Zalim alp and the Strassburger hut (Scesaplana district) two young men contrived to slip; they were shattered to fragments. Cleverest of all was the gentleman who lately achieved the distinction of dying from exposure on the Hoher Frassen. He ought to have left us word to say how the thing was done.
We do not always realize the difficulties of the pioneers. Among other matters, there were no shelter huts in those days. That which lies below the Zimba, on the Sarotla alp, is one of some fifty now scattered about the hills of this small province. The earliest of them all was the Lünersee hut which bears the name of my father; he was then president of our local section of the Alpine Club. Built for the convenience of visitors to the Scesaplana summit, this hut was swept into the lake long ago, with all it contained, by an avalanche. It is time another avalanche came along, for the place has grown into a caravanserai of the rowdiest description. Altogether, selfish as it may sound, I should not be sorry to see every one of these structures burnt to the ground, or otherwise obliterated. Their primary object, to afford shelter to _bona fide_ climbers, is laudable; what they actually do, is to serve as hotels--not bad ones, either--to a crowd of summer visitors whose faces and clothes and manners are an outrage on the surroundings. Abolish the huts, or cut down their comforts and menus to what a climber might reasonably expect, and the objectionable “Hüttenwanzen” would evaporate. What are they doing among these mountains? Let them guzzle and perspire in Switzerland!...
My friend the younger Brunnenmacher, son of “Bühel-Toni,” was also official water-specialist and _Bergfex_; he may well have been the image of his father since, from all I have heard, he had the same character and therefore, according to a theory of my own, must have resembled him also in person. If that be so, we may take it for granted that the father was an unusually hirsute creature. The mere sight of his son, at the Bludenz swimming baths, used to send us into fits. Nobody had ever seen such a “Waldmensch.” He might have been a gorilla in this respect--an uncommon kind of gorilla; for not every gorilla, I fancy, can afford to wear a regular parting down its back. No gorilla, either, could climb in better style; or smile, if they smile at all, to better purpose. The Brunnenmacher’s laughing face charmed away hunger and fatigue and wet clothes and all the ills of mountaineering. It may seem far-fetched to apply the terms “ingenuous” or “childlike” to the smile of a bearded monster of forty, but there are no other epithets available for that of the Brunnenmacher. It rose to his lips, on seeing you; it hovered there day and night, waiting for your appearance. Doubtless he had a peculiar affection for me, as being my father’s son; everybody found him a lovable person.
His weather-proof good humor must have helped to establish his reputation as a guide; that, and his jovial blasphemies. They made you laugh, and a guide who makes you laugh has already gone a long way towards gaining your friendship. Once you persuaded the Brunnenmacher to begin some story of his, which was not difficult, you were sure to get an adequate amount of playful bad language thrown in. An infallible method of getting more than this adequate amount was to make him relate his experiences of a trip to America, and of the agonies of four days’ sea-sickness on an empty stomach. This narrative bristled with swear words; it ended in a fixed formula: “Jo, Himmelherrgottsakraméntnochemol, do honni grod gmeint i müest ussm grosse Zähe uffi kotze!” which might as well be left untranslated ...
There is a curious cave near Bludenz called the _Bährenloch_, the bear’s cavern; it lies at the foot of the cliffs above the road to Rungalin village--not the field path, but that which skirts the hills. I say curious, because it is plainly not a natural cave; it is an artificial one and has been hacked by human hands out of the limestone; when, by whom, and for what purpose, no one knows. The chisel-marks are quite plain, once you are well inside. It is roughly quadrangular in shape and about the height of a man at the entrance; half way through, it takes a slight bend to the right and, growing narrower and narrower till you can hardly turn round, ends abruptly, as though the builder had grown weary of his toil, or disappointed with its result. The work of a mediæval anchorite? I doubt it. Such a person would have contented himself with a domicile less than half its length. Perhaps some crazy enthusiast dug it long ago, in the hope of discovering gold or what not among the bowels of those cliffs.
The younger Brunnenmacher first took me there, and how he managed to hit upon the precise locality of this grotto remains a mystery to me. Not only was the steep woodland below much thicker in those days--almost impenetrable, in fact--and without any trace of an upward path, but the entire base of the cliffs was defended by so dense a mass of brushwood that we had to crawl through it on hands and knees. How did he contrive to ascend undeviatingly to the cavern’s mouth? A few yards astray, and we should have been lost in that jungle where one could barely move, and had no means of seeing to right or left. All this sounds incredible at present. Most of the brushwood has been uprooted and the forest thinned out to such an extent that it has become quite transparent; moreover, that meritorious “beautification-society” of Bludenz constructed, among many other things, a convenient zigzag path which will lead you after fourteen windings to the very entrance of the _Bährenloch_. The horse-shoe bats, the greater and the lesser, which I used to capture here and take home as pets, may well have deserted the place; likewise the young foxes and badgers we unearthed in the neighborhood. One of these badgers grew so tame that he followed me about everywhere, and would even take me for rides on his back. I should like to see him do it nowadays.[3]
This Brunnenmacher seems to have made up his mind that I was to become a climber like himself. He took me in hand. He made me trot miles and miles, as it seemed, up the then almost trackless Galgen-tobel and showed me the _fons et origo_ of the Bludenz water supply, as well as a spot where you could discover a certain vitriolic mineral by the simple process of applying your tongue to the rock; and still further afield, into the upper regions of the Krupsertobel, and down its savage bed. Then came the turn of the mountains--Scesaplana, to begin with. As guide, he had already gone up there some seventy times, and even I got to know it so well in later years that I could have walked up in blackest midnight. Next the Sulzfluh, famous as a haunt of the Lämmergeier; and so on. One of the last of these trips was up the Säntis, the shapely peak across the Swiss frontier, which seems to close up our valley to the west. We came back with our pockets full of rock-crystals.
So I pursue the memories, as they rise from the past, of those old days of the Brunnenmacher. He died a good many years back. But he has left behind a sturdy brood of children--I know not how many; dozens of them, let us hope, to inherit his smile....
That Säntis mountain, which I have just mentioned, has a bad name at this moment. There was a foul murder done here, some months ago; the married couple in charge of the observatory near the summit were found killed at their post. Nobody could guess who the assassin was, nor what his object might have been, till the body of a young man was discovered in some hut not far away. He had committed suicide; and he was the murderer. So far as I could gather, this youngster was of decent birth but, owing to excesses of one kind or another, had lost all balance and self-respect. One thing, nevertheless, he preserved intact: an intense love of the Säntis, his native mountain, which he seems to have regarded as a sort of private domain. He knew its territory inch by inch and could never bring himself to forsake it; this affection, indeed, was his undoing, for after the crime he made no attempt to quit the country, as he easily might have done. The all-absorbing attachment to this piece of ground kept him chained there, and it was supposed, though nowise proved, I fancy, that he killed the old people out of an insane envy, and in the equally insane hope of being thereafter installed at the observatory as their successor, and having the Säntis all to himself for the rest of his life. Murders are committed for a considerable variety of amorous motives, but seldom for one of such a glacially nonsexual and idealistic tinge; it is the kind of etherealized horror that might be imagined to take place on some other planet. Altogether, an interesting problem in psychology, if the facts they gave me are correct. To fall in love with a mountain is not the common lot of man. And so disastrously!
It was a tragedy of unreciprocated passion, from beginning to end. The Säntis is no longer in the first flush of youth; it can be trusted, I feel sure, to behave with perfect decorum under the most trying and delicate circumstances. Its reputation, previous to this little affair, had been of the best; nor is there any reason to suppose that it gave its brain-sick admirer the slightest encouragement to act as he did, or to think himself singled out for favors denied to the rest of us. The locality is doubtless attractive, as such places go, but that is not its own fault--who ever heard of blame attaching to beauty?--so attractive, that a man might well be pardoned for growing fond of it, and fonder, and fonder. Even in the case of superlative fondness, I, at least, would still try not to feel jealous of other people’s familiarity with its charms, and would certainly think twice before murdering a respectable married couple _pour ses beaux yeux_.
* * * * *
I have now seen four generations of these delightful folk who own our tavern, the latest arrival being a great-grandchild of the first. Though barely born, it already wears a laughable resemblance to its grandfather.
He is the present head of the family, a village magnate who knows the ins and outs of the countryside as well as any one alive; a Nimrod in his day, and the only marksman, beside my father, to whom they hung up a diploma of honor in the Ludesch shooting range; he has lived for years in Milan and traveled, officially, to Vienna, to set forth to the Government some claim of our district. The face might be that of one of those good-natured but intelligent Roman emperors like Titus, with round head and ruddy hair; a face such as you find all over the Roman province to this day, and all over this province as well. His family came originally from the Bregenzerwald region, at the back of our hills, and is connected with that of Angelika Kauffmann who was born there.[4]
Having been friends with him for the last half century, we never lack subjects of conversation; there is fresh ground to explore as often as we meet, and old ground to traverse again. What I now want to know is this: how about the rain? Are we in for a _Landregen_? He thinks not; the weather is too cold, and snow lies too low; where his own cattle are, on the alp of Zürs near Lech, it must be lying at this moment. Unless the weather clears, he will have to go up and look after them; also on account of the foot-and-mouth disease, which has broken out in the neighborhood. Lech: who has the chamois shooting there? Nearly all the shoots in the country, he explains, have been taken by Swiss, and no wonder; look at their exchange! And what of the projected _Anschluss_ (annexation) to Switzerland? Well, Germany would be better, on the whole. Besides, the truth of the matter is (laughing) the Swiss won’t have us; they say we are too Catholic and too lazy and too fond of drinking. As if our people could afford to pay for wine nowadays! By the way, just try this _Schnapps_, as a curiosity.
It was juniper-spirit, of the year 1882. With all respect for its antiquity, I found myself unable to appreciate the stuff. Then he gave me, as an antidote, some of his own _Obstler_ (made of apples) only three weeks old. A little crude, but of good promise. So we went through the lot. His own _Zwetschgenwasser_--excellent! Then Kirsch, from the neighboring village of Tiefis, which makes a specialty of this _Schnapps_, distilled from the small mountain cherries; of mighty pleasant flavor. Next, Enzian; the product of the yellow Alpine gentian. Whoever likes Enzian--and who can help liking it?--will have nothing to say against that of our Silberthal, which has a well-deserved reputation for this brand. _Beerler_, I enquire? No, he says; nobody makes bilberry-spirit any more.
“Which is a pity.”
“This infernal war----”
“It has shattered all the refinements of life.”
So we discuss the world, and presently the proprietress comes up to announce that she has discovered coffee. I thought she would! She sent to Bludenz for it, on the sly. Now what, I ask, is her particular method of roasting?
“Why, in the oven, of course; and very carefully. Then, when the beans begin to sweat, and are neither lighter nor darker than a capuchin’s frock, I take them out and place them, steaming hot, into a glass jar and cover them at once with a thick layer of powdered sugar. There they get cold slowly and are obliged, you see, to draw in again all the fragrance which they would otherwise have lost. Isn’t that your English way?”
I wish it were....
TIEFIS
_Tiefis_
A really fine morning at last; glorious sunshine.
“Now for those idiots,” says Mr. R., and so do I. We have found out about them, from the inn-people.
It appears that two, a man and a woman, come from the Walserthal, which has always been famous for its crop of imbeciles; the third was born at Raggal, likewise fertile mother of idiots, because everybody marries into his own family there. These Raggalers are such passionate agriculturalists and so busy, all the year round, with their fields and cattle, that they refuse to waste time scouring the province for so trivial an object as a wife with fresh blood, when you can get a colorable substitute at home. Our particular idiots live, all three of them, on the road to St. Anne church, in that workhouse which, so far as I know, has sheltered from time immemorial the poor of the district, the aged, the infirm of mind or body. There is always a fine assortment of wrecks on view here. Sisters of Charity look after them.
Sure enough, the first thing we saw was one of the man-idiots hacking wood out of doors. He was of the deaf and dumb variety, with misshapen skull; he took no notice of us, but continued at his task with curious deliberation, as if each stroke of the ax necessitated the profoundest thought. Weak in the head, obviously; but not what I call an idiot. If he could have spoken, he would doubtless have uttered as many witticisms as one hears in an English public-house at closing time. The woman was also there, sitting on the bench beside a Sister of Charity. Under-sized, stupid-looking, with mouth agape; nothing more; I have seen society ladies not unlike her in appearance. She can sew and knit stockings and even talk, they had told us. Mediocre specimens, both of them. And how about the third one, we enquired? He was working in the fields, said the Sister.
Working in the fields....
These things call themselves idiots. Even idiots, it seems, have degenerated nowadays. Mr. R. was dreadfully disappointed; and so was I. He vowed I had led him to expect something on quite another scale; and so I had. He extracted a promise, then and there, that I should show him over Valduna, the provincial lunatic asylum near Rankweil, in the hope of unearthing a few idiots worthy of the name.
Now of course you cannot have everything in this world. You cannot ask, in a district otherwise so richly endowed by Nature as this one, for the _fine fleur_ of imbecility--for _crétins_. To see these marvels you must go further afield, to places like the Valtellina or Val d’Aosta (and even there, I understand, the race is losing some of its best characteristics. These doctors!) But one might at least have kept alive a specimen or two of the old school, just for memory’s sake; idiots such as my sister and myself used to see, while rambling as children about these streets with the _Alte Anna_, our nurse. On that very bench, where the modish lady was reclining to-day, or its predecessor, there used to sit two skinny old madwomen side by side, with their backs to the wall. There they sat, always in the same place. They were as mad as could be, and older than the hills. A terrifying spectacle--these two blank creatures, staring into vacuity out of pale blue eyes, with white hair tumbled all about their shoulders. One of them disappeared--died, no doubt; the survivor went on sitting and staring, in her old place. There was another idiot whom we liked far better; in fact we loved him. He was of the joyful and jabbering kind, and he lived near the factory. His facial contortions used to make us shriek with laughter. Sometimes he dribbled at the mouth. When he dribbled copiously, which was not every day, it was our crowning joy.
The old Anna, of course, knew by heart every idiot within miles of our home. She specialized in such phenomena. What she liked even better was anything in the nature of an accident, operation, horrible disease, or childbirth; she knew of it, by some dark instinct, the moment it occurred: she knew! and, being forbidden to leave the children alone, dragged us with her into the remotest peasant-houses and hamlets to enjoy the sight. Above all things, she had a mania for corpses and the flair of a hyena for discovering their whereabouts. As often as there was a corpse within walking distance, she donned her seven-league boots and rushed towards it in the bee-line, carrying my sister, to save time, while I toddled painfully after. Arrived at the spot where the dead body lay, she would first cross herself and then begin to gloat. We did the same. Who knows how many maladies, how many corpses, we inspected at that tender age! A sound education. For it familiarized us with death and suffering at a life-period when one cannot yet grasp their full import; it took away, for good and all, a great part of their terrors. We were never shocked by such things; only interested--hugely interested....
After an appetizing luncheon which atoned for the bitter disappointment of this morning, we strolled upwards in the sunshine, slowly and comfortably, towards the village of Tiefis. The ancient _Dorfberg_ road which started opposite the sawmill to climb the height now lies obliterated and forgotten; it was so steep that coachmen and all the rest of us--save one or other of those awesome Scotch grand-aunts, fragile and frowsy--had to get out of the carriage and walk. Here, on the upper level, stood certain immense walnut trees of ours, in whose shade I used to crawl about before I could walk. They are gone. But the distant iron target against the hill-side behind them, which served my father for rifle-practice, is in its old place; they have not troubled to pull it down. I glance into the back regions of our old house; no great change here; some of the present proprietor’s children are bathing in that fountain which used to be covered with water-lilies. Then, a couple of hundred yards further on, the ochre-tinted bed of that wonderful stream which petrified leaves and grasses, a ceaseless marvel of childhood. There it is as of old, trickling downhill in the same miniature cascade. Up again, to the next level and beyond, where the forest begins and where, looking back, you have a fine view upon the Zimba.
Now these are the things for which I have come here; things for which you will vainly ransack England and the whole Mediterranean basin. You are confronted, all of a sudden, by a dusky precipice, a wall of ancient firs, glittering in the sun; their branches droop earthward in curtain-like fringes. Here the path enters the forest--an inspiring portal! To step from those bright meadows into the solemn and friendly twilight of the trees is like stepping into a vast green cavern, into another world; involuntarily one lowers one’s voice. I shall be much surprised if these benign woodlands do not have a chastening influence upon the character and the whole worldly outlook of Mr. R., to whom this country and its people and language and customs are so utterly strange that he has not yet recovered from his first bewilderment; they are what he needs--what all of us need; one should return to them again and again, to breathe a cleaner air, to rectify one’s perspective, to escape from the herd and the contamination of its unsteady brain.
There is a short break in the wood soon afterwards, a steep grassy slope with a hay-hut at its foot. The place is called _Hirsch-sprung_, because in olden days a hunted stag took the whole descent at a single leap. Any one who has seen stags pursued by a hound will admit that they are remarkable jumpers. They seldom get as good a chance as this, of showing what they can do. The distance aerially traversed must be about eighty yards.