“The incident occurred in a mountain train carrying slowly, as is its wont, up the wooded slope, a ‘conducted’ party of English tourists. A little grey-eyed man was sitting in the corner, opposite a prosperous-looking woman dressed in a black dolman and clinging with traditional awe to her umbrella. Both were manifestly thrilled by the scenes through which they were passing, and not a little bewildered by the profusion of wonders in Alp, tree, and sky. At last the lady, devastated by her curiosity, broke silence in the following scene:—
The Lady (looking anxiously through window at clump of pine trees rich with yellow cones): “John, look at yon trees with the fruit on.”
The Man: “Eh, but they look like bananas.”
The Lady (lighting up with a bright idea): “Ask guide, John.”
The Man (turning to guide, a sad person, long stricken by stupid questions). “Mister, are thoose things bananas?”
The Guide (unable to rouse himself): “I don’t know.”
The Man (confidentially to his wife): “He says he don’t know.”
The Lady: “It makes no odds, John, they’re ower-ripe anyhow—but the place is grand!”
And ‘the place is grand’ so truly defines the scene en route to Villars, the phrase is so simple and comprehensive and so true, that we have been lucky to get it from the lady frae Lancashire even at the tail of her lazy mental attitude. In one sense it is the highest tribute that has ever been paid to our fairy fastness of Villars-sur-Ollon—this conception of the fir trees magic-laden with golden tropic fruit. If you do not believe it, take the train at Bex, in the little Rhone valley town of wooden houses where one dare not smoke ‘en cas de vent’ for fear that a spark flying loose should ignite the street and render you liable to a fine of six francs and confiscation of your pipe. And surely, if you want the most thrilling of all personal adventure-stories with which to startle your own village on your return from a daring holiday, this will suffice:—
“‘Strange places? Yes, I reckon I’ve seen some! I remember one night I lost a two-franc piece in a street in Bex. I struck a match to find it. Suddenly a wind blew out the light, and a policeman came rushing round the corner and arrested me. I was fined six francs for striking a match in a gale—the wind was no more than a draught from a window—and in the dark the policeman himself picked up the two-franc piece and walked off with it.’
“But I must not keep you too long with the fantastic, for already your train is passing Gryon, built like a bird’s nest in the hill, and soon Villars itself is reached. There get out, and having drunken of the panoramic ecstasy from the Diablerets round to the mountains of Savoy, walk down the road towards ChesiÈres, snugly sleeping a hundred feet below Les Ecovets. You must not go as far as ChesiÈres however, for having crossed the viaduct over the deep ravine a little beyond Villars I want you to turn round quickly and tell me your candid opinion of the picture—as soon as you can get your breath. For here, surely, if ever you are sensitive to your environment, Beauty will take you to her breast. The clustering fir trees, framed about with velvet plots of green under a clear, blue-grey sky; the suggestion of the infinite in the peaks tossing in the heat-haze like a wild sea beyond the verge of a far-away coast; the chastening awe of the Glacier of Trient and the undertone of the gorge-water below rising like the spirit of reflection bred of the dense solitude of hill and sky—all these fine miracles about you! For this is the charm of Villars, that it lies a kind of lagoon of quiet beauty amid the circling terror of pitiless frost and snow. ‘Domestic felicity’ best describes the atmosphere of this little hill-town, the wrath and terror of rock and glacier mellowed by distance and yet near enough to heighten by contrast the soft rapture of Villars reposing in the arms of its hills. Go up another day to Les Ecovets, and, looking across to Leysin and the Tours d’AÏ and away to Lac LÉman and the dim-blue Jura mountains, say if ever ruler of the world claimed more glittering conquest than this of yours. For whether you are mountaineer or one of the people who ‘never walk’, the groves of Les Ecovets will always lure you. Painter, poet, rhapsodist or mere plain, blunt man, you there will find inspiration such as is not written in any book. It must indeed have been at Les Ecovets that the little English child, waking suddenly from a noonday sleep, wished that he were always ‘with Christmas’; for the magic of all pines that ever mimicked an Alpine glade on paper, the glamour of all the berries that made your long-ago December a lustrous time in hearth and hall, and the mystery of all Christmas memories of other climes is here consummated in Nature’s own most ideal, most artistic scheme. I know no place like Villars for health and holiness: the high health of crystal air and shining peak, the strange holiness of solitude and the silent eloquence of the sky-embracing mountains; for there in the palpable hush are the mystic pipes of Pan that charm us on with tunes played ‘not to the sensual ear’ but are ever making for the spirit ‘ditties of no tone’.”
LEYSIN, SEEN FROM LES ECOVETS
I scarce know what more to say of Villars after the moving eloquence of my friend; I am at a loss for simile and dainty word. And yet, more must be said. Not of Villars in the spring and summer—though the secretive little pine-surrounded lake of Chavonnes above Bretaye, and the steep slopes of the Chamossaire, glorious with purple viola and blue gentian, call insistently for notice—but of Villars in its sun-drenched robe of snow; for in winter Villars is amazingly transformed and its panorama need fear no rivals in the Alps. There is a grander and more Alpine note in winter; there is greater mystery, austerity, sublimity in the wonderful alignment of peak and col and glacier; there is, too, a greater suggestion of power and vastness in the open landscape than there is in summer; and yet, the while one admires this wide-flung, steely grandeur, one is bathed the livelong day in glorious sunshine, there being no hours of shadow as at many winter resorts in the Alps. A cloudless day at Bretaye on the Chamossaire slopes, where ski-jumping is organized and whence Mont Blanc and his attendant Aiguilles are seen quite intimately, is a revelation in Alpine winter scenery—the deep ultramarine forests, the crisp and radiant snow, the intense warm-blue shadows, over the whole of which reigns a purity that is dazzling. But I must make way for a keen and skilful all-round sportsman, well known as a leader at