Samuel Irenus Prime

The Priest’s Leap—The Devil’s Bridge—Night on the Mountains—Storm—Hospenthal—the Glaciers—a Lady in Distress—the Furca Pass—Glacier of the Rhone—Heinrich and Nature—Heinrich asks after God—Scene in the Hospice.

We are now on the great road that leads over the Alps into Italy by the famous Pass of St. Gothard. The diligence to Milan went off this morning at nine o’clock, and had we come on in the earliest boat from Lucerne, we might have been taken on as far as we liked by that lumbering conveyance. A party of students, seven from Germany, and two from Oxford joined us, and we resolved to hire a carriage to Amsteg, two hours onward, and there to begin the ascent and pedestrianism together. The ride to Amsteg was lively, but when we were set down at that village, with a walk of five hours before us, all the way up the mountains, I confess to a slight sinking at the heart; and my courage oozed out gradually at the end of my toes. At the inn of Altorf, a young German student attracted me by the gracefulness of his manner, the delicacy of his features, and the pleasant expression with which he conversed. He attached himself to our party, and we walked on together, pilgrims to see Switzerland, and rejoicing in the power to take leave of all modes of travelling, but that first and best, which nature had provided. The river Reuss comes dashing along down with the fury of a young torrent, pouring over rocks, and whirling around precipices with a madness that brooks no control. The Bristenock mountain towers aloft into the regions of snow and ice, and nature begins to grow wild and dreary. The soft meadows on which the maids of Uri were making hay have disappeared, and the green pastures with frequent herds are now the only hope of the shepherd. The road is no longer a straight path, but in its toilsome way upward, it crosses again and again this foaming river, and bridges of solid masonry, built to resist the flood when it bears the ruins of avalanches on its bosom, and spreads them in the spring on the plains below.

We crossed the third bridge and came to a gorge of frightful depth through which the river rages furiously, in a maddened torrent too fearful to look on without awe. It is called Pfaffensprung, or the Priest’s Leap, from a story—which no one will believe who stands here—that a monk once leaped across the chasm with a maiden in his arms. I have no doubt a monk would do his best under the circumstances, but I doubt the possibility of his clearing thirty feet at a bound over such an abyss as this, even for the sake of the prize he is said to have carried off. We had been beset by beggars under all sorts of guises, and here a miserable old woman—alas that a woman could come to this—appeared with a huge stone in her hands, which she hurled into the deeps, for us to see it leap from rock to rock and finally sink into the raging waters far below. A few cents she expected for this service, and she received them with gratitude; when an old man, perhaps her husband, came on with another rock which he was willing to drop for a similar consideration. As I turned away from the scene, a carriage came up in which an English gentleman was riding, with two servants on the box. I walked by the side of his carriage and fell into conversation, when he very politely invited me to ride with him. I declined of course, and told him that I was making a pedestrian tour, and designed to walk to Andermatt, three hours and a half farther up the mountain. “I spend the night there also,” he said, “and I will esteem it an honor, Sir, if you will take a seat in my carriage.” Such an invitation, under the circumstances, was not to be refused, and I took a seat by the gentleman’s side. How wonderfully the scenery improved, certainly how much my appreciation of it increased, when I fell back on the cushions! My companion was an accomplished member of the London bar. He knew public men whom I had met, and was well acquainted with all subjects of international interest, so that in fifteen minutes we were comparing minds on those questions in which England and America are so much concerned. We stopped at the little village of Wasen for refreshments. I insisted on paying the reckoning, when he stopped me with this remark, “Sir, you are my guest to-day: when I meet you in America I shall be happy to be yours.”

We rode on and upward, the road now assuming the character of a mighty structure of mason work through a savage defile, only wide enough for the carriage-path, and the torrent of the Reuss, which no longer flows, but tumbles headlong from one cliff to another, while for three or four miles the lofty precipices hang fearfully on high. In the spring, the rage of this mountain river, swollen by melting snows, and bringing down ice and rocks in its thundering fall, would tear away the foundations of any common pathway, and this must be built to defy the fiercest storm. Twenty-five or thirty thousand persons cross the Alps by this route every year; and to secure this travel, which would otherwise be carried off to the other passes, the cantons of Uri and Tessin built a road which has twice been swept away by the avalanches, but one would think that the present might stand while the mountains stand. So rapid is the ascent, that the road is made often to double on itself, so that we are going directly backward on the route; a foot passenger may clamber across the doublets and save his time, but the carriage must keep the zig-zag way, patiently toiling up a smoother and more beautiful highway than can be found in the most level region of the United States of America! Not a pebble in the path: the wheels meet no other obstruction than gravitation, which is sufficient to be overcome only by the strongest of horse power. Yet through this very defile, long before any road like this had been built, three armies, the French and the Russians and the Austrians, have pursued each other, contesting every inch of this ground, and each one of these rugged heights, and disputing the possession of dizzy cliffs where the hunter was afraid to tread. Never did the feeling of Nature’s awful wildness so take possession of my soul, as when night was shutting in upon me in this dreary pass. Sometimes the road is hewn out of the solid rock in the side of the precipice, which hangs over it as a roof, and again it is borne over the roaring stream, which in a gulf four hundred feet below is boiling in its obstructed course, and making for itself an opening, it leaps away over the rocks, and rushes down while we are toiling up. In the day-time it would be gloomy here; it will be terrible indeed if the darkness overtakes us before we reach our resting-place for the night.

More than five hundred years ago an old Abbot of Einsiedeln built a bridge over an awful chasm here, but such is the fury of the descending stream, the horrid ruggedness of the surrounding scenery, the smoothness and solidity of the impending rocks, the roar and rage of the waters as they are tossed about and beaten into spray, and so unlikely does it appear that human power could ever have reared a bridge over such a cataract, that it has been called from time immemorial the Devil’s Bridge, and so it will be called probably till the end of time. It was just nightfall when we reached it. It was very cold, so far up had we ascended. We had left the carriage and were walking to quicken the blood, when the roar of the waters rose suddenly upon us, the spray swept over us, and we were in the midst of a scene of such awful grandeur, and with terror mingled, as might well make the nerves of a strong man tremble. The river Reuss, at this stage of its course, makes a sweeping leap, a tremendous plunge at the very moment it bends nearly in a semi-circle, while the rocks, as if by some superhuman energy, have been hurled into the torrent’s path, so as to break its fall, but not to withstand its power. Two bridges are here—for when the old road was swept away, the bridge defied the storm, and this one, more solid and of far greater span, has been thrown high above the other which is left as an architectural curiosity in the depths below. And long before that was built, another one was there, and when the French in 1799 pursued the Austrians over it, and while the embattled hosts were making hell in a furious fight upon and over this frightful gorge, the bridge was blown up, and the struggling foes were whelmed together in the devouring flood. A month afterwards, and the Russians met the French at the same spot—no bridge was here, but the fierce Russians bound timbers together with the scarfs of the officers, threw them over the chasm, crossed in the midst of a murderous fire, and drove the enemy down the Pass into the vales below.

THE DEVIL’S BRIDGE.

It was dark before we were willing to quit this fearful place. The strength of the present bridge is so obvious, and the parapet so high, that the scene may be contemplated without fear; but the clouds had now gathered, hoarse thunder muttered among the mountains, spiteful squalls of rain, cold, gloomy, and piercing, were driving into our faces, and we were anxious to find shelter for the night. We left the Bridge, but in another moment plunged into utter darkness as we entered a tunnel called the Hole of Uri, where the road is bored one hundred and eighty feet through the solid rock, a hard but the only passage, as the stream usurps the rest of the way, and the precipice admits no possible path over its lofty head. This was made a hundred and fifty years ago, and before that time the passage was made on a shelf supported by chains let down from above. It was called the Gallery of Uri, and along it a single traveller could creep, if he had the nerve, in the midst of the roar and the spray of the torrent, and with an hungry gulph yawning wide below him.—Emerging from this den, we entered a valley five thousand feet above the sea; once doubtless a lake, whence the waters of the Reuss have burst the barriers of these giant fortresses, and found their way into more hospitable climes. No corn grows here, but the land flows with milk and honey—by no means an indication of fertility, for the cows and the goats find pasture at the foot of the glaciers, and the bees their nests in the stunted trees and the holes of the rocks. We drove through it till we came to Andermatt, where the numerous lights in the windows guided us to a rustic tavern.

By this time it had commenced raining hard, and I began to be anxious for my young friend Rankin, and a German student, Heinrich. But I could do no more for them than to send a man to watch in the highway till they should come up, and lead them into the house where I was resolved to spend the night, whether we could find beds or not. These rural inns in Switzerland are rude and often far from comfortable. But travellers here must not stand upon trifles. The house was designed to lodge twenty travellers, and thirty at least were here before us. A large supper table was spread, and around it a company of gentlemen and ladies, mostly German, were enjoying themselves right heartily, after the day’s fatigue was over. The London lawyer and myself had a separate table laid for us—we soon gathered on it some of the good things of this life, which by the way you can find almost every where, and had made some progress in the discussion of the various subjects before us, when Rankin and Heinrich arrived nearly exhausted with their toilsome walk. They had a dreadful tale to tell of the storm they had met—which we just escaped, and barely that. The lightning filled the gloomy gorge, lighting up for an instant the mighty cliffs and hanging precipices, while the thunder roared above the sound of the torrent, and the rain drove into their faces, disputing with them the upward pass. But they were young men, and strong. They told me that I never could have borne the labor and the exposure of the walk. Two travellers and a guide had given out, and taken lodgings in a hamlet we had passed, and the man whom we had employed to bring on our light bags, had also halted for the night, and would come up early in the morning.

After supper I led them to our chamber. Upon my arrival, the landlady assured me that every bed in the house was full, but I insisted so strenuously on having three, that the girls exchanged looks of agreement, and one of them offered to show me a chamber, if it would be acceptable. She led me up three pair of stairs, into a low garret bed-room, with one window of boards which could be opened, and one small one of glass that could not, and here were three beds kindly given up by the young women. Into this chamber I now conducted my young friends.

Worn out with their hard day’s work, but free from all anxious care, they were asleep in five minutes, while I coaxed the candle to burn as long as it would, fastened it up with a pin on the top of the candlestick, and tried to write the records of the few past hours. It was amusing to hear my companions, one on each side of me, talk in their sleep; Heinrich in his native German, and Rankin in his English, showing the restlessness of over-fatigue, while I sat wondering at myself, so lately a poor invalid, now in this wild region, exposed to such nights of discomfort, and days of toil. Yet was I grateful even there, not only for a safe shelter and a much better bed than my Master had, but for the strength to attempt such things, and for the luxury of health that lives and flows in a genial current through every part of a renovated frame.

In the morning I met an American gentleman returning from the summit of St. Gothard pass, and he advised me strenuously not to go further up, unless I was going now into Italy. The most wonderful of the engineering in the construction of the road, had already been seen, and there was nothing else of interest above. The same savage scenery, in the midst of which the Reuss leaps down 2,000 feet in the course of a two hours’ walk, is continued, and the dreariness of desolation reigns alone. A house for the accommodation of travellers has been maintained for hundreds of years, destroyed at times and then restored, and a few monks have been supported here to extend what aid they may to those who require their assistance. We resolved to pursue a route through the Furca pass, one of the most romantic and interesting of all the passes in Switzerland. A long day’s walk it would be over frozen mountains and by the side of never melting glaciers, and no carriage way! Nothing but a bridle and a foot path, and a rough one too, was now before us, and if we left the present road, and struck off over the Furca, it would be four or five days before we should reach the routes which are traversed by wheels. Our baggage, though but a bag apiece and blankets, was too heavy for us to carry if we walked, and I proposed to take a horse, put on him our three bundles, and ride by turns. Heinrich had never heard of the mode of travelling called “ride and tie,” and he was greatly amused when it was described to him. Accordingly we ordered a horse for the day. The price is regulated by law, under the pretence of protecting the traveller, but really for the purpose of extorting from him a sum twice as large as he would have to pay if the business were open to competition. The horse was brought to the door, and when we ordered the bags of three to be strapped on, the landlord flew into a great rage, and declared he would not be imposed upon. I smiled in his red face, and asked, “If he knew how much baggage the law allowed each man to carry on his horse.” He said he did, and I then told him to weigh those, and he might have for his own all over and above the legal allowance. He was still dissatisfied, but when we bade him to take his old nag to the stable, he suddenly cooled. Without further delay he made fast “the traps,” gave me a good stout fellow to conduct the party and bring back the beast. An idle group of guides and tavern hangers, and quite a party of Germans and English were looking on when I bestrode the animal, and took my seat in the midst of the bundles rising before and behind, like the humps of a camel. We are yet in the vale of the Urseren, not more than a mile wide, and lofty mountains flanking its sides. The mountain of St. Anne is clad with a glacier, from which the “thunderbolts of snow” come down with terrific power in the spring, and yet there stands a forest in the form of a triangle, pointing upward, and so placed that the slides of snow as they come down are broken in pieces and guided away from the village below. The great business of the people in this vale is to keep cattle and to fleece the strangers who travel in throngs over the pass of St. Gothard. Hundreds of horses are kept for hire, and nothing is to be had by a “foreigner” unless he pays an exorbitant price. Even the specimens of minerals are held so high, that no reasonable man can afford to buy them. But we are now leaving Andermatt, and on the side of the road not long after leaving the village we saw two stone pillars, which need but a beam to be laid across them, and they make a gallows, on which criminals were formerly hung, when this little valley, like Gersau on the lake, was an independent state. The pillars are still preserved with care, as a memorial of the former sovereignty of the community.

We reached Hospenthal in a few moments; a cluster of houses about a church, and with a tower above the hamlet which is attributed to the Lombards. I was struck with the exceeding loneliness and forsakenness of this spot. It seemed that men had once been here, but had retired from so wild and barren a land, to some more genial clime. Hospenthal has a hotel or two, and it is a great halting place for travellers who are about to take our route over the Furca to the Hospice of the Grimsel. Here we quit the St. Gothard road, and winding off by a narrow path in which we can go only in single file, we are soon out of the vale, and slowly making our way up the mountain. The hill sides are dotted with the huts of the poor peasants, who have hard work to hold fast to the slopes with one hand, while they work for a miserable living with the other. The morning sun was playing on the blue glacier of St. Anne, and a beautiful waterfall wandered and tumbled down the mountain; yet this was but one of many of the same kind that we are constantly meeting as we go through these defiles of the high Alps. The vast masses of snow and ice on the summits are sending down streams through the Summer, and these sometimes leap from rock to rock, and again they clear hundreds of feet at a single bound; slender, like a long white scarf on the green hill, but very picturesque and beautiful. At the foot of this mountain are the remains of an awful avalanche, which buried a little hamlet here in a sudden grave, and a sad story of a maiden and a babe who perished, was told me with much feeling by the guide as we passed over the spot. The peasant men and women were bringing down bundles of hay on their heads and shoulders from the scanty meadows which here and there in a warm bosom of the hills may be found, and as they descended I recalled the story of Orpheus, at whose music the trees are said to have followed him, and I could readily understand that such a procession might be taken or mistaken for the marching of a young forest. We are still following up the river Reuss towards its source, and though it is narrower, it is often fiercer and makes longer strides at a step than it did last evening. We cross it now and then on occasional stones, or on rude logs, and come to a spot where the bridge was swept away last night by an avalanche of earth and ice, and well for us that it came in the night before we were here to be caught. An old man with a pickaxe in his hand had been working to repair the crossing, and had managed to get a few stones arranged so that foot passengers could leap over, and the horses after slight hesitation and careful sounding of the bottom, took to the torrent and waded safely over. I held my feet high enough to escape a wetting, but I heard a lady of another party complaining bitterly that the water was so deep or her foot so far down, I could not tell which, but it was evident that very much against her will she had been drawn through the river.

At Realp, a little handful of houses, we found a small house of refreshment, where two Capuchin friars reside to minister to travellers, and this was the last sign of a human habitation we saw for some weary hours. We are now so far up in the world, that the snow lay in banks by the side of the path, while flowers, bright beautiful flowers were blooming in the sun. It is difficult to reconcile this apparent contradiction in nature. The fact is not surprising here, where we see such vast accumulations of snow and remember that a short summer does not suffice to melt it, but it is strange to read of flowery banks all gay and smiling, within a few feet only of these heaps of snow. I counted flowers of seven distinct colors, and gathered those that would press well in my books, souvenirs of this remarkable region. On the right the Galenstock Glacier now appears, and out of it vast rocks like the battlements of some old castle shoot 1,000 feet into the air. I am now among the ice palaces of the earth. The cold winds are sweeping down upon me, and I hug my coat closer as the ice blast strikes a chill to my heart.

We were just making the last sharp ascent before reaching the summit of the Furca when I overtook a lady sitting disconsolately by the wayside. She cried out as soon as I came up, “O Sir, my guide is such a brute—the saddle turns under me and I cannot get him to fix it—my husband has gone on before me—I cannot speak a word of German and the dumb fool cannot speak a word of English. What shall I do?”

“Madam,” said I, “my servant shall arrange your saddle, and I will conduct you to the summit where the rest of your party will doubtless wait.” She overpowered me with her expressions of gratitude, and while my servant was putting her saddle girths to rights, I gave her guide the needful cautions, and we crossed a vast snow bank together, climbed the steep pitch, and in ten minutes reached the inn at the top of the Furca. Distant glaciers, snow clad summits, ridges, and ranges stood around me, a world without inhabitants, desolate, cold and grand in its icy canopy and hoary robes of snow.

The descent was too rapid and severe for riding, and giving the horse into the charge of the servant we walked down, discoursing by the way of things rarely talked of in the Alps. My young German friend had all the enthusiasm of the French character joined to the mysticism of his own nation. He is well read in English literature, and familiar with ancient and modern authors, so that we had sources unfailing, to entertain us as we wandered on; now sitting down to rest and now bracing ourselves for a smart walk over a rugged pass. I became intensely interested in him, though I had constant occasion to challenge his opinions, and especially to contrast his philosophy with the revealed wisdom of God. We had spoken of these things for an hour or more when I asked him if he had ever read “the Pilgrim’s Progress,” and when I found he had not, I told him the design of the allegory, and said “we are pilgrims over these mountains, and have been cheering one another with pleasing discourse as the travellers did on their way to the celestial city. They came at last in sight of its gates of pearl.”

“But what is that?”

We had suddenly turned the shoulder of a hill, and a glacier of such splendor and extent burst upon our view as to fix us to the spot in silent but excited admiration. It was the first we had seen near us. Others had been lying away in the far heights, their surface smoothed by the distance, and their color a dull blue; but now we were at the foot of a mountain of ice! We could stand upon it, walk on its face, gaze on its form and features, wonder, admire, look above it and adore! This is the glacier of the Rhone! That great river springs from its bosom, first with a strong bound as if suddenly summoned into being, works its way through a mighty cavern of ice, and then winds along the base till it emerges in a roaring, milky white stream and rushes down the valley toward the sea. This glacier has been called a “magnificent sea of ice.” It is not so. That description conveys no idea of the stupendous scene. You have stood in front of the American fall of Niagara. Extend that fall far up the rapids, receding as it rises a thousand feet or more from where you stand to the crest: at each side of it let a tall mountain rise as a giant frame work on which the tableau is to rest; then suddenly congeal this cataract, with its curling waves, its clouds of spray, its falling showers of jewelry, point its brow with pinnacles of ice, and then, then let the bright sun pour on it his beams, giving the brilliancy not of snow but of polished ice to the vast hill-side now before you, and you will then have but a faint conception of the grandeur of this glacier.

“It answers,” said Heinrich, “to Burke’s definition of the sublime—it is vast, mysterious, terrible!”

I replied that “it was impossible for me to have the sensation of fear, and scarcely of awe in looking upon the scene before us—it rather had to me the image of the outer walls of heaven, as if there must be infinite glory within and beyond when such majesty and beauty were without. And then these flowers skirting the borders of this frozen pile, and smiling as lovely as beneath the sunniest slope in Italy, forbade the idea that this crystal mountain was of ice.”

“But will it not vanish if we look away?” said Heinrich, as he gazed on the frozen cataracts, and gave utterance to his admiration in the most expressive words that German, French, English, Latin or Greek would supply, for our discourse was in a mixture of them all.

Soon after passing the Glacier of the Rhone we met a peasant who assured us that he had fallen into one of its crevices, seventy feet, and had cut his way up with a hatchet, thus delivering himself from an icy grave.

A little wayside inn gave us a brief respite from our toilsome journey. We climbed the Grimsel, and reached the Dead Sea on its summit. It is called the Lake of the Dead, because the bodies of those who perished in making this journey were formerly cast into it for burial. Heinrich and I left the path and climbed to a cliff where we looked down on the pilgrim parties on horses and on foot, winding their way along its borders. We sent our servant onward to engage beds for us at the hospice of the Grimsel, and resolved to spend the rest of the day (the sun was yet three hours high) in this wilderness of mountain scenery.

We could now look down into the valley, a little valley, but like an immense cauldron, the sides of which are sterile naked rocks, eight hundred feet high! On the west they stand like the walls and towers of a fortified city, and in the bottom of the vale is a single house and a small lake; but a flock of a hundred goats and a score of cows, with tinkling bells, are picking a scanty subsistence among the stones. The scene was wild, savage, grand indeed, and had there been no sun to light it up with the lustre of heaven, it would have been dreary and dismal. Heinrich had been very thoughtful for an hour. He had discovered that my thoughts turned constantly to the God who made all these mountains, while he was ever studying the mountains themselves.

“Here I will commune with nature.”

I replied, “And I will go on a little further, and commune with God!”

“Stay,” he cried, “I would go with you.”

“But you cannot see Him,” I said—“I see Him in the mountain and the glacier and the flower: I hear Him in the torrent and the still small voice of the rills and little waterfalls that are warbling ever in our ears. I feel his presence and something of his power. I beg you to stay and commune with nature, while I go and commune with God.”

I left him and wandered off alone, and in an hour went down the mountain, and to my chamber in the hospice. I was sitting on the bedside, arranging the flowers I had gathered during the day, when Heinrich entered, and giving me his hand said to me, “I wish you would speak more to me of God!”

He sat down by my side, and I asked him if he believed the Bible to be the Word of God.

He said he did, but he would examine it by the light of history and reason, and reject what he did not find to be true.

“And do you believe that the soul of man will live hereafter?”

“I doubt,” was his desponding answer.

I then addressed him tenderly, “My dear young friend, I have loved you since the hour I met you at Altorf. And now tell me, with all your studies have you yet learned how to die? You doubt, but are you so well satisfied with your philosophy that you are able to look upon death among the mountains, or by the lightning, without fear? My faith tells me that when I die my life and joy will just begin, and go on in glory forever. This is the source of all my hopes, and it gives me comfort now when I think that I may never see my native land and those I love on earth again. I know that in another land we shall meet?”

“How do you know that you shall meet?”

“My faith, my heart, my Bible tells me so. I shall meet all the good in heaven. I am sure of one child, an angel now.”

“And where are your children?”

“Four in America, and one in heaven. I had a boy four years ago; earth never had a fairer. His locks were of gold and hung in rich curls on a neck and shoulders whiter than the snow: his brow was high and broad like an infant cherub’s; and his eye was blue as the evening sky. And he was lovelier than he was fair. But in the budding of his beauty, he fell sick and died.”

“O no, not died!”

“Yes, he died here by my heart. And that child is the only one of mine that I am sure of ever seeing again.”

“I do not understand you.”

“If my other children grow up to doubt as you doubt, they may wander away on the mountains of error or the glaciers of vice, and fall into some awful gulph and be lost forever. And if I do not live to see my living children, I am as sure of meeting that one now in heaven, as if I saw him here in the light of the setting sun.—Heinrich, have you a mother, my dear friend?”

“Yes, yes,” he cried, “and her faith is the same as yours.”

I had seen his eyes filling, and had felt my own lips quivering as I spoke, but now he burst into tears and fell on my breast. He kissed my lips, and my cheeks, and my forehead, and the hot tears rained on my face, and mingled with my own. “O teach me the way to feel and believe,” he said at last, as he clung to me like a frightened child, and clasped me convulsively to his heart. I held him long and tenderly, and felt for him somewhat, I hope, as Jesus did for the young man who came to him with a similar inquiry. I loved him, and longed to lead him to the light of day.