The sheet 482 of the topographical atlas of Switzerland assigns the name of Vermala to the mayens in Canton Valais, situated above Sierre, at an altitude of 4,500 feet or thereabouts. Swiss mayens are places where grass is grown that can be mown and on which cattle is grazed in autumn.

About 600 feet higher there is in the forest a clearing, with a south-west exposure, in which the Mont Blanc range, framed in fir-trees, presents itself in the distance to the appreciative eye as a beautiful background to a picture of loveliness. If the bareness of the map is to be trusted, this spot was not yet inhabited in 1884 when the topographical survey was made.

The map is right, and yet it is not quite right. There were at that time no ordinary dwelling-houses in the clearing, but people of ordinary mind held that the Ski-runner of Vermala, whose presence on the country-side was at that time exactly known, had his home somewhere in those parts.

From afar curious people would point out a rocky platform planted with beautiful, well-spaced firs amongst which it would be pleasant to bask in the sun in winter. But others were rather taken up with the peculiar apparitions which at night were seen there skimming the rocks in a sinister play of light. The map marks the place with a broken line, between Vermala and Marolire, right above Praz-Devant.

It was said that in earlier times the mowers piled up their hay at the top of the clearing in one or two mazots, or rough barns, set on short posts, four in number, planted in the ground and crowned with flat stone disks. But that hay had an unwelcome way of catching fire, consuming the mazots as well. Nothing was left but the stones. So the peasantry gave up this unlucky storage ground.

At present no other mystery hovers about this spot than that which these recollections call back to mind. The Forest Hotel occupies the site. The sun holds divided sway in summer with the coolness of the woods, in winter with King Frost. Here conventional tourists embrace at a glance the most marvellous piece of Alpine scenery—from Monte Leone and beyond, to Mont Blanc—that human eye can long for, such, that had Byron known of it, he would have sent his world-sick Manfred to contemplate it from Vermala.

The sweetness of this name would have rung as true to the poet’s ear as, in the Italo-Celtic tongue, it rings to the ear of the rough mountaineer. Would you not, for a while, when reading on the map names of such romantic harmony, forget that they are mere geographical terms? Let us personify those place names. Do not Vermala and Marolire spell out as tunefully as the classically tender and melodious Daphnis and Chloe?

But then there might be a risk of forgetting that there is not a halfpenny worth of love in this story. It is a homespun yarn, woven by rustics in ignorance and fear, and would fall very flat on the ears of civilised mankind, but for the curiosity roused by that consummate sportsman whose humours shine through the woof of the story.

Whence did he come? Who was he? Nobody ever knew.

He had already disappeared from the country when a more enlightened generation ceased to look upon him as a true ghost. There arose a class of minds which ran to the opposite extreme and held him to be a superman of the morrow. In the end he was described as the Ski-runner of Vermala, when some acquaintance with the new implements called back popular imagination within the bounds of reason. Then the glamour that had gathered around his memory at last faded away.

The terraced plain of Crans on which there is now a golf course was not then much frequented. The whole district was held to be inhospitable. The Wildstrubel mountain group, which fills up all the space between the Rawyl and Gemmi passes, bore a redoubtable reputation. It was still more feared for the Plaine-Morte and the glacier of the same name, which spread as a counterpane over his feet. Both the plaine and the glacier were reputed abodes of the souls of the dead. Poor souls perishing with cold in the cracks! Dante’s idea of an ice circle in hell harks back to the rustic belief that souls serve their term of purgatory on the Plaine-Morte and come down on certain sacramental nights to visit the living and receive additional punishment from the contemplation of the evil deeds they have left behind them to work themselves out.

In summer, the Valaisan peasant would not venture upon the Plain of the Dead, had he not first sought the protection of the Holy Virgin and saints. In winter he doubts not that the Plain of the Dead is reserved for the evil ones by the holy Powers that be. As soon as the first winter snow turns to white the brown, sunburnt slopes of the upper grazings, these are laid under the ban by the piety of the villagers, if not by the Church.

Who knows, say the vintners of Sierre, what is going on there? Assuredly, nothing of worth, while the sun draws its daily course slowly on the horizon from the Equinox of autumn to that of spring. Thus an alarming scientific fact has become a nursery ground for fond popular beliefs.

We should easily sympathise with the credulity of those big children if we would but imagine our own state of mind, did we believe we had positive reason to fear lest the sun which had ripened the last harvest might not return in spring to ripen the next, after we had exhausted the garnered crops of the former year. And in what mood would we see the shades of night enfolding us this evening, if we did not rest more confidently in the hope of dawn than in the arms of sleep?

It is under the influence of motives of that kind that the inhabitants of the populous villages thrown as a belt round the plateau of Crans Mollens, Randogne, Montana, Chermignon, Lens, and Icogne—were quite prepared to go into the forest to pick up their allotment of fire-wood, and even to pilfer that of their neighbour. But, so long as their herds and flocks—when the sun rises again full east and sets again full west, which is the signal for the raising of the ban—have not been solemnly escorted to the grazings by the priest with holy water and sprinkler, they will not be seen ascending to the beats whence they retreated in the autumn. And if any do visit those desecrated spots before they have again been hallowed, even the boldest miscreants undertake the venture with a sense of insecurity, knowing full well that, for the pure-minded, they are committing sheer blasphemy.

The God of winter is still a God for heathens in the eyes of those people. Nor should this call forth any astonishment. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings.” If so, how much more awful than elsewhere must appear there those of the arch-fiend! He alone is of a nature sufficiently proof to fire to make his home in ice with impunity. His followers alone are sufficiently witched to share in his privilege.

Therefore, when the rumour was spread that a supernatural form haunted the Vermala woods, it needed but little comment before it gained credence. Everybody was pretty clear in his own mind as to what kind of person he must be, and none needed to question others to know that they thought exactly the same thing.

As might be expected, poachers, chamois hunters, and wood-cutters, people with uneasy consciences—because they steal wood or game, and because their occupation makes them particularly liable to mistrust each other and to meditate on the Evil One—were among the first to believe a story so much in keeping with the trend of their own thoughts. They could even bear witness to its truth.

They had uplifted their eyes, at night, upon a shade so pellucid that the moonbeams shone through it. The shade stole away among the trees like the wind, with a slight rustling of the snow. Then, in a hollow lane leading from the Mayens de Lens towards Chermignon, they had come across strange marks which were not those of game, such as hares, foxes, or badgers. They were not either the marks of any hoofed animal, whether it be a four-footed beast or even the dreaded biped. Those marks soon seemed to join together into tracks that flung themselves like huge ribbons all over the country-side. But, of all those who would, none was able to follow them out. Never had impressions like these been seen on the snow, of which it was impossible to say whether the being who made them walked backwards or forwards. Some said he was a creature mounted on a wheel or riding on two. Others said he was a serpent crawling on his belly, so unbroken was the track and so much did it keep winding about.

However much it seemed to roll away in every direction and to stop nowhere, a few bold spirits determined to follow its course. They forthwith found themselves plunging and diving in such deep snow that, breathless and shivering, they gave up the chase, feeling numb at heart.

From that moment the public mind was made up. No creature in mortal shape, no flesh could ever have marked the face of the snow with this labyrinthine coil. To wind up this clue of thread one must either fly like a bird, or blow like the wind, or be favoured with the malediction of God. This last explanation being of all the most clear, and the most creditable to the piety of the largest commune in the Canton du Valais, it was accepted by the municipal council and the clergy.

In the spring—the next to the great disturbance—the melting snow blotted out the dreadful spoor, the alarm it had caused and, of course, the Runner, for want of his element.

As soon as they dared, people hurried up to the Vermala rock. There they found the remains of a new and unexpected kind of habitation. The drooping branches of a mighty fir appeared to have been pinned to the ground by frost, consequent upon the piling of snow upon their extremities. Then snow had been piled up higher and higher around the tree, embedding other branches as it rose, which were cut away from the trunk, except at the top, where they stretched out in the form of a snow-covered dome. There had thus arisen a pyramid-shaped dwelling enclosed in walls of ice, for the snow had clearly been brought to transparency by the application of heat from within. And thus was explained that wonderful effluvium of light, the shimmer of which looked so sinister from afar. It is even said that some children picked among the tufts of green grass which here and there began to grow about the floor of the abandoned hut, pieces of a yellow amber-like substance which shot forth sparks bathed in a soft purple radiance, when seen by them in the darkness of their own homes.

No wonder that people spoke of Vermala in fearsome strains! What a pity the most beautiful spot in the country was haunted!

In the ensuing winters, things went from bad to worse. People ceased visiting the plateau de Crans for pleasure. Do you fancy, they said, that strangers henceforth will ever set foot upon this ground, unless it be for their sins?

So much tribulation turned the feebler heads. Folk no longer understood each other aright. They got confused over names. Those who called La Zaat by its name were rebuked by those who called it La Chaux Sei, and those parties both fell out with the supporters of the name Bellalui. No one was quite clear about the identity of Petit Mont Tubang and Grand Mont Tubang. They were in a mist as to Petit Mont Bonvin and Grand Mont Bonvin. Everybody confused one and all of these with the Tonio de Merdasson. In short, the mind of the country-side was muddled, now that all eyes saw double when they looked in the direction of Vermala.

Old men, however, stiffened their backs and spoke in firm voices above the new Babel of tongues. They said it had always been known before their time and would ever hereafter be manifest, that the crest that is visible from Lens is the brow of Bellalui, and they clinched the matter with the reminder that when Bagnoud the mayor built his new house, he called it Bellalui after the mountain.

As it happens, it was at Lens that the meteoric personage once more called attention to himself.

Truth to say, though there was no one who did not expect his return, there was nevertheless a general shudder when Jean Perrex who had gone to Saillon, brought back the news that “he” was known to have brought out of the stable the horse which had lately been bought with a new cart, to show visitors over the country. “He” had put the horse to the cart without collar, traces, or bridle. Without whip or ribbons, he had driven to St. Pierre de Clages. He had tied the horse to the church door. Then he had sat down on the grass at the foot of the Norman tower, between the beehives of the curÉ and the wasps’ nest that is there sunk in the soil. Nobody could say how and when they had seen him. It would have been useless to ask what he was like. But it could not but be he, since the abandoned horse and cart had been impounded, and the church was now sinking more rapidly than heretofore.

The most convincing testimony, however, was that of Claudine Rey. Her brother was in the habit of walking out with a girl who had a situation in a hotel in Brigue. One night he had clambered up the wall to the terrace, when the moon suddenly grinned through the clouds. Then, instead of the girl he was to meet, whom should he see there to his right in the arbour but “him” in the shape of a dwarfish, wizened wiseacre, clutching in his right hand a death’s head, and with the fingers of his left running rapidly along the lines of a book of charms!

When, on St. Martin’s eve, this account was given to the worthy curÉ of Lens, who had gathered about his hearth some of his parishioners to crack in goodly company the arolla nuts roasting in the ashes, the dear old man shook his head; his mind was running on the words “Get thee behind me, Satan.”

Then a gentle scratching was heard on the panes of the closed window. The gathering looked that way and most turned pale. The first snow of the coming winter was swirling and whirling against the glass, borne on the soughing wind. And the bluish purple light poured forth from the wells of memory into the sockets of their eyes.

The curÉ came out with his guests on his way to trim the church lamp. A thin layer of snow covered the village lanes. He cast about him furtive and mistrustful glances. The pure white carpet was as yet unsullied by footprints. Would “he” come?

Now this curÉ was a bit of an astronomer and a clerical moralist. He took every care of the sundial of his church tower and had adorned it with an inscription, in two expressive lines:—

That night he stared at it. The piece of advice was as good as ever. But the involutions of the meridian mean curve, drawn with such careful exactness on the stone and painted with such a light hand in the gayest colours, struck him now as being the exact counterfeit of the ribbons on the snow. Was he not breaking away from his ordinary piety in accusing his church dial of taking after an un-Christian pattern? Surely, he was wronging his dial. And the good curÉ kept poring over the unholy coincidence, in so far at least as his mind could find time to spare for meditation upon matters of paramount importance.

On the morning of St. Martin’s Day, the village showed itself to be all in a tangle of loops. The diabolical spoor went in and out round every house. The figure eight of the sundial had thrown off innumerable copies upon the ground. The bells were tolled in vain. To no purpose did the chimes peal. In vain did the most Christianlike of all suns that ever poured its kindly light upon Lens, kindle the most reassuring smile upon the wrinkled stones of the old tower. Not a single parishioner was bold enough to spurn with his foot the cabalistic loops that embraced the bosom of Mother Earth in their oppressive grasp. Not a child dare step across them, not even to go and dip his fingers in the holy water at the church door.

The most thunder-struck was the curÉ. A truculent pentagram in red chalk was displayed all over his distich, surrounded by a double circle that looked like a green fairies’ ring designed in moss upon the church tower.

As for the good men of the largest commune in Canton Valais, they bethought themselves of a day of fasting, the natural remedy for their orthodox faith to point out. But there was a sign against that too. The pewter pots and mugs of the village tavern appeared that morning all set up in a row upon the railings of the churchyard gate, upside down. They would have to be fetched and brought back to their proper place. The hardiest commoners were summoned. They took heart from their thirst. The general anxiety was soothed by such an obvious way of drowning care.

The frequenters of the forests, whether they were honest day-labourers or night-birds, knew alone, beyond all doubt, the identity of the mischief-maker. For them the prime mover in the big upset was none other than the Strubel, about whom the village elders would still relate, in the dim light of the evening fires, dreadful stories of an ancient stamp, such as suggest themselves in the woods after dark, when the old tree stumps are phosphorescent and glow-worms come out of their retreats to set up their tiny lamps on the edges of the rocks.

Of all creatures born of local lore the Strubel was to them the nearest in kin. When the north wind blows the Strubel races from crest to crest, from the Gemmi to the Rawyl, and from the Rawyl to the Gemmi. Up there his long white shock of hair streaming in the wind, and upturned by the gale, spreads as a plume across the sky. The tumbling folds of his beard fill the precipitous ravines. A hail of icicles rattles out of his roaring breast. The rush of his huge body, soaring amid snowflakes and in glacier dust, awakens the slumbering elements. At night the Aurora Borealis gathers in streamers around his brow. At dawn and at sunset a diadem of snow-crystals sets a many-coloured band about his hoary head. He flies, and his feet do but tip the top of the peaks, and his stature rises aloft in an immense upward sweep. In a blue-and-white transparency, such as one sees in glacier crevasses and in pure ice water, the spring of his sinuous limbs uplifts him to the confines of atmosphere and firmament.

Such is the poetic picture of the dread being which the shepherds still worship secretly, far down in the recesses of their primitive hearts. And it is he whose image the antics of an enigmatic ski-runner revived for several winters, as our story shows, under the low and gloomy roofs of the white-hooded chalets.

There is an evening hour, when, after cooking and partaking of the day’s last meal, the family gathers round the domestic hearth. Then the last embers are fanned into a congenial flame. The dying light of the hearth kindles anew the memories of a bygone age. Is the time near when these will die out for want of fuel, as the flame of that hearth when the family goes to bed? But why should we link any melancholy after-thought with their well-earned rest? The thought of the reward granted to their toil pleases one’s moral sense. Yet he who, like me in this chapter, uses figments of the past as a page decoration, cannot but regret that such picturesque elements should be gradually, but surely, vanishing for ever from the face of our modern world.

The accepted idea is that things have progressed. So they have. A nice hotel crowns the Vermala rock. At night real electric light of industrial origin has taken the place of the fantastic rays of old. There is a chauffage central, fed with colliers’ coal, and stoked by porters who never could produce heat without matter and on terms that were not commercial. Now people dance at Vermala, they have music at night, they lounge about in smoking-jackets, and, when all is said and done, I am one of those who most enjoy the new situation.

Did I ever meet the Ski-runner of Vermala? I should have a vague fear of being caught prevaricating should I answer either Yes or No. Truth sometimes dwells in half-way houses.

I was staying at Vermala last winter. The glacier de la Plaine-Morte, and the ascent of the Wildstrubel, were objects which a young man of my party kept steadily in view. It was his second winter holiday in Switzerland. A much-travelled man, he had camped out in Persia, and endured thirst and hunger in some of the most God-forsaken spots of the globe. How would he fare in the Wildstrubel country? A man may have done very well in sandy deserts and yet find himself out of his depth in snow. He had ski, but would they do as much for him on these charmed snows as a camel’s spreading feet had done in the desert?

So we set forth late one morning, after paying the usual penalty to the photographic fiend. So great an honour conferred by a number of fair women inspired us with proper pride. It was a most strengthening draught to harden us against the trials that might be in store, but it also worked so insidiously as to cause us to overlook the wise saw of the most bourgeois of French fabulists: “Rien ne sert de courir, il faut partir À temps,” which, topically rendered, might mean: “A man who has started late need never hope to make up for lost time when going uphill on ski.”

The glacier de la Plaine-Morte lies at the altitude of 9,500 feet approximately, measured at the brim, or lip, which we had to overcome before we could dip down to the surface of that shroud of the dead. We were setting out for it from the altitude of 5,500 feet, and allowing for unavoidable “downs” that would break the upline, we had quite 5,000 feet of vertical displacement before us.

At whatever hour of the day we might have started we had that much to ascend by sunset, if we wished to reach the Hildebrand hut in comfortable circumstances, and so the true bourgeois spirit would have us do. Had we been in military mood we should have borne with the dictates of punctuality. Unfortunately we had received attentions that had raised us beyond ourselves. We chose to trust our elation to bring us on over the ground. But the 5,000 feet we had to ascend would not grow less. The sun would not delay its progress. The ups and downs would not smooth themselves out, however much gentle pressure our planks might bring to bear upon them. The refreshing compliments we had stored up would not check the flight of time.

All too early Night put in a punctual appearance upon the scene. She found us, indeed, sailing gently along the shroud of the dead, but far from the place prepared to shelter weary Alpinists.

We seemed to be in for the same adventure as a friend of mine who spent the night wandering on the glacier during a wind and snowstorm. The dead then might almost have been moving under their shrouds in every direction. He did not lose his way, but was impressed by solitude and by the weirdness of the shifting snows, let alone the fatigue that loosened his limbs. He confided to me quite lately how odd he still thought it that he did not go off his “chump.”

Anyhow, Mr. B., my present companion, decided that he saw something happy in the situation, the beckoning finger of a friendly fate, that would guard us while we spent that January night on the open glacier. The air was still and clear. The cold might be keen, but not sharp, though somebody since would absolutely have it that the thermometer marked that night at Vermala 2.2 Fahrenheit.

As Mr. B. was anxious to view this escapade as a fit counterpart to his nights in the Persian desert, the situation could be accepted with equanimity. He was possessed of the true romantic spirit. Poor man! He was afflicted with much thirst. I had, unfortunately, nothing better to offer him than the carefully worded expression of my regret that he had not been able to get himself fitted up, before he left Persia, with some of the valuable water compartments of his Bactrian camels. So by ten o’clock we laid ourselves demurely down on the angular glacier moraine, pretty confident that long before the hour struck for the sun to rise, we should be anxious to roll the shutters away from the Palace of Dawn.

On the contrary, when the sun stepped out of his car upon the glacier and, at the most reasonable hour of eight on the clock, knocked us up, we were still reclining in our alcÔve. Shall I say that we found at our bedside shaving water and a cup of tea? No, for this would be a really undue elongation of truth. But we saw the “boots” busy lighting odd scraps of paper and slipping them into our shoes to soften the frozen leather. We thanked him and were about to tip him when he took fright and flew away upon a sunbeam, leaving behind a pot of blacking and an electric brush.

If I ever did set eyes upon the Ski-runner of Vermala, it was during that night, nor could it have been in a better setting than on the Plain of the shrouded Dead. In fact, in the supposition that he is a person that never existed, the glacier de la Plaine-Morte would cry out for him.

Glaciers are legion, but there is only one glacier de la Plaine-Morte.

Measured with tape, its size, as our readers have learnt in a preceding chapter, would come out at a few miles.

Sir Martin Conway, in his “Alps from End to End,” comes nearer to conveying a correct impression, because he measures it by the standard of his own mind.

Those who have in any weather entrusted themselves in winter to that ice cup scooped out of the top of lofty Alpine battlements, may alone imagine in its true character the Alpine world as it was in those dim and distant days, when half Europe would have been too small to hold the glories of the Plaine-Morte in its prehistoric stage of being.

Since last year (1911), a cable railway runs passengers up from Sierre to Montana-Vermala. Some day, perhaps, the railway may be taken 5,000 feet higher. It would then pass the place where we spent the hours of our mystic night, alternately watchful and asleep, taking in the immense charm that flowed in upon us, and seeking in short terms of slumber rest from our meditation.

WILDSTRUBEL AND PLAINE MORTE GLACIER.

To face p. 100.