The Project Gutenberg eBook of Beautiful Europe--The Engadine, by Spencer Musson

AU PROFESSEUR CÉSAR ROUX
DE LAUSANNE
TÉMOIGNAGE DE PROFONDE ESTIME
ET RECONNAISSANCE

I

THE LAKE DISTRICT

'Ille terrarum mihi præter omnes angulus ridet' is the inscription that greets the traveller over the post-stables at Silvaplana. He is, perhaps, a little surprised, not having hitherto thought of stables and the postal service as haunts of classic culture; but those who know the Upper Engadine will readily accept the quotation as expressing their feeling towards it. There is something about that high-lying, broad-stretched valley, though its scenery is seldom of a dramatic, overmastering kind, that gives it a quite individual claim when Memory makes up her jewels.

There is an individual note, too, about the people, a suggestion of peculiar history that mocks us as we try to seize it. One of the earliest documents in a people's archives is ordinarily their language, but that spoken by Engadiners, the interesting form of Romanic known as Ladin, one of the many tongues evolved from late Latin, only takes us back to the Roman {10} conquest of the Rhaetian upland that won the magniloquent admiration of Horace. In truth, the population is a human document, a palimpsest on which the Romans are but the latest and most masterful writers. Since, at the commencement of our era, the soldiers of Drusus and Tiberius wrote their enduring record, there have been only interlineations, mainly Teutonic, but many are the traces of antecedent scripts. Could we read below the prevailing Latin, we should probably find an elusive Keltic romance and enwoven with it perhaps a grave Etruscan legend, while scattered through all are undecipherable memorials of forgotten races and perished tongues. One ethnic wave after another has surged up that ancient highway from central Europe into Italy, and each as it passed or receded has contributed some component to the population.

But even the briefest sketch of the tangled history of the Engadine is beyond the scope of this booklet. I will stick to my little last, the graceless business of cutting away four out of every five pages of a previous work which the world has willingly let die.*

* This little book is mainly an abridgment of 'The Upper Engadine' (A. and C. Black, 1906).

Most travellers enter the Engadine by the tunnel under the Albula, having slowly wound up from Chur along a line that can hardly be surpassed in bold engineering and romantic variety. After a momentary {11} halt at Spinas, we steam for a couple of miles down Val Bevers—very interesting to the geologist and botanist, the singular mixture of Alpine and meadow flora can be noted even from the rail—and reach the valley of the Inn at Bevers, where are some excellent specimens of the quaint old Engadine houses that have no small part in giving the valley its individual character. Away on the east stands Piz Esan, a bold, bare, dolomitic mass capped with Rhaetic, which is the south-western sentinel of the lately established National Park.

The rail turns right and left. Let us turn right to Samaden, administratively the chief village of the Upper Engadine. Here, too, are good examples of old Engadine architecture, including a house of the Plantas, one of the ancient families of the valley whose name is writ large on every page of its history. St. Peter's at Samaden enjoys a traditional primacy among the churches of the valley, and has many representative functions. It bears the date 1491, but this must refer to the rebuilding of the nave; the Romanesque tower must date from the tenth or eleventh century. Switzerland has old churches in plenty, but both care and neglect have combined to denude them of nearly all the interesting features that the belfries show they must have possessed. Protestantism is often blamed for this, but in artistic desert I do not know that there is much to choose between the two communions; such difference as there may be {12} is expressed in two different estimates of George IV. Someone remarked that he had no taste. 'On the contrary,' said another, 'he's a great deal of taste, but it's bad.'

Piz Ot, near Samaden, is a superb point of view; the neighbouring Piz Padella is interesting botanically and geologically.

A mile beyond Samaden are Celerina and Cresta, now merged into one. Plate II. is a view on the way: in the background Piz Albriz, on the right a buttress of the sombre Piz Chalchaign, Pontresina in middle distance; nearer, standing lorn among the tombs on a little larch-clad hill, the ancient church of San Gian, which, except for funerals, is now disused; in the meadowed floor of the valley the Inn rests in quiet reaches after its furious descent from the lakes; its clear waters are joined by those of the Flaz from Val Bernina, turbid with 'the dust of continents to be,' and larger in volume than those of the stream in which after their confluence its name and individuality are lost; in the triangle between the rivers are the Samaden golf links. The most famous and fatal of toboggan runs descends between St. Moritz and Cresta.

Between Celerina and St. Moritz the rail threads the romantic Charnadura gorge above the raging Inn. At the upper end is a fine fall by which the water descends from the lake of St. Moritz, the lowest of the chain of blue-green lakes that form {13} the characteristic charm of the upper reaches of the Engadine.

St. Moritz strikes one on arrival as a town of hotels. Happily, hotels are becoming sensible that they cannot afford to be unsightly outrages on the scenery that is their raison d'être. An example of this is the Hôtel Margna, designed by Signur Nichol Hartmann, in whom the Engadine possesses an architect imbued with the spirit of its characteristic and picturesque style of building, and with unfailing resource in adapting it to modern requirements and utilizing old construction. 'Only a matter of appearance,' said a practical companion when I was hesitating to enter a restaurant that disfigured a lovely nook of tarn and fell. It was said with a superior air of appealing to higher considerations, much as Solomon, in extolling the God-fearing woman, reminds us that favour is deceitful and beauty is vain. But, after all, what is scenery save a matter of appearance? In fact, Switzerland lives on appearances, and it is but business to take them into account in catering for the thousands who are attracted thither, not by the sterling virtues of the inhabitants, but by the superficial beauty of the land.

St. Moritz, seated on a spur of hill at the head of the lake, is the highest village in the Engadine, being some 200 feet higher than the Maloja Pass at the head of the valley. At the highest point is the old church, no longer used, whose interesting belfry seems {14} leaning to its fall. The inestimable Swiss periodical Heimatschutz has pointed a salutary architectural moral by presenting this neglected tower with its simple proportions and vestiges of good work side by side with the modern parish church, a painstaking example of bad taste.

Beyond the old church the hill slopes up to the Badrutt Park, named after a famous dynasty of hoteliers. Here is provision for golf, abounding in speculative and absorbing contingencies. In the larch wood on the upper road from St. Moritz to Camfer is the Segantini Museum, in which are gradually being collected works of the painter who loved and studied the Engadine with life-long devotion.

In the way of pictures, St. Moritz possesses a treasure of the last kind one would look to find in a mountain village. In the Palace Hotel is—what shall I say?—a copy, a replica, the original, for even that claim has been made for it, of Raphael's Madonna di S. Sisto, assuredly the noblest presentment of motherhood that the world can show. By a happy inspiration it has been placed in the Ladies' Room, where it must awaken a Magnificat in many a heart.

Apart from technique, there are slight but unmistakable differences between it and its famous compeer at Dresden. In the Madonna's gaze is less of wonder and amazement, something reaching far into futurity, assurance of final triumph and disdain of intermediate obstacle; not yet had the sword that should go through {15} her soul set its sign on the young mother's face. In the Child the difference is in an opposite sense; in both pictures there is the same wonderful suggestion of the awakening of the divine spirit amid the strange limitations of humanity, but here it is rather the human pathos than the divine power that holds our attention; there is less imperial moulding of brow and mouth, less profound mastery in the eyes: the eyes to which all things were open but which saw them now as man sees, appear contemplating with perplexed wonder the path that was to be trodden—he had known it all along, but it looked so different now.

In the flat land at the head of the lake, a little more than a mile from St. Moritz, and linked to it by an electric tramway, are the famous chalybeate springs, round which has grown up the cluster of buildings known as St. Moritzbad. About half-way down, on the larch-clad slope that rises to the right of the road, is the Museum Engiadinais, the charming building in old Engadine styles in which Signur Hartmann has housed the magnificent collection of Rhaetian antiquities made by Signur Campell of Celerina. To speak of this museum as a collection of antiquities gives a very inadequate notion of its interior. Whole rooms, halls and corridors have been installed there, and, combined with the old styles of the building and the furniture and surroundings of {16} old life, make wandering about it like an excursion into the past.

A little farther on is the Anglican church, a massive little building in the grey-green gabbro of the neighbourhood. The tower seems to have been suggested by that of the half-ruined church of San Gian, an assimilation of local style that cannot be too highly commended. An English church on the Continent, like the Englishman himself, his clubs, customs, and amusements, is apt to have an air of extraterritoriality. Who has not felt a shock on revisiting some beloved mountain haunt to find that since he was last there the church of his fathers, looking as though it had just stepped from a suburb of London, had added its note of incongruity to those that hotels and bazaars had accumulated on the devoted spot?

The chalybeate waters of St. Moritz have been known from early times. In addition to the original spring there are now two others, one of which wells up in the bed of the Inn. Bubbles of carbonic acid gas that rise to the surface of the lake where the river enters it are thought to indicate another spring below; in fact, the whole mass of crystalline rock that rises into the peaks of Rosatz and Ova Cotschna is probably a vast laboratory, in which the water that falls from heaven and filters down to the river and the lake is charged with healing virtues.

Its efficacy, no doubt, is largely due to the {17} co-operation of the air, and to the ample provision made for the comfort and distraction of health-seekers. Sportsmen, artists, naturalists, and whatnot find wherewithal to occupy them, while those who wish to lounge and dream, who are content for a while simply to exist, have environment to their hearts' content: sleeping lakes and leaping streams, slopes of pasture starred with flowers, solemn sanctuaries of forest, wildernesses filled with the large companionable loneliness of the hills. And all this enchantment shines in the rare mountain air with a vividness that seems scarcely real. Indeed, it is hard to set limits to the many and magical effects of altitude on body and spirit. Though there may be no theological ground for the statement by which it is said encouragement is sometimes given to invalids at St. Moritz that in the worst event they are nearer heaven than in any other health resort of Europe; yet, short of that unnegotiable contingency, there are undoubted advantages at 6,000 feet above the sea not to be found at lower levels.

Two roads, one from the village and one from the baths, and numerous paths, direct and digressive, lead from St. Moritz to Camfer, standing on the uppermost of the three rocky steps that divide the Upper Engadine into as many lake-basins. The upper lake has been divided into three by detritus brought down from the Val Fex at Sils and from the Julier {18} and Surlej at Silvaplana, the mid-lake at St Moritz has shrunk to a remnant of its former self, while the lower lake has entirely disappeared, tapped by the gorge that the Inn has cut from the Upper to the Lower Engadine.

The origin of such lakes has long been a problem. The most authoritative conclusion seems to be that in the slow tectonic wrinkling of the earth's crust bars have been raised across the course of a river, which has thus been dammed up into a lake and drowned its former bed. Of course, a crustal subsidence might have had the same effect, or the two movements may have been combined.

A mile and a half beyond Camfer is Silvaplana, seated on the green promontory by which the silt of the Ova del Vallun descending from the Julier Pass, seconded on the opposite side by streams from the Surlej, has cut the original lake in two. A picturesque wooden bridge spans the channel still left to the Inn between the deltas of its furious tributaries; in the background rises Piz Margna, a glacier filling the cleft in its broad head.

The sylvan shades commemorated in the name of Silvaplana have long given place to flowery meadows, which now cover the broad holm that the Ova del Vallun has thrust into the lake. High above the village the vehement stream is commandeered for the electrical supply of the valley. By the side of the {19} works is a water-wheel, the earliest and the latest harnessing of water-power, a striking illustration of the return of industry to its oldest helpmate. It will be a curious instance of history repeating itself if manufactures again plant themselves by streams as in the days before water-wheels were superseded by steam. Population may one day be as congested in the beautiful highlands that are now the playground of the nations as in the great coal-basins. Happily the 'white coal,' as the Swiss call their water-power, deals more sympathetically with nature than the black. What a contrast to our factories and gasworks is this trim little building at Silvaplana, with its aqueduct of ruddy larch, and the fine cascade from the overflow of its reservoir. It is as though the grimy palm of Vulcan were replaced by the light finger of Apollo.

The raison d'être of Silvaplana was the Julier Pass. Before the construction of the railway, this was a frequent route for entering the Engadine, which makes a much more striking first impression here than from the Albula. After emerging from the grey desolation of the two upper reaches of the descent, a superb view of the Bernina peaks and the ice-fields is gradually disclosed. More and more the panorama is extended to the right, first by the Fex peaks and glaciers, and finally by the massive Margna. The one thing lacking is the Engadine; we seem to have arrived in a land of serried and far-spread mountains, {20} in which there is no place for the valley of the Inn. So precipitous are its sides at this point that no suggestion is given of the broad lake-filled chasm intervening between the immediate foreground and the sombre rampart that rises to those glistening fields and summits. At length we are among the first outposts of the forest, gaunt pines and battered larch, scourged by centuries of storm; suddenly we see through the foliage the glint of water and of verdure; a moment after, and the lovely valley from Sils to St. Moritz, with lakes and forests, meadows and clustered homes, is stretched before us.

It is a pleasant walk from Silvaplana to the pass, a broad saddle of bog and pasture, flecked with snow, seamed with rivulets, and bright with abundant flora. The tarns on the left are stocked with trout in spite of being sealed with ice and buried in snow for half the year. A path from the dairy of the Julier Alp takes us in three hours to the summit of the Piz Julier, where, 'walled by wide air and roofed by boundless heaven,' we have an extensive and splendid view.

Another delightful walk from Silvaplana, as from most places in the Upper Engadine, is to the Fuorcla Surlej. This saddle between Piz Corvatsch and Munt Arias is equally accessible from Silvaplana, Sils, St. Moritz, and Pontresina; it thus affords a pleasant way of going from any place in the main valley to the Bernina side-valley.

The road up the valley from Silvaplana lies straitly between the left shore of the lake and the mountains that rise precipitously from it. Walkers will do well, after Camfer, to take the path that skirts the lakes on the right side of the valley, every step of which is beautiful. It leads now under shady trees, now over parklike or rock-strewn slopes; picks its way along precipitous hillsides, amid many-hued crags, set with steadfast-rooted pine and larch, festooned with red roses, inlaid with dwarf rhododendron, blue clematis, and countless lovely flowers; occasionally may be found masses of the rare and stately Alpine columbine. On the right are the ever-changing waters of the lakes, or the flat, emblossomed meadows that separate them.

Not quite three miles from Silvaplana the high-road passes the little hamlet of Sils Baselgia, so called from the ancient church, the basilica of the neighbourhood, that stands, 'a grief-worn memory of old years,' in a flat meadow by the tranquil Inn.

Past and present are delightfully merged in Signur Badrutt's Hôtel Margna on the right of the hamlet, an admirable example of an hotel in the traditional architecture of the region, and in harmony with the scenery around it. Nichol Hartmann was given a free hand with a characteristically massive and picturesque old Engadine house, which he restored, enlarged, and fitted with every modern comfort and convenience, but with unfailing antiquarian feeling; old features have been piously preserved, and their spirit carried {22} into the new construction, with infinite ingenuity and down to the smallest detail.

About half an hour farther from the high-road, Sils Maria nestles cosily in a recess of the valley behind a rocky hill, which rises as an island from the flat meadows that have supplanted the lake.

Val Fex, which stretches up some five miles to the south-east, is perhaps the most beautiful of the side-valleys of the Engadine. From the sunny breakfast-cloisters of the Hôtel Margna we see its widespread glacier sagging between the Capütschin and Piz Led, as it were a great white sheet let down from heaven. This forms the background of Plate IV., with the picturesque little chapel that stands on the steep meadow slope between the first and second reaches of the valley in the foreground. On either side of the glacier interesting passes lead to Chiesa in the beautiful Val Malenco, and thence down to Sondrio, the capital of the Valtelline; in a few hours we exchange ice-bound heights, sombre pines, and cautious, close-growing Alpine flora for umbrageous groves, trellised vines, and the luxurious breezes of the south.

Various points in the great rocky down that separates the Fex and Fedoz valleys afford fine views. We look down the whole chain of the lakes, seeming masses of turquoise in an emerald setting; on the right the Val Fex mounts to its glacier with crowded peaks beyond; on the left is the wild ravine of the Fedoz, the billowy ice-field at its head descending in {23} a crumpled and crevassed glacier, beyond which a host of rocky peaks ring round the abyss of blue haze that covers the steep descent into Italy.

On the opposite side of the Val Fex is Marmorè, another fine point of view. An interesting continuation of this walk leads to the savage amphitheatre round the little Lej Sgrischus, 'the shuddering lake.' This lonely tarn, 8,695 feet above the sea, frozen for nine months of the year, abounds in trout, a striking instance of the hardiness of these redoubtable little fish. How they came there is a problem; if introduced by human enterprise it must have been centuries ago as the renting of the fish-take is of ancient date.

A delightful place in which to pass a lazy hour or so is the narrow promontory of Chastè, which stretches half a mile into the lake in front of Sils Baselgia. Couched in springy undergrowth amid larch-clad rocks and patches of beflowered meadow, we are filled with a great content; the eye is satisfied with seeing and the ear with hearing; the ripples lap against the craggy shore, streams hum in the great mountain that rises like a wall beyond the streak of water, birds twitter amid the whispering leaves, the earth seems flooded with a vast, satisfying murmur that

A rock at the end is inscribed to Friedrich Nietzsche, the apostle of unbridled individualism, himself so {24} helpless in the cruel grip of idiosyncrasy, who frequently sought to cool life's fitful fever in this lovely spot.

The charming path runs along the right shore of the lake past the picturesque hamlet of Isola, slumbering on its green promontory by the rush and roar of the tumultuous Fedoz. As the path approaches it along the cliff its lichen-gilt stone roofs, nestling close together, form a delightful mass of rich colour. These slices of mica-schist that render roofs such a pleasing feature in the Engadine are mostly quarried in the neighbouring Val Fex. Behind Isola the Fedoz descends in a fine fall, bringing material for the delta that bids fair one day to cut the lake in two. In the village is an interesting old tavern, formerly a country seat of the Vertimati; the fittings and furniture are quite a study in woodwork.

A little farther on is a block of breccia inscribed to the memory of Thomas Henry Huxley, who spent many summers at Maloja. Then, at the head of the lake, we pass some fine ice-smoothed rocks and ice-borne boulders, and arrive at the pleasant space between the lake and the descent towards Italy that goes by the name of Maloja, a name that strictly belongs to its western edge, the nearest approach to a terminal pass that the truncated valley of the Inn presents.

Unfortunately for the first impression of Maloja, the most salient object is the huge bulk of the {25} Kursaal, grotesquely incongruous with its surroundings. Behind it are the golf links, bristling with attractive difficulties and deceptions. Above them is the English church, so light and graceful a little structure that it would be captious to object that though it be Swiss it is not Engadine, and on a hillock opposite the Roman Catholic church. In the grounds of the Hôtel Belvedere are impressive records of ice action, including some fine glacier-cauldrons.

It is a pleasant walk along the romantic ravine of the Ordlegna and by the Lago di Cavloccio to the Forno club hut. A digression on the right soon after starting leads to the little Lago di Bitabergo (shown on the cover) amid rocks and sombre forests, a beautiful and sequestered spot.

Those who have followed up the Inn from the beautiful mountain-girt capital of Tirol, which is named from bridging it, will not willingly forgo a pilgrimage to the little Lago di Lunghino, which is its reputed source. It is an imposing cradle for a great river, lying under a sheer wall of rock that rises into stony spires. The little stream escapes from its austere birthplace under a bridge of frozen snow, and flings itself, wild and white, down the steep descent to its lakes. In the first instance it was probably one of the most modest affluents of the stream it is now taken to represent. Both its slender volume and the fact that its direction is different to that of the Inn preclude its being considered in any real {26} sense the source of the great stream that hollowed the Engadine, which now lies a truncated trough with no terminal amphitheatre. The original source and all the upper affluents of this mighty river that rolled to the Black Sea have long since been captured by the Maira and diverted to the Mediterranean. If we walk up the neighbouring Piz Lunghino we shall look down on the field of that long battle of the waters. It is the most striking example to be found of the slow but steady encroachment of the southern streams that is going on all along the Alps. The more abrupt slope on the south gives the water greater erosive force, with the result that it is continually eating back into the range and thrusting the watershed to the north. Nowhere has this result been so extensive and startling as in the region below us.*

* The remarkable record of this physiographical change preserved in the present flora of the valley is noticed in the chapter on botany in 'Upper Engadine.'

Heim, a great authority, thinks that the original source of the great river that carved the Engadine was some seven or eight miles away in the Val Marozzo, which now passes for the head of the Val Bregaglia, whose normal direction seems thus reversed. The main water-shed of the Alps must then, he thinks, have lain along a transverse ridge somewhere above Vicosoprano. The head waters of the Maira gradually ate through this and, by offering to those of the Inn {27} a more rapid descent, captured them for the Mediterranean. The Engadine lakes were thus bereft of their parent source; the current from the rivulet of the Lunghino tarn was quite unequal to sweeping down the detritus brought by its furious affluents, which were thus free to form the deltas that are gradually filling the lakes, whose fate, happily remote, would seem to be to disappear.

What changes, one wonders, are still to come? How long will the solid peak beneath us withstand the continual flux? As one gazes on the 'sea of mountains' stretching on every side, a new aptness is given to the hackneyed figure. For seeing everywhere below the flash of cataracts and the riot of descending streams, with the murmur in the air of innumerable waters all incessantly engaged in the work of transformation, the everlasting hills seem mutable as the waves of ocean:

The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands:
They melt like mists the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

II

VAL BERNINA

Val Bernina, the most notable of the side-valleys of the Engadine, is traversed by the railway that runs from St. Moritz to Tirano in the Valtelline. This is {28} joined by the Rhaetian Railway from Samaden at Pontresina, the pleasant collective name of the three villages—Laret, Spiert, and Giarsun—that stretch in a long street at the entrance to the valley, happier than most resorts in the Engadine in enjoying magnificent views of the great snow mountains.

Of course, like all popular resorts, Pontresina pays the penalty of being appreciated. Those who gibe at the Upper Engadine as a transcendent tea-garden have a special gibe for Pontresina. But the garden is so very transcendent, so lovely, so extended, so varied, so full of retreats of wild, sweet beauty, so continually rising into points of view whence one looks illimitably across the high places of the earth, that the term is freed from all opprobrium.

Seldom do crowded places have within a few minutes of them such attractive haunts as the Schlucht promenade along the left bank of the deep ravine of the Bernina. The many-hued cliffs grasped by the snaky roots of straight-stemmed firs are writ with records of the stream's former course: the curve of waterfalls; the winding, widening, and narrowing of its channel; the swirl and sweep of its current; the deep holes ground by stones revolving in its eddies, as it gradually wore down its bed to that along which it now frets and fumes, incessantly bearing away the substance of staid and sober Switzerland to make land for the restless peoples of the Danube and the Black Sea.

The great points of view are on the other side. The most famous is the Piz Languard, reached by a beautiful walk. Another is the Muotlas Muraigl to which we may mount by a cable railway from the station of Punt Muraigl at the junction of the lines from Samaden and St. Moritz. Hence we have a splendid prospect: in front lie the Upper Engadine lakes, like successive reaches of a broad blue river; to the right is the pinnacled ridge of the lower Julier range; to the left the Rosegg valley, with the glaciers and peaks at its head; still more to the left the view in Plate I., the steep northern slope of the Chalchaign, and the shining summits and far-flung snows of the Bellavista, Palü, and Cambrena peaks.

Fine, too, is the prospect from the Schaffberg, where is a memorial to Giovanni Segantini, who for some time before his death was occupied in painting this magnificent view. Here, one winter day in 1899, he succumbed, in face of the great landscape that had cast its spell on him.

The Rosegg and Morteratsch glaciers are Pontresina's two main entrances to the high Alpine world, that radiant world which lies so near us in the Upper Engadine, yet seems as far from soil and smirch of lower earth as though it had just descended out of heaven from God. Plate V. gives the former: in front is the pleasant, primitive little inn; beyond it the {30} glacier, for a long time receding, has left the usual mean and desolate disorder; farther are the combined glaciers of the Rosegg and Tschierva; between them is the rocky Aguagliouls, a curious reserve of vegetable life on which, it is said, two hundred different specimens of plants have been counted; in the height of summer sheep are driven across the glacier to graze there; in the background, from right to left, are the Caputschin and Mongia peaks, the broad gap of the Fuorcla Glüschaint, the Piz Glüschaint, the double summit of la Sella, and, hidden in the clouds, Piz Rosegg.

The Morteratsch glacier is Pontresina's other gateway to the great white world. The railway has a station within a short distance of it. A path mounts hence to the beautiful series of falls by which the Bernina descends among purple rocks from the upper reach of its valley. About a mile after this path joins the high-road are the three quaint Bernina Houses, a typical old mountain inn, evidently prepared to be buried in snow through the winter. Behind them stands Piz Alv, a huge bare cone of limestone, sole memorial of the teeming life of the sea that once covered the granite and schist around. A striking contrast to its dusty bareness is the ruddy granite of the neighbouring Piz Lagalb, clothed with hardy vegetation.

Continuing on the almost level road, we pass the Lej Minvir, then the Lej Nair, 'black lake,' the waters of which, filtered through peat, are of an inky {31} purple. Separated from it by a few yards of pasture, and in such sharp contrast of colour as to seem almost unreal, is the Lej Alv, 'white lake,' filled by the turbid stream from the Cambrena glacier with greenish-white water. The contrast is said to be reproduced in the trout abounding in them, which are of a dark and light colour respectively. This narrow neck of bog and pasture is the watershed between the Inn descending to the Black Sea, and the Adda to the Mediterranean; occasionally, it is said, a wind from the south or east, funnelled and furious in the pass, drives the white waters over into the black, and temporarily unites the lakes. Presumably at such times the white trout lie low, or the distinction between the two breeds would have been lost.

The Bernina Hospice is finely posted above Lej Alv. Hence the road on the left, and the rail and an enchanting footpath on the right, descend by the lovely Lago di Poschiavo to Italy.

A return to Pontresina may be made by the popular 'Diavolezza Tour.' Plate VI. gives a fine suggestion of the scenery at its highest point, the little inn attractively entitled 'Zum Ewigen Schnee' in the foreground, Piz Palü beyond. Hence we descend to the Pers glacier, thread our way among its shafts and pinnacles, one of the most striking and beautiful mazes of ice formation that I know; rest awhile on the rocks of Isola Persa; {32} and finally pass over the broad, billowy Morteratsch glacier and follow its right lateral moraine to the hotel-restaurant set in front of one of the stateliest pageants of the Alps. I wish the artist had been moved to give a sketch of it, but he was probably there in conditions that made sketching impossible. Most persons know the place as a maddening babel. All day long trains, vans, and lesser vehicles discharge their close-packed occupants, and a stream of pedestrians pass through on their way up or down the valley. But one summer evening I arrived there from over the glacier after walking from early dawn; the last sightseer had gone; I had my supper at a little table on the greensward between the larch wood and the rushing stream, in front of me the majestic Piz Palvi, set on high in the lingering light like the great white throne of the Apocalypse; it seemed a divinely peaceful spot, such as may have been that garden of the early world where God walked in the cool of the day.

III

SUOT FONTANA MERLA

From old time this has been the designation of the dozen miles of the Upper Engadine below Bevers. Three-quarters of a mile down a lonely little tavern, {33} las Agnas, marks the most historic spot in the valley. Here, on the 7th of May, 1462, representatives of all the communes assembled and settled the constitution and the administrative and judicial organization of the little political unit that federated with others into the Free State of the Three Leagues, and here from time to time they long continued to meet in council. In the adjoining meadow of las Islas all men who could bear arms mustered in May, 1499, elected Thomas Planta as their bannerman, and marched down to join the forces of the Three Leagues at Zuoz, and bear their part at Calven on that bloody Easter Monday that won the independence of the land. Near by is the intermittent spring of Fontana Merla, the Merles' Well, the immemorial boundary between the two administrative divisions of the valley, sur e suot, above and below, Fontana Merla.

We then come to Ponte, with many interesting old houses, and then to Madulein, a name that is said to have no connection with Magdalen, while the etymology that derives it from medio-lacu is probably little more than a pun on some far older name rooted in a forgotten tongue. The fact, however, that the derivation was current some centuries ago is interesting as suggesting that there may then have survived some strand of tradition stretching back to the time when a remnant of the lake that must once have covered this reach of the valley still existed. On a rocky spur of mountain above Madulein are the ruins {34} of Guardaval, erected in 1251 by Bishop Conrad, 'the castle lover.'

Here and there homely potato-plots and patches of oats and rye give sign that the severity of the high Alpine climate is mitigating. On the left opens out the pleasant Val d'Eschia, carved by water from the glaciers that imbed the four rocky peaks of the Kesch, shown in Plate VII. Before us is Piz d'Eren, a great cone of limestone capped with snow. The valley widens and, clustering round a tall spire on a broad slope of meadow, we see the close-packed houses of Zuoz.

When, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, the villages of the Upper Engadine rose from the ashes to which the devoted patriotism of their inhabitants had consigned them—a devotion that saved the whole Leagueland—Zuoz was by common consent the chief among them, and all the leading families built residences there.

On entering the village we see the interesting Chesa Gregori-Gilli, dated 1551. On its front are the Rhaetian wildman and St. George, with the inscription 'Evviva la Grischa,' followed by a precept that at some periods of its history la Grischa has sadly needed 'Res parva concordia crescit, maximæ discordia dilabuntur.' In the central square is a fine house of the Plantas. On the neighbouring Tuor Planta an inscription records that it was destroyed by fire in 1499 through the patriotic self-sacrifice {35} mentioned above, and here again is an exhortation to dwell together in unity.

These inscriptions point the moral of the municipal history of Zuoz. Nowhere raged more fiercely the fire of faction that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bid fair to bring to naught the independence that the heroism of a nobler generation had so hardly won. Yet a saving seed was left. The picturesque Chesa Juvalta, which preserves many portraits of past Juvaltas in the next village of S-chanf,* recalls the pleasing legend that when the insanity of civil strife was at its highest, and the streets of Zuoz were red with the blood of its citizens, the women of the town, headed by Anna Juvalta, threw themselves with tears and prayers between the maddened combatants, and declared that they should only strike one another by passing over the bodies of their wives and daughters.

* I will not attempt to phoneticize the peculiar ch of Romanic orthography. English spelling has been styled an invention of the Father of Lies, but it is nothing to the masterpiece of misrepresentation that the alphabet has achieved in Romanic. In Engadine place-names I have preferably used the native Ladin form, except in the many cases where the German form seemed naturalized in English.

Relentless criticism has, I believe, relegated Anna to the limbo of unaccredited immortals that every day becomes more crowded, but I trust it will be long ere the souls of young Engadiners cease to be nourished on the exploded legends of their country. It matters little that they be not history. There are {36} legends that are truer than history in that they embody the spirit without which the external facts of history would not have been. William Tell may not have shot his arrow at Altorf, nor Anna Juvalta stood between the armed ranks at Zuoz, but had there not been many men and women of the temper of Tell and Anna the Forest Cantons would still be ruled by aliens, and Rhaetian independence would long ago have foundered in anarchic bloodshed.

Zuoz and S-chanf have become of late years something of an educational centre, and also a resort for winter sports. Zuoz has provided itself with a Kursaal, which it terms Castell, a finely situated building in good Engadine style designed by Nichol Hartmann. Recent building in the district gives gratifying evidence of the influence of the Heimatschutz, a league for the preservation of old architecture, and the assimilation of its styles and spirit in new construction.

Two miles below S-chanf is the hamlet of Capella, so called from the chapel of St. Güerg of which but a fragment remains. Near it formerly stood an enormous pine tree sacred to St. George, the patron of the Upper Engadine, which was an object of profound veneration throughout the valley. When, on S-chanf declaring for the Reformation, the aged tree was felled, its fall was probably a greater wrench with the past than any thesis or formula of faith. What echoes of old rites, what ghosts of forgotten creeds, may have haunted the shade of its sombre foliage! {37} That its sacred character was originally connected with St. George is most unlikely; it was more probably a relic of a faith and worship to which St. George was as of yesterday, and which primitive Christianity recognized as too deeply rooted in the popular imagination to be lightly discarded. There was a large humanity in those early missionaries that went for much in their success. They would not rudely cut away props on which men's souls had leaned, but left them to stand while they might, consecrated to a new significance. Some better thing might be reserved for the succeeding time, but without them it was not to be made perfect.

Soon after this the road crosses the Sulsanna, coming from its cascaded valley, and the changing character of the scenery ahead reminds us that we are nearing the end of the upper valley of the Inn. A mile beyond Capella, in a green basin below the road, is Sinuos-chel, the last hamlet, a few picturesque houses, one of them quaintly frescoed, with a demure little church. The valley narrows to a ravine; the Inn whitens to a torrent as it rages down the gorge that it has cut for itself through the bar of schist that once dammed it into a lake; two bridges, one in stone upon the present road, the other the historic wooden Punt Ota on the grass-grown road above, span the foaming yellow brook that is the immemorial boundary of the Upper Engadine.

IV

THE LOWER ENGADINE

The division of the Engadine into Upper and Lower is not a piece of arbitrary map-making. We seem to pass into a new country when, leaving the broad upper valley, lying wide-stretched to the sky, where only human supervision prevents the Inn spreading out into lakes and marshes, we go down into the deep trough bordered by picturesque peaks and ridges, where the river that has so long been the companion of the road flows far below it between steep walls of rock. And not only does the scenery change, but the climate, the flora, the very dialect of the people and their character in history is different.

Descending from the Punt Ota to the roofed wooden bridge that takes us to the right bank of the Inn, we are hemmed in by heights in a land of clamant streams. The sombre severity of Upper Engadine scenery is broken into a romantic variety of detail: austere masses of mountain give place to splintered peaks and ragged ridges, their sides are more furrowed, a luxuriant forest vegetation clothes their steeper slopes, and the meadows on the gentler slopes are more interspersed with tilth.

The first village is Zernez, spread on a flat green widening of the valley, the slender spire and frescoed walls of its church standing on a little eminence {39} beside it. The church and a few picturesque old houses are all that escaped a fire that destroyed the rest of the village in 1872.

A beautiful railway route runs hence by the Fuorn Pass, the Val Mustair, and the Stelvio road under the dazzling snows of the Ortler, to Trafoi in Austria. Soon after passing the frontier is the defile of Calven, where on Easter Monday, 1499, eight thousand hastily mustered men of the lately formed Leagues attacked and routed a strongly entrenched and well equipped Imperial army of nearly double their number, a brilliant feat of arms that laid the foundation of Rhaetian independence.* For about four miles of its course the railway passes through the National Park; a clause in the agreement between the Confederation and the commune of Zernez permits quarrying and wood-cutting for its construction and upkeep in the sequestrated region.

* I have described this remarkable little war at greater length in 'The Upper Engadine,' pp. 9-20.

For a couple of miles road and river thread a pine-clad gorge in which the normally longitudinal valley of the Inn becomes transverse; before us towers the huge Piz Linard, posted in front of and dominating the vast Silvretta maze of fell and glacier. Then another widening of the valley gives standing ground for the picturesque village of Susch; an ancient tower rises by the quaint minaret of its church; on a wooded hill beside it is one of the many 'chiefless {40} castles breathing stern farewell' that add a note of historical romance to the scenery of the Engadine.

In the Lower Engadine the valley of the Inn seldom widens into a flat floor as at Zernez. On the right it for the most part rises precipitously, giving little footing for building and cultivation. Thus habitation has always been mainly on the sunny slopes and terraces that look south on the left. At Lavin, two miles below Susch, walkers can take the old road that runs on this side, high above the new, by the shells and towers of old castles, and commanding lovely views. Lavin, Guarda, and Ardez are known as the Etruscan villages; I believe they have not an even colourable claim to the appellation, which, however, is of old date, and has given rise to much ingenious diversion in providing etymologies for place-names in the neighbourhood. The villages, however, have an idyllic charm from their quaint old houses and lovely situation that has no need to borrow interest from factitious history or philology. Guarda, on an open terrace at the entrance to Val Tuoi, is perhaps the most frequented as a summer resort. Its neighbourhood affords rambles to suit all tastes, from mountaineering to dawdling, with special attractions in Val Tuoi for the botanic dawdler.

At Ftan, delightfully placed on an undulating terrace some 1,500 feet above the Inn, we enter a region impregnated with mineral waters and gases of {41} singular potency, where thousands of sufferers from various ills that flesh is heir to are yearly gathered. It is claimed that no other district in Europe is so rich in therapeutic waters.

The springs, which issue with a temperature a little over 60° F., are all strongly acidulated, and though varying a good deal in their constituents and in the proportions in which they are mixed, fall broadly into two classes: Glauber's salts (sulphate, carbonate, and chloride of sodium) and chalybeate or iron. They are good for both drinking and bathing; the large proportion of carbonic acid gas with which they are charged is said to render them peculiarly efficacious in baths. An interesting evidence of the plutonic character of the neighbourhood are the mofette, vents in the earth from which carbonic acid gas issues in considerable quantity. One in a field near Scuol, in which unwary birds, lizards, and insects are frequently done to death, has been estimated to discharge eleven million litres a day.

The centres of the little invalid world are the Kurhaus and Trinkhalle, emparadised in beautiful gardens on the left and right banks of the Inn respectively, and connected by a roofed bridge. Both sides of the valley bristle with hotels for the accommodation of patients: Scuol on an open terrace on the left with magnificent views, and Vulpera ensconced among woods and meadows on the right.

The region takes its name Tarasp, terra aspera, from the castle, which stands on a hill of splintered rock some distance from the principal springs. On the hillside is the hamlet of Sparsels, with a curious fountain-shrine; and below, by a little lake, Fontana, with the parish church and a Capuchin hospice, for, owing to the long tenure of the seigniory by Austria, this commune, alone in the Engadine, has remained Catholic. In the eleventh century, after long disputes, the castle and seigniory became vested in the bishopric of Chur. In 1239 they passed to the counts of Tirol, and remained Austrian till, by the Treaty of Luneville in 1801, they were made over to Graubünden as a set-off to various fiefs of the bishopric of Chur scattered in the Vorarlberg and Tirol. There are enchanting views of this loveliest nook of the Lower Engadine from the windows of the castle, whose latest purchaser is the ex-Grand-Duke of Hesse.

Descending the valley, we pass the ruin of the Romanesque church of St. Peter on a rocky hill. Then the villages of Sent and Crusch, 'The Cross,' a little below which a road crosses the Inn to Sur En on the right bank at the opening of the sequestered Val d'Uina.

About a mile and a half below Crusch is the deep ravine through which the Sinestra flows to the Inn. On a rocky hill above is the ruined castle of Tschanuf, {43} the seat till the beginning of last century of an episcopal castellan who controlled the jurisdiction of the Lower Engadine. Less than an hour up the wild and lovely Val Sinestra are some famous springs impregnated with iron, arsenic, and other minerals, and highly charged with carbonic acid gas. Centuries before the present high-road and Kurhaus facilitated access to and use of them, their virtues were known in the Engadine and Tirol, and a little band of sufferers flocked yearly to this secluded glen, living in tents while they drank the waters and bathed with pristine simplicity under a spreading elder tree in troughs in which the water was warmed by heated stones.

Descending the Inn Valley we come to Ramuosch in a fertile nook of ancient cultivation. Its interesting church, which formerly claimed to enshrine the wonder-working remains of St. Florin, was long a place of pilgrimage both for Engadiners and Tirolese. Though the saint was priest of Ramuosch, his birthplace was Matsch in Tirol, and every year on his festival the chest that was believed to hold his bones was carried in solemn procession from Ramuosch to Matsch, some eight hours distant, and back. In 1530 it occurred to the authorities of Ramuosch to open the chest, which was found to contain nothing but rags. Ramuosch was then halting at the crossways, and {44} this cruel disillusion decided it for the Reformation.*

* 'At the commencement of the great schism the Government of the Three Leagues, after listening to incontrovertible arguments on both sides in a theological conference at Ilanz in January, 1526, decided to be perfectly neutral, leaving individual consciences free, and allowing each commune to decide for itself to which persuasion it would officially belong. Thus the people settled for themselves the question that concerned them so deeply, which in the rest of Europe was mainly decided over their heads by rulers often actuated by considerations far from religious' ('Upper Engadine,' p. 168).

On the right below Ramuosch a fine waterfall marks the entrance to the pent, pine-clad Val d'Assa. In a cliff some two hours up is a stalactite cavern and a spring known as Fontana chi staina, 'the spring that stands still.' Its final channel is probably a natural siphon that empties a hidden reservoir three times a day, and ceases to flow while it is refilling.

In a fertile widening of the Inn Valley is the village of Strada and, perched high above, that of Tschlin. Dark woods clothe the right bank of the Inn, now swollen by the melting of many glaciers to a considerable stream. Then we come to Punt Martina, in German Martinsbruck, standing amid grand scenery at the end of the Engadine. By the iron bridge beyond it we pass into Tirol. In front the road winds up wooded slopes, and then climbs and cuts its way among the slate rocks of the romantic Finstermünz {45} Pass. On the left a new road drops down along the Swiss side of the Novella gorge to Alt Finstermünz, far below, where antiquated fortifications cling to the sheer cliffs, under which the straitened stream flows swift and deep. Old wooden bridges from either jealous bank meet in the vaulted gangway of a square tower set on a submerged rock in midstream.

V

THE NATIONAL PARK

This great reserve has added a unique attraction to the Engadine. The idea was for a long time the aspiration of an elect few, leavening public opinion and pestering the Government. At last they had their reward. For years the authorities that in an admirable reciprocity govern and are governed by the population of Switzerland cautiously committed themselves to the enterprise. In 1906 they appointed a Naturschutzkommission to report on a desirable region to be sequestrated. In 1909 a Naturschutzbund was formed to supplement official efforts. The commission negotiated rights in first one fragment then another of the selected and authorized area: from the commune of Zernez in 1909 the Val Cluoza, in 1910 the Val Tantermozza and the northern and western slopes of Piz Esan; from the commune of S-chanf in 1911 the southern slopes of Piz Esan and {46} Piz Quatervals, the Val Muschauns, and part of the right side of Val Trupchum; from the commune of Scuol and the pastoral league of Tavrü most of the east side of the S-charl district; from Zernez in 1913 the Praspol, Schera, and Stavelchod districts. All concessions were with option of renewal. Right of emption was also secured over the region linking the two unequal areas into which the appropriations fall. This is termed the Verbindungsgebiet, roughly speaking the Val Nuglia, the upper Val Plavna, and the heights bordering both. In 1914 a resolution of the Federal Council gave legislative seal to the transactions, banning to human enterprise some fifty square miles. The addition of the linking domain will bring the area up to about eighty square miles. Of course, the figures give the horizontal projection on the map; the surface measurement would be considerably more, as anyone who has had to do with real property that is 'mostly on end' will realize.

As to the locality of this forbidden land, public opinion has unanimously endorsed the choice of the commission. In no part of Switzerland is there an equal area that could be given over to untrammelled natural agencies with so little social or economical derangement. It is wholly without permanent human habitation, there is no tillage and but little pasturage to be disestablished, while the hardly less important Fremdenindustrie has barely touched the hem of the great reserve, which boasts none of the {48} transcendent charm that has made the rest of Switzerland the playground of Europe; with the exception of a short reach below the Fuorn Pass, no rail or post-road threads its savage solitudes, it cradles no enchanting lake, it enshrines no soaring peaks or shining glaciers, its valleys, which enjoy such uninviting names as Val del Diavel, Sassa, Cluoza, Nuglia, Sainza bon (I will not insult the reader's ingenuity by translating them), though full of wild charm, are little haunted by artist and photographer; wood-cutting, hunting, and scanty and sporadic pasturage are the only industries that will be interfered with. This unkempt, unused wilderness at the eastern edge of the Confederation has the further recommendation that, partly from this isolation and neglect, partly from lying on the borderland of distinct botanic zones, it exhibits a varied and comprehensive flora, and has given asylum to sundry odds and ends of vanishing fauna.

Though, following precedent elsewhere, the term 'reserve,' which was first employed for the sequestrated area, has officially given place to that of National Park, the former better expresses the aim of the scheme. The proposed object of such sequestration in other countries has been public enjoyment, but this is only incidentally an object of the Swiss enterprise, which is rather a great scientific experiment in the interplay of unimpeded natural agencies. Nature is to be given a free hand, and man, his hands {49} behind his back, will look on and see what she makes of it.

Of course, the field of unsophisticated nature is not, when closely looked at, the peaceful paradise dreamed by the artless philosophy of a century ago. The beneficent mother pictured by sentimental idealists has been revealed to these latter days as a soulless monster, red in tooth and claw with ravin, working blindly under the impulsion of inexorable tendencies that know not truce nor ruth. To make a sanctuary where she shall have her way without let or hindrance amounts to keeping the ring for a free fight of flora and fauna, only the meddlesome hand of her supreme masterpiece—whom it is rather amusing we should exclude from our conception of nature—being ruled out.

As regards flora, I believe the procedure has been mainly thus to let things alone, but the administration are introducing much that is new, or that has disappeared, in the way of fauna. To a large extent, indeed, they have introduced themselves with that telepathic percipience of a sanctuary so remarkable in hunted creatures. Already in October, 1913, a large bear appeared in the Park. Their former presence is attested by sundry place-names—Val del Orso, Bagn del Uors—and in the Val Cluoza and elsewhere old timber bear-traps still stand. Bears, however, are too expensive guests to be welcomed. Not sixty years ago their ravages among sheep and cattle were {50} still considerable, and the administration has engaged with the neighbouring communes not to harbour them.

A former denizen of the Alps whose successful re-establishment has been hailed with universal acclamation is the lordly ibex, or, as Engadiners call it, the Capricorn (bouquetin, steinbock). Throughout Switzerland there is a sentiment of romance connected with this stately goat, who for over three centuries has had only an heraldic existence in his ancient fastnesses; his imperially horned head is the emblem of the canton, and swings as sign of innumerable inns; he capers amid thistles on the seal of the commune of Zernez and prances rampant on either side of armorial devices frescoed on the walls of old houses. In 1920 seven young Capricorn were let loose in the Cluoza-Spol section, and their number has increased in spite of foreign marauders, but here we are on delicate ground, and it is well to emulate the diplomatic reticence of the Federal authorities. The stock is to be reinforced this year by a pair from the Zoological Gardens at Interlaken.

The Park started with a good stock of chamois of several types and some deer, and more have flocked to it as the good news of a sanctuary was passed round in ways that man knows not; in fact deer may be said to have taken possession of the S-charl district. Marmots abound, and will still more abound. Moreover, {51} affiliated to the Park, the only patch of it on the left of the Inn is a sanctuary established for the droll little rodents on the Godgod slopes between S-chanf and Capella well back in last century. During the construction of the railway the Italian workmen wrought sad havoc among them with snares, which they had become too confiding to avoid; but they have since regained their paradise, and the discreet wanderer may watch their engaging antics at work and play. Their surplus progeny is no doubt making its own Verbindungsgebiet with the Park.

It must not be supposed, from what has been said, that the great reserve is a forbidding region of interest only to the naturalist. It is replete with charm and full of a variety that blends in wide harmonies, or surprises with sudden contrasts; a region of still forest sanctuaries, of wild ravines and savage gorges, of eager streams flashing white in cascades and torrents or rushing green and smooth in deep-worn beds; of many-hued rocks piled in chaotic ruin or set in mazy labyrinths or strewn splintered on the slopes; lonely tarns shine on emerald uplands or sleep in stony wildernesses; the lofty lawns are starred with flowers and sentinelled with immemorial trees; in sequestered dells rivulets wind and whisper amid blossoming herbage, or creep and croon in leafy coverts; great grey stones dream under the hoary trees of Druidic glades; a land of pristine seclusion, of gracious solitudes, of high, silent places where {52} earth and heaven seem to meet. And over all plays the wizardry of the clear mountain air and the fleeting mountain weather, weaving a glamour of shifting splendour and gloom over peak and vale, stream and forest, lighting the landscape into a prodigal enchantment of detail or wrapping it in mystery and portent.

In common with all who are interested in the National Park, I am greatly indebted to Dr. Stefan Brunies, Secretary and Treasurer of the Heimatschutz, who has made the subject his own in various delightful books replete with nature- and folk-lore. Therein are given a number of itineraries for exploring the Park and studying its plants, birds, and beasts, in all which the wanderer will find Dr. Brunies an invaluable and entertaining companion.

S-chanf is, he thinks, the best starting-point for traversing the Park. Crossing the Inn by the Livigno road, a path on the left crosses the Varusch stream and follows up its right bank to Alp Purcher. Here, on the left, a path enters the Park, and runs up the Alp Müschauns under the chasmed heights of Piz Esan; on the steep grassy slopes below them the practised eye will seldom fail to locate chamois browsing. Passing on the right a long narrow tarn fed by a tongue of glacier we reach a low saddle that leads into the appropriately named Val Sassa, in the steep screes of which the path is lost till it reappears on the broad valley floor, where, crossing a wooden {53} bridge, we find, ensconced in dense forest, the Cluoza blockhouse.

Here are eight beds and supplementary sleeping accommodation on hay; the warder supplies meals at a fixed tariff. Chamois, and now and then deer, may be marked on the slopes above, where salt-licks have been placed for their delectation. Any wayfarer may pass two nights at the blockhouse in the heart of the great reserve; for a longer stay authority must be obtained from the Naturschutzkommission at Bale.

We commence next day's walk by mounting steeply on the east to the Murter Alp, a plateau of flowery pasture buttressed round with precipices. Here we have a survey of the upper Val Cluoza and its three savage head-valleys: Diavel, Sassa, and Valetta. Descending eastward to the old sheep-pastures of Laschaida, we come to the first outposts of forests, hoary, battered larch, which, as the path drops steeply down, gradually give place to fir. At the bottom we emerge on the pastures of Praspol by the turbid Spol, one of the largest tributaries of the Inn, rich in trout, and a last refuge of the hard-bested otter, who can now live and multiply there in peace, doubtless giving a wide berth to the right bank for the two miles along which the Spol forms the Park boundary. It will be interesting to note if fish do the same; the right of fishing from this bank is reserved to the commune of Zernez. We may cross {54} the stream by the Punt Praspol, leaving the Park for a while, or we may take on the right a lonely and bewitching forest path that runs above the left bank of the Spol, crosses it by the Punt Purif, and descends to the point where, half an hour below Fuorn, the post-road re-enters the Park.

Those not in a hurry will do well to spread this walk, with digressions that will readily suggest themselves, over the second day, passing the night at Fuorn. If pressed for time, however, an early start from the blockhouse will enable good walkers to get on to S-charl or Tarasp. A quarter of an hour above Fuorn on the road to the Pass, by the second bridge, which crosses a gully, a footpath on the left through the forest brings us into the Val del Botsch, abounding in chamois, and ascends steeply to the Fuorcletta, a low saddle between towering dolomite peaks. Looking back as we ascend is an ever-widening prospect of serried summits and savage gorges. Very striking, too, as we thread the stony trough, is the contrast between the stark desolation around and the soft rich hues of the Lower Engadine, with a crowded host of peaks rising behind and about them. The path then leaves the Park, and is for a while in the Verbindungsgebiet, descending to Alp Plavna, turning to the left, ascending, and re-entering the Park at the pleasant col of Sur il Foss; then descending the Val Minger, it strikes the Clemgia a couple of miles below the lone, forest-begirt hamlet of S-charl. The {55} once busy iron-smelting village has dwindled to a dozen houses with their little church on a holm of the rushing Clemgia. The name of the secular Jurada forest on the left records an ancient reserve banned to axe and saw as a protection from avalanches. To the south the wild and beautiful valley is closed by the snow-flecked dolomite peaks of the Pisoc. A half-day's walk down the right bank of the stream, along the eastern edge of the Park, takes us by the Clemgia Gorge to Tarasp.

'The course of nature' as exhibited in such experiments as the Swiss National Park irresistibly calls to mind the headlong history of the world during the ten years that have passed since its inauguration. The teaching of nature had been studiously assimilated by a great nation to which the world is deeply indebted in every field of thought, science, and research; it was made the basis of their national policy, and put in practice with every resource of skill and deliberation. The results have been catastrophic, and would seem to show that when man became a social being—and we may perhaps extend the statement to all society, however inchoate, from the pack and the herd to the hive and the ant-heap—he entered a new plane of evolution, and that those who would apply to it the crude methods of selection that operated in more primitive and individual stages are fighting against the stars in their courses.

Some such thoughts as these shaped themselves in my mind into the following lines in the second year of the war.

They said: Behold, battle is earth's high law,
Turn where we will is ruthlessness and strife,
Beast against beast, and plant with plant wage war,
Through havoc only gain we ampler life.

The strong leaf ousts the weak leaf from the sun,
Root strangles root in wrestle for the soil,
Close-shelved in rock lie types whose race is run,
Cast out in the eternal stress and moil.

Thus painfully, by force and guile and hate,
From flaccid forms that lurked in primal ooze,
Life, in advance from low to high estate,
Ever the weak rejects, the strong doth choose.

Shall man alone shirk universal rule,
And bind the peoples with his petty codes
That shield rank growth of weakling and of fool
And crush the hero under caitiffs' loads?

Truth is a figment, charity a myth,
Life gives its crowns to strength and craft and greed,
Why should we weave, to stay our hands therewith,
A moral net at variance with our need?

We will forswear the outworn, craven creed
That blessed the peacemakers and pure in heart,
And take the lesson taught by beast and weed
To guide our feet in court and camp and mart.

And thus they placed their land all else above,
Suckled their sons at iron paps of war,
Made mock of honour and a God of love,
Trampled on covenant and scoffed at law.

And God gave unto them their hearts' desire,
And poured into their cup the wine they sought
That turns the soul to stone, the brain to fire,
And brings the centuries' slow work to naught.

Gave strong delusion to believe a lie,
Gave them seared heart, sealed mind, and pervert sense,
The straitened outlook of the earth-bound eye
That sees no kingdom that is not from hence.

On from delusion to delusion hurled,
They worked out madly to its utmost cost
The doom on those whom, though they gain the world,
It profits nothing, for their soul is lost.

The gain is futile and the world is small
That can be bought by barter of the soul,
A new time dawns and gleaming portents call
For fresh means, changed ideals, altered goal.

VI

WINTER

The attraction of the Alpine winter, which till lately was a pious cult of the elect, has become a common-place of advertisements and agencies. Every year a larger crowd gathers in what used to be considered frost-bound solitudes, and some new resort is opened for the Christmas holiday-maker. Among such resorts the Engadine, with its dry air, clear sky, and brilliant sunshine, takes a foremost place. At no {58} time is it more lovely and enjoyable, more unlike the surroundings we have left at home, more recuperative to jaded denizens of the town. It would be difficult to find a gayer and busier scene than its frozen lakes and snow-clad slopes present in winter. Even the work that goes on partakes of the general exhilaration. Sleighs and toboggans replace carts and barrows, lightening the labour of man and beast, and adding a novel animation to transport and locomotion. Bound and buried though Nature be, the work of those who deal with her is by no means at a stand-still; the universal snow, instead of staying it, inaugurates a general transport system, converting rough mountain roads into smooth and facile descents; little more than guidance and gravitation is needed to bring the hay mown in summer and the timber felled in autumn from the distant uplands to the villages and homesteads where they should be. Nothing is more enjoyable than to take a passage down on a sleigh laden with hay or faggots, to rush through the keen air over glistening slopes, or along winding forest ways, or in the trough of steep gullies that centuries of similar traffic have cut through copse and wood; most admirable is the adroitness with which a practised mountaineer pilots his wayward and unwieldy craft, which, if once it 'take charge,' runs a mad career as fatal to its crew as to wayfarers in its path.

Sports are organized in the most business-like {59} manner, and are as cosmopolitan as the human crowd; northern and mountain lands in all quarters of the globe have contributed to them, and when the short sunny day is over, keen brilliant nights, carnival balls on the illuminated lakes, theatricals, dancing, and unlimited miscellaneous fooling prolong the strenuous enjoyment.

And then the setting of it all. The exceeding beauty and strangeness of the snow-clad earth, spotless and radiant, like a bride adorned for her husband, and the enchanting details that surround us, wander where we will. On every side cold and heat, wind and moisture, play fantastic tricks before high heaven, stereotyping cascades on the precipices, casing in crystal the swirls and falls of streamlets, draping cliffs and caves with iridescent fringe and lacework of ice. Snow decorates the sombre towers of pine and fir as with jewelled fleece, and bows to an added grace the pliant larch-limbs on which remnants of autumn foliage still linger in brushes of tawny gold; hoar-frost weaves fairy-like embroidery over twigs and leaves; shadows chequer the stainless ground with exquisite pencilling; all the familiar objects of wayside, croft and fell suffer a winter change into something rich and strange.

He who would see all this at its best and at his ease must take to skis, for the gift of which the Alps owe an incalculable debt to Norway. The introduction is comparatively recent, but the alacrity with {60} which it has been taken up shows how thoroughly it met a want. Detachments of the Swiss army are exercised on skis every winter, and the citizen soldiers have taken the accomplishment back to their mountain homes, where it has been eagerly adopted. Children may be seen on home-made skis trooping to the often distant school, or having the time of their lives on slopes and plateaux.

Those who do not cultivate it as a spectacular sport may welcome ski-ing as a means of locomotion, enabling them to go to places otherwise inaccessible, to pass swiftly and lightly over snow in which unskied bipeds would flounder up to the knees, if not over the head. What matters it to the humble novice that his course seem but shambling and shuffling to the winner of cups and breaker of records. What is that to him as he brushes over the sparkling slopes and threads the cloistral hills? He will find himself on shining plateaux bathed in hazy light and walled in the shimmering distance with ethereal ramparts. He will pass into solemn depths of forest where the winding way is edged and arched with pines that stretch on either hand into illimitable aisles. Sometimes his path will lead him to a radiant sanctuary where Nature seems taking her winter rest in undisturbed repose; no breath of wind breaks the stillness, nor note of bird, nor human footfall; the earth as he ascends is transfigured with new and strange magnificence, the heaven deepens to a diviner blue and the shadows to {61} more mystic purple, the peaks close round and rise cathedral-like on every side: a cathedral vast and soaring, vaulted with unfathomable sky, piled and pinnacled, sculptured and wrought, beyond any architect's imagining, and clothed with light as with a garment.

INDEX

Agnas, Las, 33
Aguagliouls, 30
Albriz, Piz, 12
Albula, Pass, 10
Alv, Lej, 31
Piz, 30
Anglican Church, 16, 25
Architecture, 21
Ardez, 40
Assa, Val d', 44

Badrutt Park, 14
Bears, 49
Bernina Falls, 30
    Hospice, 31
    Houses, 31
    Pass, 31
    Val, 12, 20, 27-32
Bevers, 11
    Val, 11
Bishopric of Chur, 42, 43
Bitabergo, Lago di, 25
Bregaglia, Val, 26
Brunies, Stefan, 52

Calven, 33
Campell, 15
Camfer, 17
Capella, 36
Capricorn, 50
Cavloccio, Lago di, 25
Celerina, 12
Chalchaign, 12
Chamois, 50
Charnadura Gorge, 12
Chastè, 23
Chesa Gregori-Gilli, 34
    Juvalta, 35
    Planta, 34
Chiesa, 22
Chur, 10
Cluoza blockhouse, 53
    Val, 45, 49, 50
Cresta, 12
Crusch, 42

Electricity, 18
Eren, Piz, 11, 50
Eschia, Val, 34
Etruscan villages, 40
Evolution, 55

Fedoz, 22, 24
Fex, Val, 22, 24
Finstermünz Pass, 45
Flaz, 12
Fontana Merla, 33
Ftan, 40
Fuorcla, Surlej, 20

Lagalb, Piz, 30
Lakes, 17, 27, 33
Language, 9, 10, 35
Lauguard, Piz, 29
Laret, 28
Lavin, 40
Linard, Piz, 39
Lunghino Lake, 25
Piz, 26

Madulein, 33
Maira, 26
Malenco, Val, 22
Maloja, 24
Margna, Hôtel, St. Moritz, 13
    Sils Baselgia, 21
Marmorè, 23
Marmots, 50
Marozzo, Val, 26
Martina, Punt, 44
Martinsbruck, 44
Moritz, St., 4
    Bad, 15
    Dorf, 13
Morteratsch Glacier, 29, 30, 32
Muotlas Muraigl, 29
Muraigl, Punt, 29
Museum Engiadinais, 15

Padella, Piz, 12
Palü, Piz, 12
Pers, Glacier, 31
Planta, 33, 34
Ponte, 33
Pontresina, 12, 28, 32
Poschiavo, Lago di, 31
Punt Ota, 37

Samaden, 11, 12
S-chanf, 35
Schaffberg, 29
S-charl, 54
Schlucht Promenade, 28
Segantini, 14, 29
Sent, 42
Sgrischus, Lej, 23
Sils Baselgia, 21
Maria, 12
Silvaplana, 9, 18
Sinestra, Val, 42
Sinuos-chel, 37
Skis, 59
Sondrio, 22
Spiert, 22
Spinas, 40, 42
Springs, 40, 42
Strada, 44
Sur-en, 42
Surlej, Fuorcla, 20
Susch, 39

Val d' Assa, 44
    Bermina, 12, 20, 27
    Bevers, 15
    Bregaglia, 26
Val Cluoza, 45, 49, 50, 53
    Eschia, 32
    Fex, 22, 24
    Malenco, 22
    Marozzo, 26
    Sinestra, 42
    Tuoi, 40
Valtelline, 22
Vulpera, 41

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Engadine

Beautiful Europe

The Engadine

I

THE LAKE DISTRICT

II

VAL BERNINA

III

SUOT FONTANA MERLA

IV

THE LOWER ENGADINE

V

THE NATIONAL PARK

VI

WINTER

INDEX

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Engadine

Beautiful Europe The Engadine

I THE LAKE DISTRICT

II VAL BERNINA

III SUOT FONTANA MERLA

IV THE LOWER ENGADINE

V THE NATIONAL PARK

VI WINTER

INDEX

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

Beautiful Europe

The Engadine

I

THE LAKE DISTRICT

II

VAL BERNINA

III

SUOT FONTANA MERLA

IV

THE LOWER ENGADINE

V

THE NATIONAL PARK

VI

WINTER