Winter Sports in Switzerland. E. F. Benson
overhead the gutters gurgled and the eaves of houses dripped with its melting in this brilliant morning. No shred of cloud was left in all the shining heavens, and like the flanks of a galloped horse the pine-clad hillsides steamed in the sun. … And then the miracle. … As we steamed forth again to the Eastern station, a long valley lying between two wooded hills opened out, and there, clear in the light of the young day, and white with virgin snows and blue with precipices of ice, and set in the illimitable azure, rose the Queen of Mountains, the maiden, the Jungfrau, peaked and domed and pinnacled in ineffable crystal.
The Jungfrau is and will always be my mistress among mountains, as she was when I first saw her at the age of twelve. One mistake I have made in my conduct towards her, and that was ten years later when I climbed her—and yet who could tell she would prove so tedious and heavy (not in hand but in foot)? For I approached the lady of my adoration from the Concordia hut, and instead of feasting my eyes at every step on her queenly gracious carriage and maiden slenderness, I found that the closer I got to her the more did she appear round-shouldered, not to say hump-backed. In addition, a quantity of fresh snow had fallen, and we had a long tiresome and utterly unexciting trudge, a hot and stodgy affair. I had imagined that ventures and perils would have to be encountered for this wooing and winning of her, with balancings and poisings on stairways of precipitous ice and needles of pinnacled rock: instead she had to be solidly and laboriously and dully approached; it was like wooing some great bolster or gigantic cow. For a little while after that I cared nothing for her; she was a mature and silent barmaid of vast proportions, but gradually her charm and enchantment cast their spell over me again, the dissolution of which I intend never to risk in the future, unless I approach her by a more hazardous and daring route. To those who approach her dully, she gives herself dully: the more daring wooer she may perhaps kill, but she does not bore him.
But the wonder of her, when seen through clear air with the brilliant winter sky around her head from the entrance to this valley that leads up to Lauterbrunnen! Up it we steamed in a little angry rattling snorting train, which cut itself in half to take some of its aspiring contents to Grindelwald on the left, and others among whom I numbered myself to Wengen and to Mürren. By the side of our way ran a turbulent mountain stream fed by the glaciers of the Oberland, too swift to freeze altogether, but with its backwaters and sheltered reaches covered over with lids of ice. For all its glacier-birth steam rose from it in the icy air that hovered in shaded places, and the alders and hazels that hung over it were thickly encrusted with the marvellous jewellery of the hoar-frost, spiked and parsemès and refoliaged in wondrous winter growth with tendrils and scrolls of minutest diamond-dust. Narrower grew the valley, steeper and taller the wooded hills that overhung it till at last we reached Lauterbrunnen, close to which the Staubbach, most amazing of all waterfalls, leaps a clear eight hundred feet from the edge of the high plateau-shelf, which skirts along the mountain-side on to the rocks below. Even in summer, when the melting of the snows that feed the stream make it of far greater volume than when the stricture of frost is on it, the water, poured as from a jug-spout, disintegrates in its fall, so that it reaches the valley more in wreaths of mist than in solid water, and collects again from the dripping rocks; while in winter its diminished volume is further spent in the manufacture of the huge icicles that fringe the edge of its leaping-place, and hang in great streamers, the beard and hair, you would say, of the very Frost-king himself, who sits at ease on this precipitous throne. Little water to-day runs away from where the clouds of mist and water-smoke fall on the rocks, for most of them are frozen there, and a layer of ice covers the boulders where they come to earth. For here, so engorged lies the valley, so close to the great rampart of the Oberland, that the sun which blazed on Interlaken has not yet surmounted the barrier of mountain-peaks.
Parallel with the Staubbach, and up a hillside which appears hardly less sheer than the precipice itself, runs the funicular railway which leads to the Mürren-plateau. At first sight it seems as if it must be meant for a practical joke, constructed by humorous engineers to astonish the weak minds of travellers, and, though practical from the point of view of a joke, to be perfectly impracticable as a means of conveyance. Its steepness is that of disordered images seen in a dream, and it was with a sense of utter incredulity that I first took my place in one of the small wooden compartments and was locked in by an apparently sane and serious conductor. He blew a whistle, or a bell sounded, just as is done on real lines of traffic, and immediately afterwards we began to ascend that impossible line of rails, sauntering with smooth and steady progress up that ridiculous precipice. More amazing still we soon observed a similar car sauntering steadily down it, just strolling down, even as we were strolling up. We met, we passed, and I had a vision of passengers smoking and chatting, as if nothing in the least remarkable was happening and imminent death did not await us all. …
But more remarkable things than that were happening. Upwards from the valley we climbed on this Jacob’s ladder that reached if not to Heaven, to very heavenly places. Pine woods and rocks melted away below, streaming quietly downwards; presently we were level with the top of the towering precipice from which the Staubbach was discharged, and presently that too was left below. But higher as we mounted there climbed with us, in fresh unfoldings of glaciers and peaks and glittering snow fields, the great range of the Oberland. New peaks “met Heaven in snow,” new arêtes, too steep and wind-swept to allow a vestige of snow to lie there pointed arrow-like to the tops above them. Eiger, Monch, Silberhorn, and Jungfrau towered glittering just across the Lauterbrunnen valley from which we had come, and as we sidled along the upland shelf on which Mürren stands, gradually the whole range spread itself out in tremendous rampart, radiant, rejoicing, and austere. For foreground was this narrow ledge of white fields dotted here and there with cattle-châlets, and pines scattered singly or in companies, all wearing plumes and tippets of snow that made their foliage seem a black blot in the sunlight, and soon the congregation of village roofs appeared, and Mürren stood bathed and basking in sunshine, drowned, so to speak, in the sparkling champagne of the invigorating winter morning. And the intoxication of the high places, an entrancing vintage of oxygen and ice and sun, invaded limb and sinew and brain.
It is supposed by those who have never seen the infinite variety of forms into which frost converts mist and dew and all manner of water, that there must be a monotony in those vast expanses of snow and ice. They figure to themselves the depressing spectacle of snow as it usually appears in England, smooth and soft and wet, and too close a cousin to slush not to be tainted with a family resemblance; the image called up by ice is a grey surface in which are imbedded dead leaves, twigs and stones thrown on to it by boys for purposes not clearly understandable, while all they know of hoar-frost is an evanescent decoration that occurs at the edges of ditches and on lawns when tea is being made in the morning and disappears as soon as the poached eggs, leaving the grass soaked and dripping. But as is crystal to soap so are those radiant congelations of the High Alps to the same as seen beneath grey skies and unluminous days. Here, if snow has fallen, as sometimes happens, while wind is blowing, it is driven into all manner of curving wave crests and undulations; then when the fall is over, the sky clears again, a night of frost hardens and congeals the outlines, and the trees wear fine feathers and plumes of whiteness. As the snowfall packs with its own weight, there grows on the surface of the fields a crust half snow, half ice, covered with dazzling minute crystals. During the fall of the snow there has been moisture in the air, and often on that brilliant morning that succeeds the fall, the air is full of minute frozen particles of water that sparkle like the old-fashioned glass-decoration on Christmas cards, so that one walks through a shining company of tiniest diamond fire-flies. And the frozen surface of snow reflects the wonderful azure and gold of sun and sky, and here in the blaze it lies white beneath a vivid yellow, there in the shade a dim blue permeates it. After a few days of hot sun more of the fall will have melted and slipped from the trees, and they stand black-foliaged and red-trunked waiting for the decoration of the hoar-frost. The one more night of frost covers every sprig and fir-needle with amazing spikes and fernlike sprays of minute crystal. Wondrous are their growths, more particularly if, as sometimes happens, some cold mist comes up from the valleys. Then with a craze for decoration almost ludicrous, you shall see your friends with hair and eyebrows bedecked with these jewels, each separate hair wearing its frozen garniture, and their coats and stockings ornamented in like manner. They grow white in a single minute almost; and such as have moustaches, close to the moisture of their breath will suddenly turn to walruses with long dependence