A Tramp Abroad
telling idle stories; he was right, nevertheless, and this was what he
saw.
Michel Croz had laid aside his ax, and in order to give Mr. Hadow
greater security, was absolutely taking hold of his legs, and putting
his feet, one by one, into their proper positions. As far as I know, no
one was actually descending. I cannot speak with certainty, because the
two leading men were partially hidden from my sight by an intervening
mass of rock, but it is my belief, from the movements of their
shoulders, that Croz, having done as I said, was in the act of turning
round to go down a step or two himself; at this moment Mr. Hadow
slipped, fell against him, and knocked him over. I heard one startled
exclamation from Croz, then saw him and Mr. Hadow flying downward;
in another moment Hudson was dragged from his steps, and Lord Douglas
immediately after him. All this was the work of a moment. Immediately we
heard Croz's exclamation, old Peter and I planted ourselves as firmly as
the rocks would permit; the rope was taut between us, and the jerk came
on us both as on one man. We held; but the rope broke midway between
Taugwalder and Lord Francis Douglas. For a few seconds we saw our
unfortunate companions sliding downward on their backs, and spreading
out their hands, endeavoring to save themselves. They passed from our
sight uninjured, disappeared one by one, and fell from the precipice to
precipice onto the Matterhorn glacier below, a distance of nearly
four thousand feet in height. From the moment the rope broke it was
impossible to help them. So perished our comrades!
For more than two hours afterward I thought almost every moment that the
next would be my last; for the Taugwalders, utterly unnerved, were not
only incapable of giving assistance, but were in such a state that a
slip might have been expected from them at any moment. After a time we
were able to do that which should have been done at first, and fixed
rope to firm rocks, in addition to being tied together. These ropes were
cut from time to time, and were left behind. Even with their assurance
the men were afraid to proceed, and several times old Peter turned,
with ashy face and faltering limbs, and said, with terrible emphasis, “I
CANNOT!”
About 6 P.M., we arrived at the snow upon the ridge descending toward
Zermatt, and all peril was over. We frequently looked, but in vain, for
traces of our unfortunate companions; we bent over the ridge and cried
to them, but no sound returned. Convinced at last that they were neither
within sight nor hearing, we ceased from our useless efforts; and, too
cast down for speech, silently gathered up our things, and the little
effects of those who were lost, and then completed the descent. Such
is Mr. Whymper's graphic and thrilling narrative. Zermatt gossip
darkly hints that the elder Taugwalder cut the rope, when the accident
occurred, in order to preserve himself from being dragged into the
abyss; but Mr. Whymper says that the ends of the rope showed no evidence
of cutting, but only of breaking. He adds that if Taugwalder had had the
disposition to cut the rope, he would not have had time to do it, the
accident was so sudden and unexpected.
Lord Douglas' body has never been found. It probably lodged upon some
inaccessible shelf in the face of the mighty precipice. Lord Douglas was
a youth of nineteen. The three other victims fell nearly four thousand
feet, and their bodies lay together upon the glacier when found by
Mr. Whymper and the other searchers the next morning. Their graves are
beside the little church in Zermatt.
CHAPTER XLII
[Chillon has a Nice, Roomy Dungeon]
Switzerland is simply a large, humpy, solid rock, with a thin skin of
grass stretched over it. Consequently, they do not dig graves, they
blast them out with powder and fuse. They cannot afford to have large
graveyards, the grass skin is too circumscribed and too valuable. It is
all required for the support of the living.
The graveyard in Zermatt occupies only about one-eighth of an acre.
The graves are sunk in the living rock, and are very permanent; but
occupation of them is only temporary; the occupant can only stay till
his grave is needed by a later subject, he is removed, then, for they do
not bury one body on top of another. As I understand it, a family owns
a grave, just as it owns a house. A man dies and leaves his house to his
son--and at the same time, this dead father succeeds to his own father's
grave. He moves out of the house and into the grave, and his predecessor
moves out of the grave and into the cellar of the chapel. I saw a black
box lying in the churchyard, with skull and cross-bones painted on it,
and was told that this was used in transferring remains to the cellar.
In that cellar the bones and skulls of several hundred of former
citizens were compactly corded up. They made a pile eighteen feet long,
seven feet high, and eight feet wide. I was told that in some of the
receptacles of this kind in the Swiss villages, the skulls were all
marked, and if a man wished to find the skulls of his ancestors for
several generations back, he could do it by these marks, preserved in
the family records.
An English gentleman who had lived some years in this region, said it
was the cradle of compulsory education. But he said that the English
idea that compulsory education would reduce bastardy and intemperance
was an error--it has not that effect. He said there was more seduction
in the Protestant than in the Catholic cantons, because the confessional
protected the girls. I wonder why it doesn't protect married women in
France and Spain?
This gentleman said that among the poorer peasants in the Valais, it was
common for the brothers in a family to cast lots to determine which
of them should have the coveted privilege of marrying, and his
brethren--doomed bachelors--heroically banded themselves together to
help support the new family.
We left Zermatt in a wagon--and in a rain-storm, too--for St. Nicholas
about ten o'clock one morning. Again we passed between those grass-clad
prodigious cliffs, specked with wee dwellings peeping over at us from
velvety green walls ten and twelve hundred feet high. It did not seem
possible that the imaginary chamois even could climb those precipices.
Lovers on opposite cliffs probably kiss through a spy-glass, and
correspond with a rifle.
In Switzerland the farmer's plow is a wide shovel, which scrapes up and
turns over the thin earthy skin of his native rock--and there the man of
the plow is a hero. Now here, by our St. Nicholas road, was a grave, and
it had a tragic story. A plowman was skinning his farm one morning--not
the steepest part of it, but still a steep part--that is, he was not
skinning the front of his farm, but the roof of it, near the eaves--when
he absent-mindedly let go of the plow-handles to moisten his hands, in
the usual way; he lost his balance and fell out of his farm backward;
poor fellow, he never touched anything till he struck bottom, fifteen
hundred feet below. [This was on a Sunday.--M.T.] We throw a halo of
heroism around the life of the soldier and the sailor, because of the
deadly dangers they are facing all the time. But we are not used to
looking upon farming as a heroic occupation. This is because we have not
lived in Switzerland.
From St. Nicholas we struck out for Visp--or Vispach--on foot. The
rain-storms had been at work during several days, and had done a deal of
damage in Switzerland and Savoy. We came to one place where a stream had
changed its course and plunged down a mountain in a new place, sweeping
everything before it. Two poor but precious farms by the roadside were
ruined. One was washed clear away, and the bed-rock exposed; the other
was buried out of sight under a tumbled chaos of rocks, gravel, mud,
and rubbish. The resistless might of water was well exemplified. Some
saplings which had stood in the way were bent to the ground, stripped
clean of their bark, and buried under rocky debris. The road had been
swept away, too.
In another place, where the road was high up on the mountain's face, and
its outside edge protected by flimsy masonry, we frequently came across
spots where this masonry had carved off and left dangerous gaps for
mules to get over; and with still more frequency we found the masonry
slightly crumbled, and marked by mule-hoofs, thus showing that there had
been danger of an accident to somebody. When at last we came to a
badly ruptured bit of masonry, with hoof-prints evidencing a desperate
struggle to regain the lost foothold, I looked quite hopefully over the
dizzy precipice. But there was nobody down there.
They take exceedingly good care of their rivers in Switzerland and other
portions of Europe. They wall up both banks with slanting solid stone
masonry--so that from end to end of these rivers the banks look like the
wharves at St. Louis and other towns on the Mississippi River.
It was during this walk from St. Nicholas, in the shadow of the majestic
Alps, that we came across some little children amusing themselves in
what seemed, at first, a most odd and original way--but it wasn't; it
was in simply a natural and characteristic way. They were roped together
with a string, they had mimic alpenstocks and ice-axes, and were
climbing a meek and lowly manure-pile with a most blood-curdling amount
of care and caution. The “guide” at the head of the line cut imaginary
steps, in a laborious and painstaking way, and not a monkey budged till
the step above was vacated. If we had waited we should have witnessed an
imaginary accident, no doubt; and we should have heard the intrepid band
hurrah when they made the summit and looked around upon the “magnificent
view,” and seen them throw themselves down in exhausted attitudes for a
rest in that commanding situation.
In Nevada I used to see the children play at silver-mining. Of course,
the great thing was an accident in a mine, and there were two “star”
parts; that of the man who fell down the mimic shaft, and that of the
daring hero who was lowered into the depths to bring him up. I knew one
small chap who always insisted on playing BOTH of these parts--and he
carried his point. He would tumble into the shaft and die, and then come
to the surface and go back after his own remains.
It is the smartest boy that gets the hero part everywhere; he is head
guide in Switzerland, head miner in Nevada, head bull-fighter in Spain,
etc.; but I knew a preacher's son, seven years old, who once selected
a part for himself compared to which those just mentioned are tame
and unimpressive. Jimmy's father stopped him from driving imaginary
horse-cars one Sunday--stopped him from playing captain of an imaginary
steamboat next Sunday--stopped him from leading an imaginary army to
battle the following Sunday--and so on. Finally the little fellow said:
“I've tried everything, and they won't any of them do. What CAN I play?”
“I hardly know, Jimmy; but you MUST play only things that are suitable
to the Sabbath-day.”
Next Sunday the preacher stepped softly to a back-room door to see if
the children were rightly employed. He peeped in. A chair occupied the
middle of the room, and on the back of it hung Jimmy's cap; one of
his little sisters took the cap down, nibbled at it, then passed it to
another small sister and said, “Eat of this fruit, for it is good.” The
Reverend took in the situation--alas, they were playing the Expulsion
from Eden! Yet he found one little crumb of comfort. He said to himself,
“For once Jimmy has yielded the chief role--I have been wronging him, I
did not believe there was so much modesty in him; I should have expected
him to be either Adam or Eve.” This crumb of comfort lasted but a very