The Silent Barrier
whereabouts remain unknown to thousands of people who visit the Maloja
each summer, there was an aspect of stealth in its sudden discovery
that was almost menacing. But Helen was not a nervous subject. The
sobbing had ceased, and when the momentary effect of such a depressing
environment had been resolutely driven off, she saw that a rusty iron
gate was open. The place was very small. There were a few monuments,
so choked with weeds and dank grass that their inscriptions were
illegible. She had never seen a more desolate graveyard. Despite the
vivid light and the joyous breeze rustling the pine branches, its air
of abandonment was depressing. She fought against the sensation as
unworthy of her intelligence; but she had some reason for it in the
fact that there was no visible explanation of the mourning she had
undoubtedly heard.
Then she uttered an involuntary cry, for a man's head and shoulders
rose from behind a leafy shrub. Instantly she was ashamed of her fear.
It was the old guide who acted as coachman the previous evening, and
he had been lying face downward on the grass in that part of the
cemetery given over to the unnamed dead.
He recognized her at once. Struggling awkwardly to his feet, he said
in broken and halting German, "I pray your forgiveness, _fraeulein_. I
fear I have alarmed you."
"It is I who should ask forgiveness," she said. "I came here by
accident. I thought I could go to Cavloccio by this path."
She could have hit on no other words so well calculated to bring him
back to every day life. To direct the steps of wanderers in his
beloved Engadine was a real pleasure to him. For an instant he forgot
that they had both spoken German.
"No, no!" he cried animatedly. "For lek him go by village. Bad road
dissa way. No cross ze field. _Verboten!_"
Then Helen remembered that trespassers are sternly warned off the low
lying lands in the mountains. Grass is scarce and valuable. Until the
highest pastures yield to the arid rock, pedestrians must keep to the
beaten track.
"I was quite mistaken," she said. "I see now that the path I was
trying to reach leads here only. And I am very, very sorry I disturbed
you."
He hobbled nearer, the ruin of a fine man, with a nobly proportioned
head and shoulders, but sadly maimed by the accident which, to all
appearances, made him useless as a guide.
"Pardon an old man's folly, _fraeulein_," he said humbly. "I thought
none could hear, and I felt the loss of my little girl more than ever
to-day."
"Your daughter? Is she buried here?"
"Yes. Many a year has passed; but I miss her now more than ever. She
was all I had in the world, _fraeulein_. I am alone now, and that is a
hard thing when the back is bent with age."
Helen's eyes grew moist; but she tried bravely to control her voice.
"Was she young?" she asked softly.
"Only twenty, _fraeulein_, only twenty, and as tall and fair as
yourself. They carried her here sixteen years ago this very day. I did
not even see her. On the previous night I fell on Corvatsch."
"Oh, how sad! But why did she die at that age? And in this splendid
climate? Was her death unexpected?"
"Unexpected!" He turned and looked at the huge mountain of which the
cemetery hill formed one of the lowermost buttresses. "If the Piz
della Margna were to topple over and crush me where I stand, it would
be less unforeseen than was my sweet Etta's fate. But I frighten you,
lady,--a poor return for your kindness. That is your way,--through
the village, and by the postroad till you reach a notice board telling
you where to take the path."
There was a crude gentility in his manner that added to the pathos of
his words. Helen was sure that he wished to be left alone with his
memories. Yet she lingered.
"Please tell me your name," she said. "I may visit St. Moritz while I
remain here, and I shall try to find you."
"Christian Stampa," he said. He seemed to be on the point of adding
something, but checked himself. "Christian Stampa," he repeated, after
a pause. "Everybody knows old Stampa the guide. If I am not there, and
you go to Zermatt some day--well, just ask for Stampa. They will tell
you what has become of me."
She found it hard to reconcile this broken, careworn old man with her
cheery companion of the previous afternoon. What did he mean? She
understood his queer jargon of Italianized German quite clearly; but
there was a sinister ring in his words that blanched her face. She
could not leave him in his present mood. She was more alarmed now than
when she saw him rising ghostlike from behind the screen of grass and
weeds.
"Please walk with me to the village," she said. "All this beautiful
land is strange to me. It will divert your thoughts from a mournful
topic if you tell me something of its wonders."
He looked at her for an instant. Then his eyes fell on the church in
the neighboring hollow, and he crossed himself, murmuring a few words
in Italian. She guessed their meaning. He was thanking the Virgin for
having sent to his rescue a girl who reminded him of his lost Etta.
"Yes," he said, "I will come. If I were remaining in the Maloja,
_fraeulein_, I would beg you to let me take you to the Forno, and
perhaps to one of the peaks beyond. Old as I am, and lame, you would
be safe with me."
Helen breathed freely again. She felt that she had been within
measurable distance of a tragedy. Nor was there any call on her wits
to devise fresh means of drawing his mind away from the madness that
possessed him a few minutes earlier. As he limped unevenly by her
side, his talk was of the mountains. Did she intend to climb? Well,
slow and sure was the golden rule. Do little or nothing during four or
five days, until she had grown accustomed to the thin and keen Alpine
air. Then go to Lake Lunghino,--that would suffice for the first real
excursion. Next day, she ought to start early, and climb the mountain
overlooking that same lake,--up there, on the other side of the
hotel,--all rock and not difficult. If the weather was clear, she
would have a grand view of the Bernina range. Next she might try the
Forno glacier. It was a simple thing. She could go to and from the
_cabane_ in ten hours. Afterward, the Cima di Rosso offered an easy
climb; but that meant sleeping at the hut. All of which was excellent
advice, though the reflection came that Stampa's "slow and sure"
methods were not strongly in evidence some sixteen hours earlier.
Now, the Cima di Rosso was in full view at that instant. Helen
stopped.
"Do you really mean to tell me that if I wish to reach the top of that
mountain, I must devote two days to it?" she cried.
Stampa, though bothered with troubles beyond her ken, forgot them
sufficiently to laugh grimly. "It is farther away than you seem to
think, _fraeulein_; but the real difficulty is the ice. Unless you
cross some of the crevasses in the early morning, before the sun has
had time to undo the work accomplished by the night's frost, you run a
great risk. And that is why you must be ready to start from the
_cabane_ at dawn. Moreover, at this time of year, you get the finest
view about six o'clock."
The mention of crevasses was somewhat awesome. "Is it necessary to be
roped when one tries that climb?" she asked.
"If any guide ever tells you that you need not be roped while crossing
ice or climbing rock, turn back at once, _fraeulein_. Wait for another
day, and go with a man who knows his business. That is how the
Alps get a bad name for accidents. Look at me! I have climbed the
Matterhorn forty times, and the Jungfrau times out of count, and never
did I or anyone in my care come to grief. 'Use the rope properly,' is
my motto, and it has never failed me, not even when two out of five of
us were struck senseless by falling stones on the south side of Monte
Rosa."
Helen experienced another thrill. "I very much object to falling
stones," she said.
Stampa threw out his hands in emphatic gesture. "What can one do?" he
cried. "They are always a danger, like the snow cornice and the
_neve_. There is a chimney on the Jungfrau through which stones are
constantly shooting from a height of two thousand feet. You cannot see
them,--they travel too fast for the eye. You hear something sing past
your ears, that is all. Occasionally there is a report like a gunshot,
and then you observe a little cloud of dust rising from a new scar on
a rock. If you are hit--well, there is no dust, because the stone goes
right through. Of course one does not loiter there."
Then, seeing the scared look on her face, he went on. "Ladies should
not go to such places. It is not fit. But for men, yes. There is the
joy of battle. Do not err, _fraeulein_,--the mountains are alive. And
they fight to the death. They can be beaten; but there must be no
mistakes. They are like strong men, the hills. When you strive against
them, strain them to your breast and never relax your grip. Then they
yield slowly, with many a trick and false move that a man must learn
if he would look down over them all and say, 'I am lord here.' Ah me!
Shall I ever again cross the Col du Lion or climb the Great Tower?
But there! I am old, and thrown aside. Boys whom I engaged as porters
would refuse me now as their porter. Better to have died like my
friend, Michel Croz, than live to be a goatherd."
He seemed to pull himself up with an effort. "That way--to your
left--you cannot miss the path. _Addio, signorina_," and he lifted his
hat with the inborn grace of the peasantry of Southern Europe.
Helen was hoping that he might elect to accompany her to Cavloccio.
She would willingly have paid him for loss of time. Her ear was
becoming better tuned each moment to his strange patois. Though he
often gave a soft Italian inflection to the harsh German syllables,
she grasped his meaning quite literally. She had read so much about
Switzerland that she knew how Michel Croz was killed while descending
the Matterhorn after having made the first ascent. That historic
accident happened long before she was born. To hear a man speak of
Croz as a friend sounded almost unbelievable, though a moment's
thought told her that Whymper, who led the attack on the hitherto
impregnable Cervin on that July day in 1865, was still living, a keen
Alpinist.
She could not refrain from asking Stampa one question, though she
imagined that he was now in a hurry to take the damaged carriage back
to St. Moritz. "Michel Croz was a brave man," she said. "Did you know
him well?"
"I worshiped him, _fraeulein_," was the reverent answer. "May I receive
pardon in my last hour, but I took him for an evil spirit on the day
of his death! I was with Jean Antoine Carrel in Signor Giordano's
party. We started from Breuil, Croz and his voyageurs from Zermatt.
We failed; he succeeded. When we saw him and his Englishmen on the
summit, we believed they were devils, because they yelled in triumph,
and started an avalanche of stones to announce their victory. Three
days later, Carrel and I, with two men from Breuil, tried again. We
gained the top that time, and passed the place where Croz was knocked
over by the English milord and the others who fell with him. I saw
three bodies on the glacier four thousand feet below,--a fine
burial-ground, better than that up there."
He looked back at the pines which now hid the cemetery wall from
sight. Then, with another courteous sweep of his hat, he walked away,
covering the ground rapidly despite his twisted leg.
If Helen had been better trained as a woman journalist, she would have
regarded this meeting with Stampa as an incident of much value. Long
experience of the lights and shades of life might have rendered her