The Silent Barrier
revealed the nature of a moraine," she said; "but, please, what is a
_geroell_?"
"A slope of loose stones. Let me see, what do they call it in
Scotland and Cumberland? Ah, yes, a scree. On the French side of the
Alps the same thing is known as a _casse_."
"How well you know this country and its ways! Have you climbed many of
the well known peaks?"
"Some years ago I scored my century beyond twelve thousand feet. That
is pretty fair for an amateur."
"Have you done the Matterhorn?"
"Yes, four times. Once I followed Tyndall's example, and converted the
summit into a pass between Switzerland and Italy."
"How delightful! I suppose you have met many of the famous guides?"
He laughed pleasantly. "One does not attempt the Cervin or the
Jungfrau without the best men, and in my time there were not twenty,
all told. I had a long talk with our present guide last night, and
found I had used many a track he had only seen from the valley."
"Then----"
A loud toot on a cowhorn close at hand interrupted her. The artist was
a small boy. He appeared to be waiting expectantly on a hillock for
someone who came not.
"Is that a signal?" she asked.
"Yes. He is a _gaumer_, or cowherd,--another word for your Alpine
vocabulary,--the burgher whose cattle he will drive to the pasture has
probably arranged to meet him here."
Bower was always an interesting and well informed companion. Launched
now into a congenial topic, he gave Helen a thoroughly entertaining
lecture on the customs of a Swiss commune. He pointed out the
successive tiers of pastures, told her their names and seasons of use,
and even hummed some verses of the cow songs, or _Kuh-reihen_, which
the men sing to the cattle, addressing each animal by name.
An hour passed pleasantly in this manner. Their guide, a man named
Josef Barth, and the porter, who answered to "Karl," awaited them at
the milk chalet by the side of Lake Cavloccio. Bower, evidently
accustomed to the leadership of expeditions of this sort, tested their
ice axes and examined the ropes slung to Barth's rucksack.
"The Forno is a glacier _de luxe_," he explained to Helen; "but it is
always advisable to make sure that your appliances are in good order.
That _pickel_ you are carrying was made by the best blacksmith in
Grindelwald, and you can depend on its soundness; but these men are so
familiar with their surroundings that they often provide themselves
with frayed ropes and damaged axes."
"In addition to my boots, therefore, I am indebted to you for a
special brand of ice ax," she cried.
"Your gratitude now is as nothing to the ecstasy you will display when
Karl unpacks his load," he answered lightly. "Now, Miss Wynton, _en
route_! You know the path to the glacier already, don't you?"
"I have been to its foot twice."
"Then you go in front. There is no room to walk two abreast. Before we
tackle the ice we will call a halt for refreshments."
From that point till the glacier was reached the climb was laboriously
simple. There was no difficulty and not the slightest risk, even for a
child; but the heavy gradient and the rarefied air made it almost
impossible to sustain a conversation unless the speakers dawdled.
Helen often found herself many yards in advance of the others. She
simply could not help breasting the steeper portions of the track. She
was drawn forward by an intense eagerness to begin the real business
of the day. Bower did not seek to restrain her. He thought her high
spirits admirable, and his gaze dwelt appreciatively on her graceful
poise as she stopped on the crest of some small ravine and looked back
at the plodders beneath. Attractive at all times, she was bewitching
that morning to a man who prided himself on his athletic tastes. She
wore a white knitted jersey and a short skirt, a costume seemingly
devised to reveal the lines of a slender waist and supple limbs. A
white Tam o' Shanter was tied firmly over her glossy brown hair with a
silk motor veil, and the stout boots which she had surveyed so
ruefully when Bower brought them to her on the previous evening after
interviewing the village shoemaker, were by no means so cumbrous in
use as her unaccustomed eyes had deemed them. Even the phlegmatic
guide was stirred to gruff appreciation when he saw her vault on to a
large flat boulder in order to examine an iron cross that surmounted
it.
"_Ach, Gott!_" he grunted, "that Englishwoman is as surefooted as a
chamois."
But Helen had found a name and a date on a triangular strip of metal
attached to the cross. "Why has this memorial been placed here?" she
asked. Bower appealed to Barth; but he shook his head. Karl gave
details.
"A man fell on the Cima del Largo. They carried him here, and he died
on that rock."
"Poor fellow!" Some of the joyous light left Helen's face. She had
passed the cross before, and had regarded it as one of the votive
offerings so common by the wayside in Catholic countries, knowing that
in this part of Switzerland the Italian element predominated among the
peasants.
"We get a fine view of the Cima del Largo from the _cabane_," said
Bower unconcernedly.
Helen picked a little blue flower that nestled at the base of the
rock. She pinned it to her jersey without comment. Sometimes the
callousness of a man was helpful, and the shadow of a bygone tragedy
was out of keeping with the glow of this delightful valley.
The curving mass of the glacier was now clearly visible. It looked
like some marble staircase meant to be trodden only by immortals. Ever
broadening and ascending until it filled the whole width of the rift
between the hills, it seemed to mount upward to infinity. The sidelong
rays of the sun, peeping over the shoulders of Forno and Roseg, tinted
the great ice river with a sapphire blue, while its higher reaches
glistened as though studded with gigantic diamonds. Near at hand,
where the Orlegna rushed noisily from thraldom, the broken surface was
somber and repellent. In color a dull gray, owing to the accumulation
of winter debris and summer dust, it had the aspect of decay and
death; it was jagged and gaunt and haggard; the far flung piles of the
white moraine imposed a stony barrier against its farther progress.
But that unpleasing glimpse of disruption was quickly dispelled by the
magnificent volume and virgin purity of the glacier as a whole. Helen
tried to imagine herself two miles distant, a tiny speck on the great
floor of the pass. That was the only way to grasp its stupendous size,
though she knew that it mounted through five miles of rock strewn
ravine before it touched the precipitous saddle along which runs the
border line between Italy and Switzerland.
Karl's sigh of relief as he deposited his heavy load on a tablelike
boulder brought Helen back from the land of dreams. To this sturdy
peasant the wondrous Forno merely represented a day's hard work, at an
agreed sum of ten francs for carrying nearly half a hundredweight, and
a liberal _pour-boire_ if the voyageurs were satisfied.
Sandwiches and a glass of wine, diluted with water brought by the
guide from a neighboring rill,--glacier water being used only as a
last resource,--were delectable after a steady two hours' walk. The
early morning meal of coffee and a roll had lost some of its flavor
when consumed apparently in the middle of the night, and Helen was
ready now for her breakfast. While they were eating, Bower and Josef
Barth cast glances at some wisps of cloud drifting slowly over the
crests of the southern hills. Nothing was said. The guide read his
patron's wishes correctly. Unless some cause far more imperative than
a slight mist intervened, the day's programme must not be abandoned.
So there was no loitering. The sun was almost in the valley, and the
glacier must be crossed before the work of the night's frost was
undone.
When they stepped from the moraine on to the ice Barth led, Helen
followed, Bower came next, with Karl in the rear.
If it had not been for the crisp crunching sound of the hobnails amid
the loose fragments on the surface, and the ring of the _pickel's_
steel-shod butt on the solid mass beneath, Helen might have fancied
that she was walking up an easy rock-covered slope. Any delusion on
that point, however, was promptly dispelled by a glimpse of a narrow
crevasse that split the foot of the glacier lengthwise.
She peered into its sea-green depths awesomely. It resembled a
toothless mouth gaping slowly open, ready enough to swallow her, but
too inert to put forth the necessary effort. And the thought reminded
her of something. She halted and turned to Bower.
"Ought we not to be roped?" she asked.
He laughed, with the quiet confidence of the expert mountaineer.
"Why?" he cried. "The way is clear. One does not walk into a crevasse
with one's eyes open."
"But Stampa told me that I should refuse to advance a yard on ice or
difficult rock without being roped."
"Stampa, your cab driver?"
There was no reason that she could fathom why her elderly friend's
name should be repeated with such scornful emphasis.
"Ah, yes. He is that because he is lame," she protested. "But he was
one of the most famous guides in Zermatt years ago."
She swung round and appealed to Barth, who was wondering why his
employers were stopping before they had climbed twenty feet. "Are you
from Zermatt?" she demanded.
"No, _fraeulein_--from Pontresina. Zermatt is a long way from here."
"But you know some of the Zermatt men, I suppose? Have you ever heard
of Christian Stampa?"
"Most certainly, _fraeulein_. My father helped him to build the first
hut on the Hoernli Ridge."
"Old Stampa!" chimed in Karl from beneath. "It will be long ere he is
forgotten. I was one of four who carried him down from Corvatsch to
Sils-Maria the day after he fell. He was making the descent by
night,--a mad thing to do,--and there was murder in his heart, they
said. But I never believed it. We shared a bottle of Monte Pulciano
only yesterday, just for the sake of old times, and he was as merry as
Hans von Rippach himself."
Bower was stooping, so Helen could not see his face. He seemed to be
fumbling with a boot lace.
"You hear, Mr. Bower?" she cried. "I am quoting no mean authority."
He did not answer. He had untied the lace and was readjusting it. The
girl realized that to a man of his portly build his present attitude
was not conducive to speech. It had an additional effect which did not
suggest itself to her. The effort thus demanded from heart and lungs
might bring back the blood to a face blanched by a deadly fear.
Karl was stocked with reminiscences of Stampa. "I remember the time
when people said Christian was the best man in the Bernina," he said.
"He would never go back to the Valais after his daughter died. It was
a strange thing that he should come to grief on a cowherd's track like
that over Corvatsch. But Etta's affair----"
"_Schweige!_" snarled Bower, straightening himself suddenly. His dark
eyes shot such a gleam of lambent fury at the porter that the man's
jaw fell. The words were frozen on his lips. He could not have been
stricken dumb more effectually had he come face to face with one of
the horrific sprites described in the folklore of the hills.
Helen was surprised. What had poor Karl done that he should be bidden
so fiercely to hold his tongue? Then she thought that Bower must have
recalled Stampa's history, and feared that perhaps the outspoken
peasant might enter into a piquant account of some village scandal. A
chambermaid in the hotel, questioned about Stampa, had told her that
the daughter he loved so greatly had committed suicide. Really, she
ought to be grateful to her companion for saving her from a passing
embarrassment. But she had the tact not to drop the subject too
quickly.