Everything for the use of the upper valley and Zermatt, now a place of considerable resort, must be carried by porters, or on horseback;and we pass or meet men and women, sometimes a dozen of them together, laboring along under the long, heavy baskets, broad at the top and coming nearly to a point below, which are universally used here for carrying everything.The tubs for transporting water are of the same sort.There is no level ground, but every foot is cultivated.High up on the sides of the precipices, where it seems impossible for a goat to climb, are vineyards and houses, and even villages, hung on slopes, nearly up to the clouds, and with no visible way of communication with the rest of the world.
In two hours' time we are at Stalden, a village perched upon a rocky promontory, at the junction of the valleys of the Saas and the Visp, with a church and white tower conspicuous from afar.We climb up to the terrace in front of it, on our way into the town.A seedy-looking priest is pacing up and down, taking the fresh breeze, his broad-brimmed, shabby hat held down upon the wall by a big stone.
His clothes are worn threadbare; and he looks as thin and poor as a Methodist minister in a stony town at home, on three hundred a year.
He politely returns our salutation, and we walk on.Nearly all the priests in this region look wretchedly poor,--as poor as the people.
Through crooked, narrow streets, with houses overhanging and thrusting out corners and gables, houses with stables below, and quaint carvings and odd little windows above, the panes of glass hexagons, so that the windows looked like sections of honey-comb,--we found our way to the inn, a many-storied chalet, with stairs on the outside, stone floors in the upper passages, and no end of queer rooms; built right in the midst of other houses as odd, decorated with German-text carving, from the windows of which the occupants could look in upon us, if they had cared to do so; but they did not.
They seem little interested in anything; and no wonder, with their hard fight with Nature.Below is a wine-shop, with a little side booth, in which some German travelers sit drinking their wine, and sputtering away in harsh gutturals.The inn is very neat inside, and we are well served.Stalden is high; but away above it on the opposite side is a village on the steep slope, with a slender white spire that rivals some of the snowy needles.Stalden is high, but the hill on which it stands is rich in grass.The secret of the fertile meadows is the most thorough irrigation.Water is carried along the banks from the river, and distributed by numerous sluiceways below; and above, the little mountain streams are brought where they are needed by artificial channels.Old men and women in the fields were constantly changing the direction of the currents.
All the inhabitants appeared to be porters: women were transporting on their backs baskets full of soil; hay was being backed to the stables; burden-bearers were coming and going upon the road: we were told that there are only three horses in the place.There is a pleasant girl who brings us luncheon at the inn; but the inhabitants for the most part are as hideous as those we see all day: some have hardly the shape of human beings, and they all live in the most filthy manner in the dirtiest habitations.A chalet is a sweet thing when you buy a little model of it at home.
After we leave Stalden, the walk becomes more picturesque, the precipices are higher, the gorges deeper.It required some engineering to carry the footpath round the mountain buttresses and over the ravines.Soon the village of Emd appears on the right,--a very considerable collection of brown houses, and a shining white church-spire, above woods and precipices and apparently unscalable heights, on a green spot which seems painted on the precipices; with nothing visible to keep the whole from sliding down, down, into the gorge of the Visp.Switzerland may not have so much population to the square mile as some countries; but she has a population to some of her square miles that would astonish some parts of the earth's surface elsewhere.Farther on we saw a faint, zigzag footpath, that we conjectured led to Emd; but it might lead up to heaven.All day we had been solicited for charity by squalid little children, who kiss their nasty little paws at us, and ask for centimes.The children of Emd, however, did not trouble us.It must be a serious affair if they ever roll out of bed.
Late in the afternoon thunder began to tumble about the hills, and clouds snatched away from our sight the snow-peaks at the end of the valley; and at length the rain fell on those who had just arrived and on the unjust.We took refuge from the hardest of it in a lonely chalet high up on the hillside, where a roughly dressed, frowzy Swiss, who spoke bad German, and said he was a schoolmaster, gave us a bench in the shed of his schoolroom.He had only two pupils in attendance, and I did not get a very favorable impression of this high school.Its master quite overcame us with thanks when we gave him a few centimes on leaving.It still rained, and we arrived in St.Nicolaus quite damp.
There is a decent road from St.Nicolaus to Zermatt, over which go wagons without springs.The scenery is constantly grander as we ascend.The day is not wholly clear; but high on our right are the vast snow-fields of the Weishorn, and out of the very clouds near it seems to pour the Bies Glacier.In front are the splendid Briethorn, with its white, round summit; the black Riffelhorn; the sharp peak of the little Matterhorn; and at last the giant Matterhorn itself rising before us, the most finished and impressive single mountain in Switzerland.Not so high as Mont Blanc by a thousand feet, it appears immense in its isolated position and its slender aspiration.