The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner Volume 2

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Returning down the rocky steep, I descried, solitary in that great
waste of rock and snow, the form of a lady whom I supposed I had left
sleeping at the inn, overcome with the fatigue of yesterday's tramp.
Lured on by the apparently short distance to the backbone of the
ridge, she had climbed the rocks a mile or more above the hotel, and
come to meet me. She also had seen the great peaks lift themselves
out of the gray dawn, and Monte Rosa catch the first rays. We stood
awhile together to see how jocund day ran hither and thither along
the mountain-tops, until the light was all abroad, and then silently
turned downward, as one goes from a mount of devotion

THE BATHS OF LEUK

In order to make the pass of the Gemmi, it is necessary to go through
the Baths of Leuk. The ascent from the Rhone bridge at Susten is
full of interest, affording fine views of the valley, which is better
to look at than to travel through, and bringing you almost
immediately to the old town of Leuk, a queer, old, towered place,
perched on a precipice, with the oddest inn, and a notice posted up
to the effect, that any one who drives through its steep streets
faster than a walk will be fined five francs. I paid nothing extra
for a fast walk. The road, which is one of the best in the country,
is a wonderful piece of engineering, spanning streams, cut in rock,
rounding precipices, following the wild valley of the Dala by many a
winding and zigzag.

The Baths of Leuk, or Loeche-les-Bains, or Leukerbad, is a little
village at the very head of the valley, over four thousand feet above
the sea, and overhung by the perpendicular walls of the Gemmi, which
rise on all sides, except the south, on an average of two thousand
feet above it. There is a nest of brown houses, clustered together
like bee-hives, into which the few inhabitants creep to hibernate in
the long winters, and several shops, grand hotels, and bathing-houses
open for the season. Innumerable springs issue out of this green,
sloping meadow among the mountains, some of them icy cold, but over
twenty of them hot, and seasoned with a great many disagreeable
sulphates, carbonates, and oxides, and varying in temperature from
ninety-five to one hundred and twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit.
Italians, French, and Swiss resort here in great numbers to take the
baths, which are supposed to be very efficacious for rheumatism and
cutaneous affections. Doubtless many of them do up their bathing for
the year while here; and they may need no more after scalding and
soaking in this water for a couple of months.

Before we reached the hotel, we turned aside into one of the
bath-houses. We stood inhaling a sickly steam in a large, close
hall, which was wholly occupied by a huge vat, across which low
partitions, with bridges, ran, dividing it into four compartments.
When we entered, we were assailed with yells in many languages, and
howls in the common tongue, as if all the fiends of the pit had
broken loose. We took off our hats in obedience to the demand; but
the clamor did not wholly subside, and was mingled with singing and
horrible laughter. Floating about in each vat, we at first saw
twenty or thirty human heads. The women could be distinguished from
the men by the manner of dressing the hair. Each wore a loose woolen
gown. Each had a little table floating before him or her, which he
or she pushed about at pleasure. One wore a hideous mask; another
kept diving in the opaque pool and coming up to blow, like the
hippopotamus in the Zoological Gardens; some were taking a lunch from
their tables, others playing chess; some sitting on the benches round
the edges, with only heads out of water, as doleful as owls, while
others roamed about, engaged in the game of spattering with their
comrades, and sang and shouted at the top of their voices. The
people in this bath were said to be second class; but they looked as
well and behaved better than those of the first class, whom we saw in
the establishment at our hotel afterward.

It may be a valuable scientific fact, that the water in these vats,
in which people of all sexes, all diseases, and all nations spend so
many hours of the twenty-four, is changed once a day. The
temperature at which the bath is given is ninety-eight. The water is
let in at night, and allowed to cool. At five in the morning, the
bathers enter it, and remain until ten o'clock,--five hours, having
breakfast served to them on the floating tables, "as they sail, as
they sail." They then have a respite till two, and go in till five.
Eight hours in hot water! Nothing can be more disgusting than the
sight of these baths. Gustave Dore must have learned here how to
make those ghostly pictures of the lost floating about in the Stygian
pools, in his illustrations of the Inferno; and the rocks and
cavernous precipices may have enabled him to complete the picture.
On what principle cures are effected in these filthy vats, I could
not learn. I have a theory, that, where so many diseases meet and
mingle in one swashing fluid, they neutralize each other. It may be
that the action is that happily explained by one of the Hibernian
bathmen in an American water-cure establishment. "You see, sir,"
said he, "that the shock of the water unites with the electricity of
the system, and explodes the disease." I should think that the shock
to one's feeling of decency and cleanliness, at these baths, would
explode any disease in Europe. But, whatever the result may be, I am
not sorry to see so many French and Italians soak themselves once a
year.

Out of the bath these people seem to enjoy life. There is a long
promenade, shaded and picturesque, which they take at evening,
sometimes as far as the Ladders, eight of which are fastened, in a
shackling manner, to the perpendicular rocks,--a high and somewhat
dangerous ascent to the village of Albinen, but undertaken constantly
by peasants with baskets on their backs. It is in winter the only
mode Leukerbad has of communicating with the world; and in summer it
is the only way of reaching Albinen, except by a long journey down
the Dala and up another valley and height. The bathers were
certainly very lively and social at table-d'hote, where we had the
pleasure of meeting some hundred of them, dressed. It was presumed
that the baths were the subject of the entertaining conversation; for
I read in a charming little work which sets forth the delights of
Leuk, that La poussee forms the staple of most of the talk. La
poussee, or, as this book poetically calls it, "that daughter of the
waters of Loeche," "that eruption of which we have already spoken,
and which proves the action of the baths upon the skin,"--becomes the
object, and often the end, of all conversation. And it gives
specimens of this pleasant converse, as:

"Comment va votre poussee?"

"Avez-vous la poussee?"

"Je suis en pleine poussee"

"Ma poussee s'est fort bien passee!"

Indeed says this entertaining tract, sans poussee, one would not be
able to hold, at table or in the salon, with a neighbor of either
sex, the least conversation. Further, it is by grace a la poussee
that one arrives at those intimacies which are the characteristics of
the baths. Blessed, then, be La poussee, which renders possible such
a high society and such select and entertaining conversation! Long
may the bathers of Leuk live to soak and converse! In the morning,
when we departed for the ascent of the Gemmi, we passed one of the
bathing-houses. I fancied that a hot steam issued out of the
crevices; from within came a discord of singing and caterwauling;
and, as a door swung open, I saw that the heads floating about on the
turbid tide were eating breakfast from the swimming tables.

OVER THE GEMMI

I spent some time, the evening before, studying the face of the cliff
we were to ascend, to discover the path; but I could only trace its
zigzag beginning. When we came to the base of the rock, we found a
way cut, a narrow path, most of the distance hewn out of the rock,
winding upward along the face of the precipice. The view, as one
rises, is of the break-neck description. The way is really safe
enough, even on mule-back, ascending; but one would be foolhardy to
ride down. We met a lady on the summit who was about to be carried
down on a chair; and she seemed quite to like the mode of conveyance:
she had harnessed her husband in temporarily for one of the bearers,
which made it still more jolly for her. When we started, a cloud of
mist hung over the edge of the rocks. As we rose, it descended to
meet us, and sunk below, hiding the valley and its houses, which had
looked like Swiss toys from our height. When we reached the summit,
the mist came boiling up after us, rising like a thick wall to the
sky, and hiding all that great mountain range, the Vallais Alps, from
which we had come, and which we hoped to see from this point.
Fortunately, there were no clouds on the other side, and we looked
down into a magnificent rocky basin, encircled by broken and
overtopping crags and snow-fields, at the bottom of which was a green
lake. It is one of the wildest of scenes.

An hour from the summit, we came to a green Alp, where a herd of cows
were feeding; and in the midst of it were three or four dirty
chalets, where pigs, chickens, cattle, and animals constructed very
much like human beings, lived; yet I have nothing to say against
these chalets, for we had excellent cream there. We had, on the way
down, fine views of the snowy Altels, the Rinderhorn, the Finster-
Aarhorn, a deep valley which enormous precipices guard, but which
avalanches nevertheless invade, and, farther on, of the Blumlisalp,
with its summit of crystalline whiteness. The descent to Kandersteg
is very rapid, and in a rain slippery. This village is a resort for
artists for its splendid views of the range we had crossed: it stands
at the gate of the mountains. From there to the Lake of Thun is a
delightful drive,--a rich country, with handsome cottages and a
charming landscape, even if the pyramidal Niesen did not lift up its
seven thousand feet on the edge of the lake. So, through a smiling
land, and in the sunshine after the rain, we come to Spiez, and find
ourselves at a little hotel on the slope, overlooking town and lake
and mountains.

Spiez is not large: indeed, its few houses are nearly all
picturesquely grouped upon a narrow rib of land which is thrust into
the lake on purpose to make the loveliest picture in the world.
There is the old castle, with its many slim spires and its square-
peaked roofed tower; the slender-steepled church; a fringe of old
houses below on the lake, one overhanging towards the point; and the
promontory, finished by a willo drooping to the water. Beyond, in
hazy light, over the lucid green of the lake, are mountains whose
masses of rock seem soft and sculptured. To the right, at the foot
of the lake, tower the great snowy mountains, the cone of the
Schreckhorn, the square top of the Eiger, the Jungfrau, just showing
over the hills, and the Blumlisalp rising into heaven clear and
silvery.

What can one do in such a spot, but swim in the lake, lie on the
shore, and watch the passing steamers and the changing light on the
mountains? Down at the wharf, when the small boats put off for the
steamer, one can well entertain himself. The small boat is an
enormous thing, after all, and propelled by two long, heavy sweeps,
one of which is pulled, and the other pushed. The laboring oar is,
of course, pulled by a woman; while her husband stands up in the
stern of the boat, and gently dips the other in a gallant fashion.
There is a boy there, whom I cannot make out,--a short, square boy,
with tasseled skull-cap, and a face that never changes its
expression, and never has any expression to change; he may be older
than these hills; he looks old enough to be his own father: and there
is a girl, his counterpart, who might be, judging her age by her
face, the mother of both of them. These solemn old-young people are
quite busy doing nothing about the wharf, and appear to be afflicted
with an undue sense of the responsibility of life. There is a
beer-garden here, where several sober couples sit seriously drinking
their beer. There are some horrid old women, with the parchment skin
and the disagreeable necks. Alone, in a window of the castle, sits a
lady at her work, who might be the countess; only, I am sorry, there
is no countess, nothing but a frau, in that old feudal dwelling. And
there is a foreigner, thinking how queer it all is. And while he
sits there, the melodious bell in the church-tower rings its evening
song.

BAVARIA.

AMERICAN IMPATIENCE

We left Switzerland, as we entered it, in a rain,--a kind of double
baptism that may have been necessary, and was certainly not too heavy
a price to pay for the privileges of the wonderful country. The wind
blew freshly, and swept a shower over the deck of the little
steamboat, on board of which we stepped from the shabby little pier
and town of Romanshorn. After the other Swiss lakes, Constance is
tame, except at the southern end, beyond which rise the Appenzell
range and the wooded peaks of the Bavarian hills. Through the dash
of rain, and under the promise of a magnificent rainbow,--rainbows
don't mean anything in Switzerland, and have no office as
weather-prophets, except to assure you, that, as it rains to-day, so
it will rain tomorrow,--we skirted the lower bend of the lake,--and
at twilight sailed into the little harbor of Lindau, through the
narrow entrance between the piers, on one of which is a small
lighthouse, and on the other sits upright a gigantic stone lion,--a
fine enough figure of a Bavarian lion, but with a comical,
wide-awake, and expectant expression of countenance, as if he might
bark right out at any minute, and become a dog. Yet in the
moonlight, shortly afterward, the lion looked very grand and stately,
as he sat regarding the softly plashing waves, and the high, drifting
clouds, and the old Roman tower by the bridge which connects the
Island of Lindau with the mainland, and thinking perhaps, if stone
lions ever do think, of the time when Roman galleys sailed on Lake
Constance, and when Lindau was an imperial town with a thriving
trade.

On board the little steamer was an American, accompanied by two
ladies, and traveling, I thought, for their gratification, who was
very anxious to get on faster than he was able to do,--though why any
one should desire to go fast in Europe I do not know. One easily
falls into the habit of the country, to take things easily, to go
when the slow German fates will, and not to worry one's self
beforehand about times and connections. But the American was in a
fever of impatience, desirous, if possible, to get on that night. I
knew he was from the Land of the Free by a phrase I heard him use in
the cars: he said, "I'll bet a dollar." Yet I must flatter myself
that Americans do not always thus betray themselves. I happened, on
the Isle of Wight, to hear a bland landlord "blow up" his glib-
tongued son because the latter had not driven a stiffer bargain with
us for the hire of a carriage round the island.

"Didn't you know they were Americans?" asks the irate father. "I
knew it at once."

"No," replies young hopeful: "they didn't say GUESS once."

And straightway the fawning-innkeeper returns to us, professing, with
his butter-lips, the greatest admiration of all Americans, and the
intensest anxiety to serve them, and all for pure good-will. The
English are even more bloodthirsty at sight of a travelere than the
Swiss, and twice as obsequious. But to return to our American. He
had all the railway timetables that he could procure; and he was
busily studying them, with the design of "getting on." I heard him
say to his companions, as he ransacked his pockets, that he was a
mass of hotel-bills and timetables. He confided to me afterward,
that his wife and her friend had got it into their heads that they
must go both to Vienna and Berlin. Was Berlin much out of the way in
going from Vienna to Paris? He said they told him it was n't. At
any rate, he must get round at such a date: he had no time to spare.
Then, besides the slowness of getting on, there were the trunks. He
lost a trunk in Switzerland, and consumed a whole day in looking it
up. While the steamboat lay at the wharf at Rorschach, two stout
porters came on board, and shouldered his baggage to take it ashore.
To his remonstrances in English they paid no heed; and it was some
time before they could be made to understand that the trunks were to
go on to Lindau. "There," said he, "I should have lost my trunks.
Nobody understands what I tell them: I can't get any information."
Especially was he unable to get any information as to how to "get
on." I confess that the restless American almost put me into a
fidget, and revived the American desire to "get on," to take the fast
trains, make all the connections,--in short, in the handsome language
of the great West, to "put her through." When I last saw our
traveler, he was getting his luggage through the custom-house, still
undecided whether to push on that night at eleven o'clock. But I
forgot all about him and his hurry when, shortly after, we sat at the
table-d'hote at the hotel, and the sedate Germans lit their cigars,
some of them before they had finished eating, and sat smoking as if
there were plenty of leisure for everything in this world,

A CITY OF COLOR

After a slow ride, of nearly eight hours, in what, in Germany, is
called an express train, through a rain and clouds that hid from our
view the Tyrol and the Swabian mountains, over a rolling, pleasant
country, past pretty little railway station-houses, covered with
vines, gay with flowers in the windows, and surrounded with beds of
flowers, past switchmen in flaming scarlet jackets, who stand at the
switches and raise the hand to the temple, and keep it there, in a
military salute, as we go by, we come into old Augsburg, whose
Confession is not so fresh in our minds as it ought to be. Portions
of the ancient wall remain, and many of the towers; and there are
archways, picturesquely opening from street to street, under several
of which we drive on our way to the Three Moors, a stately hostelry
and one of the oldest in Germany.

It stood here in the year 1500; and the room is still shown,
unchanged since then, in which the rich Count Fugger entertained
Charles V. The chambers are nearly all immense. That in which we
are lodged is large enough for Queen Victoria; indeed, I am glad to
say that her sleeping-room at St. Cloud was not half so spacious.
One feels either like a count, or very lonesome, to sit down in a
lofty chamber, say thirty-five feet square, with little furniture,
and historical and tragical life-size figures staring at one from the
wall-paper. One fears that they may come down in the deep night, and
stand at the bedside,--those narrow, canopied beds there in the
distance, like the marble couches in the cathedral. It must be a
fearful thing to be a royal person, and dwell in a palace, with
resounding rooms and naked, waxed, inlaid floors. At the Three Moors
one sees a visitors' book, begun in 18oo, which contains the names of
many noble and great people, as well as poets and doctors and titled
ladies, and much sentimental writing in French. It is my impression,
from an inspection of the book, that we are the first untitled
visitors.

The traveler cannot but like Augsburg at once, for its quaint houses,
colored so diversely and yet harmoniously. Remains of its former
brilliancy yet exist in the frescoes on the outside of the buildings,
some of which are still bright in color, though partially defaced.
Those on the House of Fugger have been restored, and are very brave
pictures. These frescoes give great animation and life to the
appearance of a street, and I am glad to see a taste for them
reviving. Augsburg must have been very gay with them two and three
hundred years ago, when, also, it was the home of beautiful women of
the middle class, who married princes. We went to see the house in
which lived the beautiful Agnes Bernauer, daughter of a barber, who
married Duke Albert III. of Bavaria. The house was nought, as old
Samuel Pepys would say, only a high stone building, in a block of
such; but it is enough to make a house attractive for centuries if a
pretty woman once looks out of its latticed windows, as I have no
doubt Agnes often did when the duke and his retinue rode by in
clanking armor.

But there is no lack of reminders of old times. The cathedral, which
was begun before the Christian era could express its age with four
figures, has two fine portals, with quaint carving, and bronze doors
of very old work, whereon the story of Eve and the serpent is
literally given,--a representation of great theological, if of small
artistic value. And there is the old clock and watch tower, which
for eight hundred years has enabled the Augsburgers to keep the time
of day and to look out over the plain for the approach of an enemy.
The city is full of fine bronze fountains some of them of very
elaborate design, and adding a convenience and a beauty to the town
which American cities wholly want. In one quarter of the town is the
Fuggerei, a little city by itself, surrounded by its own wall, the
gates of which are shut at night, with narrow streets and neat little
houses. It was built by Hans Jacob Fugger the Rich, as long ago as
1519, and is still inhabited by indigent Roman-Catholic families,
according to the intention of its founder. In the windows were
lovely flowers. I saw in the street several of those mysterious,
short, old women,--so old and yet so little, all body and hardly any
legs, who appear to have grown down into the ground with advancing
years.

It happened to be a rainy day, and cold, on the 30th of July, when we
left Augsburg; and the flat fields through which we passed were
uninviting under the gray light. Large flocks of geese were feeding
on the windy plains, tended by boys and women, who are the living
fences of this country. I no longer wonder at the number of
feather-beds at the inns, under which we are apparently expected to
sleep even in the warmest nights. Shepherds with the regulation
crooks also were watching herds of sheep. Here and there a cluster
of red-roofed houses were huddled together into a village, and in all
directions rose tapering spires. Especially we marked the steeple of
Blenheim, where Jack Churchill won the name for his magnificent
country-seat, early in the eighteenth century. All this plain where
the silly geese feed has been marched over and fought over by armies
time and again. We effect the passage of, the Danube without
difficulty, and on to Harburg, a little town of little red houses,
inhabited principally by Jews, huddled under a rocky ridge, upon the
summit of which is a picturesque medieval castle, with many towers
and turrets, in as perfect preservation as when feudal flags floated
over it. And so on, slowly, with long stops at many stations, to
give opportunity, I suppose, for the honest passengers to take in
supplies of beer and sausages, to Nuremberg.

A CITY LIVING ON THE PAST

Nuremberg, or Nurnberg, was built, I believe, about the beginning of
time. At least, in an old black-letter history of the city which I
have seen, illustrated with powerful wood-cuts, the first
representation is that of the creation of the world, which is
immediately followed by another of Nuremberg. No one who visits it
is likely to dispute its antiquity. " Nobody ever goes to Nuremberg
but Americans," said a cynical British officer at Chamouny; "but they
always go there. I never saw an American who had n't been or was not
going to Nuremberg." Well, I suppose they wish to see the
oldest-looking, and, next to a true Briton on his travels, the oddest
thing on the Continent. The city lives in the past still, and on its
memories, keeping its old walls and moat entire, and nearly fourscore
wall-towers, in stern array. But grass grows in the moat, fruit
trees thrive there, and vines clamber on the walls. One wanders
about in the queer streets with the feeling of being transported back
to the Middle Ages; but it is difficult to reproduce the impression
on paper. Who can describe the narrow and intricate ways; the odd
houses with many little gables; great roofs breaking out from eaves
to ridgepole, with dozens of dormer-windows; hanging balconies of
stone, carved and figure-beset, ornamented and frescoed fronts; the
archways, leading into queer courts and alleys, and out again into
broad streets; the towers and fantastic steeples; and the many old
bridges, with obelisks and memorials of triumphal entries of
conquerors and princes?

The city, as I said, lives upon the memory of what it has been, and
trades upon relics of its former fame. What it would have been
without Albrecht Durer, and Adam Kraft the stone-mason, and Peter
Vischer the bronze-worker, and Viet Stoss who carved in wood, and
Hans Sachs the shoemaker and poet-minstrel, it is difficult to say.
Their statues are set up in the streets; their works still live in
the churches and city buildings,--pictures, and groups in stone and
wood; and their statues, in all sorts of carving, are reproduced, big
and little, in all the shop-windows, for sale. So, literally, the
city is full of the memory of them; and the business of the city,
aside from its manufactory of endless, curious toys, seems to consist
in reproducing them and their immortal works to sell to strangers.

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