Schlins
There is a sense of sudden departure in the air.
We shall know the worst, to-morrow, or next day....
Lasko’s well has not moved from its old place. It lies about a hundred yards west of the “Château aux fenêtres.” The wooden trough into which the water trickles—one of its many successors—looks the same as ever; I am glad it has not yet been converted into a basin of cement, like those in the village below.
The transformation of wood into cement is proceeding relentlessly all over the country; to my infinite disgust. Those numerous wooden watertroughs for the use of householders and their cattle, which used to be quite a feature of the streets, are now all being manufactured out of this damnably durable material; there is a cement-factory near our station, and I wish somebody would drop a bomb on it. Cement has invaded domestic architecture, as was inevitable. Inevitable things are not always pleasant, and not always pretty. It is hard to imagine anything more infamous, on a small scale, than the prison-like gray garden walls which have replaced those delightful wooden palings through whose meshes a riot of flowers would come tumbling out upon the road; the spacious wooden houses, so full of charm and individuality, so redolent of patriarchal well-being, with their shingles and gables burnt to a glowing umber-brown by years and years of sunshine, are being discarded in favor of weedy little cement abominations that make one sorry for people who have to live in them. They look cheap; they are cheap. I wish they were dear, for cheap things are seldom attractive, and life in cheap and ugly homes cannot fail to give their inmates a corresponding bent of mind.
Not a single wooden bridge is left over Lutz or Ill. They were swept away, every one of them, in the floods of 1910 and 1911 and now, for the first time, their place is taken by solid but hideous structures of cement. One is sorry to let the old ones go; one calls to mind the bridge at Ludesch built as long ago as 1498 and ever since then kept in repair, with its sloping wooden roof, its sudden twilight within and odor of hot fir-wood, as of a scented tunnel; one remembers the soft tread of the horses’ feet on the powdery beams and the sound of creaking timbers underfoot. They are eyesores, these new things; they will remain eyesores.
Now a new road is an eyesore too, ruthlessly hacked, as it is, through the landscape; and nearly every road hereabouts, great or small, has been cut afresh within the last generation. No great harm in this, however, since roads have a knack of growing old again; you need only wait; lichens and grass and brushwood will presently creep up to hide the scars. There is nothing to be done with palings and bridges and troughs and houses of cement; nothing, save to stand aside and curse them. For the æsthetic drawback of cement, that godsend to lazy builders, lies in its agelessness and lack of character; if it grows old at all, it grows even more horrible than in youth. But men are becoming blind to these and other uglifications—the word is not quite ugly enough for the thing—of the scenery and of their houses. For instance: forty-one unseemly electric wires converge at the post-office of our small village; there they are, so repulsive that you cannot but look at them; the women of the place, instead of feeding chickens or mending the children’s clothes, spend their lives in gossiping with each other at long distances, and God alone knows the nonsense they find to chatter about. Go where you please, in fact, and you cannot fail to perceive half a dozen decorative telegraph poles staring you in the face. Now why do people want all this ridiculous electricity rushing up and down the country? Solidarity. Brotherhood of men....
Lasko’s well——
No; it has not moved from its old place. But we looked in vain for those “Wasserkälber” which were always to be found lying at its bottom in olden days. Indeed, I have not seen a single “Wasserkälb” since my arrival here. Are they extinct?38
We called him Lasko; but it was not till many years afterwards, at an English public school, that I learnt that Lasko really meant anything. And we called it Lasko’s well, because it was here that Lasko, our black retriever, lapped up some water on his last walk, the day before his death. After that, we made it a rule that every one of our dogs, as often as we passed this place, should drink at the trough in memory of dear old Lasko, whether he happened to be thirsty or not; if he refused, his head was held under the water till he had imbibed, willy-nilly, something like the requisite amount of liquid. To this treatment were submitted:
(1) Lasko the Second, a worthless yellow brute who, having been altered in youth, was of so timorous a disposition that it became our greatest delight to get somebody to fire off a gun in his immediate neighborhood, and watch him flee for his life.
(2) Sippins, who belonged to my sister and to the “Affenpincher” breed—that is, to so small and strange-looking a canine variety that the boys were wont to call him a Chinese rat; all of which did not prevent him from having fleas. One wonders whether those enthusiasts, who declare that dogs have no fleas, are in earnest. Have they ever looked for them? Sippins was flea’d, during the summer, twice a day by a maid who deposited the insects in a saucer containing alcohol, and in my boyish journal I record “136 fleas caught from Sippins at a single time”—Sippins himself, as aforesaid, being about the size of a full-grown rat. Now Sippins objected strongly to this water-cure at Lasko’s well. He had been born and educated at Munich; he only touched water when no beer was procurable; he could drink like a lord, like a fish; but only beer. It was not long, therefore, before it became one of our principal pastimes to “make Sippins drunk.” He seldom knew when to stop.
(3) MacDougall, a Skye-terrier belonging to me, of so pure a breed that you never knew whether he was walking forwards or backwards. He was an anomaly among quadrupeds; nothing approaching his style had been seen in this country before. His talent consisted in enticing cats down from walls and trees and other inaccessible situations by his mere appearance; the cats, seemingly, being unable to resist the temptation of inspecting at close quarters this freak of nature, this animated hearth-rug. Once on the ground, they were doomed to a violent death, for they never dreamt it was a dog. Need I say what our chief diversion with MacDougall used to be? One of his most brilliant exploits took place in Bludesch at our tailor’s—who was also our haircutter; whence, for many years, I found it difficult to realize that tailoring and haircutting were separate professions—where dwelt a family of cats, a mother and half a dozen kittens. The operation took less than a minute to perform, while we looked on amazed and, ten to one, amused; two shakes for the mother, half a shake each for the kittens; the entire family laid out flat on the grass, dead as doornails, side by side; whereupon he trotted up to us, right end forward, saying plainly: “How’s that?” And we doubtless replied: “Oh, MacDougall! Do it again.” Very cruel children, we were....
Straight up, from Lasko’s well, and once more to that inspiring portal of green, where the path to Tiefis enters the cavern-like forest. To-day those curtain-fringes of the dark firs are waving softly to and fro, stirred by a tepid Fön wind. Now down again, past sundry erratic blocks and through the newly planted tract to the “nymphe pudique”—the source of the crayfish stream, which we intend to pursue all the way to Schlins. A good deal of that fair swamp growth has been cut since our last visit; enough remains to please the eye. The vale grows wider after the Tiefis-Bludesch road has been crossed, and the rushes denser; one realizes why the peasants have called this rivulet “Ried-bach.” It meanders in desultory fashion about this upper marshy level; then plunges, all of a sudden, into the wood, and puts on a new character. A downhill career begins in earnest. Rapids are formed, and islets; all in the deep shade of those trees through which it glimmers obscurely along. A kingfisher haunts these dusky reaches (there is another on the upper Montiola brook); scenery such as this must have been in Poe’s mind when he wrote “The Island of the Fay.” Soon we pass a small abandoned reservoir; it is the second spot in the district where bulrushes can be found—the third is near Bludenz; after that comes a stretch of country difficult to follow, steep and irregular, a stretch of tortuous windings and cascades, till the lower level of Schlins is reached, where the brook enters upon its final phase, gliding demurely, like our own Feldbächle, through cultivated meadows at the foot of Jagdberg.
It stands to reason that we straightway found ourselves sitting at the Krone inn, wistful at the thought that this might be our last visit here. The proprietress is a sweet-natured woman and a stimulating conversationalist; we talked and talked, while Mr. R. partook of his traditional two eggs and insisted moreover in drinking “Suser,” freshly made cider, in spite of my warning about the probable consequences of such rash behavior, namely, an attack of the “Holde Katarina,” the “Fair Katherine,” which signifies a loosening of the bowels. The expression is remarkable as showing the prudishness of these folk in regard to bodily matters of every kind; alter a letter in that name, and you may divine its origin. All such things are slurred over, even by grown-up people. So female dogs are always known as “he”; incredible to relate, our much-married dachshund-lady is “he.” How different from Mediterranean countries where sexuality and every other physiological fact is taken for granted by the smallest children, and emphasized as such; where even inanimate objects are apt to be invested with the attributes of sex! Here we stand before a racial divergence of outlook; a gulf.
The cider-harvest promises well. But I have long ago given up pretending to enjoy this drink, and find it hard to believe that the first time I ever got tipsy was on such mawkish stuff. Yet so it was. Needless to say, it was not my own fault; other people were mixed up in the affair; Jakob, and my sister. Jakob was a smiling, sunburnt villager who looked after our cows and pigs and also helped at the hay-making; the accident, therefore, must have occurred at the present season of the year. Now whatever Jakob did, he did with such peculiar zest that it was a liberal education to watch him. Nobody could dengel quite like he could (to dengel is to beat out the blade of a scythe); he threw his heart and soul into the performance. And nobody could quaff cider with such infinite gusto; it made you thirsty to look at him. Wherever he happened to be mowing among the fields, there, close at hand, in the shade of some tree, stood his jug of blue stoneware out of which he refreshed himself gloriously, in god-like fashion, from time to time. When it was empty, he was wont to disappear down the stairs of the laundry into certain mysterious regions underneath our house and come back with the jug refilled; and this is where my sister’s rôle begins. She was three years old at the time; the suggestion, therefore, can only have come from her; the suggestion, I mean, that we should watch where Jakob went and then get some cider for ourselves. It was another world down there, a cool twilight passage running the whole length of the house, with vaulted chambers on both sides that were lighted by windows ever so high up. One of them was full of barrels side by side, and one of those barrels was still dripping. Aha! So that was where Jakob filled his jug. Now just the least little turn of the tap, and the liquid began to trickle deliciously down our throats, while we egged each other on to drink more and more. I have no idea how long we stayed down there. The countryside was scoured in vain; all traces of the children had disappeared, and had it not been for Jakob providentially descending to fetch himself yet another jugful, we might have remained undiscovered till next morning. As it was, we were picked up senseless and put to bed.
Seven o’clock—how long one has lingered in this pleasant tavern! Now we leave, after many farewellings, and wander homewards due east, not passing the church at all; we cross the streamlet which has accompanied us hither and immediately enter that wood, familiar by this time, the once awe-inspiring forest of the——. It is already dark here, under the firs, but the rich, resinous perfumes of daylight are still hanging in the air; no dew has fallen to quench them. So we move along the dim path in silence; we have talked ourselves out, at Schlins.
All those squirrels—what has become of them? In olden days you could seldom traverse any wood hereabouts without encountering one or more. Now, during the whole of our stay here, we have seen but two; one black, one red. Where are they gone? I enquired, and learnt that they had not been persecuted during the war, as were the moles. To be sure, certain persons eat squirrels and declare them to be excellent; they did this already in the days when these animals were numerous. In England, also, the race seems to be dying out. Has there been some epidemic, or is the whole squirrel-tribe growing weary of life and contemptuous of the joys of propagation? Quite lonesome these forests are, without their squirrels. As to the crested tits—they seem to have vanished altogether; in fact, the entire titmouse tribe is far less common than it used to be. Have their nesting-places grown rarer or are they, too, becoming ascetic? We have wandered leagues and leagues about these woodlands, and not once have I heard that melodious trill; not once.
Out, into the odorous pré des papillons, into a fading, greenish-gray atmosphere, a kind of elf-land. All is moist here, and mysterious. An owl sallies forth on our left and circles twice directly overhead, so close that we can discern her eyes and beak. Then up through misty fields past a decrepit hay-hut, one of the survivors of the old school like that near the crayfish-stream, one of those whose planks are encrusted with sulphur-hued lichen. Now Mr. R. produces his talisman and plays as we walk in the gloaming; many new morceaux have been “found” since that day at Blumenegg. Our last concert, possibly! And just when I was beginning to appreciate, and even understand—which is far more difficult—this aboriginal music with its up-to-date names!
Marching along I review, in fancy, the many scenes which have lately flitted before our eyes, and one little memory creeps up among the throng; I think it will end in submerging them all. It was what we saw a few days ago during our latest stroll to the ruined Jagdberg. I make a point, namely, of losing myself on the way there (it is quite easy; you have only to bear a little to the north in the woods) because, in so doing, you never fail to see something, however insignificant, which you never saw before. So it fell out. We duly lost our way and, floundering down a thickly wooded incline, came to the margin of a small crescent-shaped bog, surrounded by old firs. It was as solitary a spot as you might wish to find; for all one knew, the foot of man had never trodden here. Now I have spoken of the many-tinted vegetation of these marshy tracts. This one, for reasons which a botanist may expound, was of another nature. It had been dedicated wholly to gentians.39 They shot up from the wet moss—a blaze of the most perfect blue on earth. Theirs was not a steady light, but shimmering and playful, and of a luster so intense that no African sky, no sapphire, could have rivaled it. I plucked one of these portentous flowers. It measured nearly the length of my walking-stick and was alive with color from end to end. Conceive a hundred thousand of them, all huddled together among those somber trees. We seemed to be looking down into a lake of blue fire.
Here, I think, is a memory to cherish; a vision to carry away into other lands.
Sunday, 3 September. Departure! We leave by the 1 a.m. train to-night.
And it would not be hard to guess where we went this afternoon, for a final stroll.
There, in the well-known room, was the “old one” as well as her husband, and the baby looking prettier than ever since her holiday at Thüringerberg; there also were some twenty other people, peasant-folk, chatting at tables, and smoking and drinking beer. Sunday! We had overlooked this fact. And there they would sit, till all hours of the night. “Not much chance of embrassez-moi in here,” I thought, as I looked round. Mr. R. remained in the open doorway, and his disappointment took a tragic turn. He said bitterly:
“What are all our pleasant walks and talks worth now? Ah, I shall have nothing but unhappy memories of your country.”
“That you shall not,” I declared. “Nobody is to have unhappy memories of my country, if I can help it. Now this is a moment for heroic measures, and one little thing has just dawned upon me; what cannot be done inside a room, may be done outside. Let us sit down, while you order your eggs. I have it. I have it already. Those eggs.... How lucky you are fond of eggs. How lucky you have a friend who knows why eggs were created!”
We gave our orders.
“What on earth am I to do?” asked Mr. R.
“You will presently leave the room, without turning round to look at anybody. Go into the orchard at the back of the house, and wait there. When the baby arrives, I give you thirty seconds together. Employ them in a laughing and brotherly fashion, as I told you the other day. Then you, at least, will return straight here. Thirty seconds. If you mean to obey to the letter, swear it. Else no baby till the crack of doom. Now, swear.”
Whereupon Mr. R. swore a great oath in the Mediterranean manner, on the head, or the honor—on both, I fancy—of his own mother, to obey to the letter.
“Thirty seconds,” I went on. “Imagine otherwise what might happen if the old one grew suspicious and went into the orchard! And she may well be suspicious, after those marconigrams of the other day. What would she think of us two conspirators? How about my reputation here, in the only country where, by good luck, I have not yet been found out; where my family name is a byword for all that is upright and honorable; where my father, my grandfather.... Just let me hear you swear again.”
Whereupon he swore a second great oath, to the same effect as the first, on the souls of all his dead ancestors, male and female.
“Thirty seconds.... You can go now. And listen! Clasp her firmly if you get the chance, or you may bungle the whole affair, and these are the little accidents one never forgives oneself. After all, it would be a queer baby who objected to being embraced for thirty seconds by such an affectionate elder brother. Why should she?”
“I was going to do that anyhow.”
He departed; and presently the fateful eggs arrived and remained on the table one minute, two minutes. I beckoned Dorothea to my side:
“Will you go and fetch my friend? His eggs are getting cold. You may find him in the orchard; he is fond of orchards. Run!” and I gave her a gentle push. Whether she perceived the strategy or not, she was off like an arrow.
What happened under those apple-trees I shall learn in due course of time, by the simple expedient of asking no questions. Up to this moment I only know that Mr. R. returned alone, and sat down to his eggs with a not unsuccessful air of insouciance. The baby, I suspect, was in the kitchen, cooling down that wonderful complexion, and her mother would doubtless have gone to look for her there, had I not meanwhile entangled her into a complicated discussion anent the manufacture of Kirschwasser, a specialty of this village. Thirty thousand kronen a liter, she vowed, was what they were asking for it. Who was going to pay thirty thousand kronen? Well, it struck me that one shilling and sixpence for a bottle and a quarter of the finest Kirschwasser on earth was a fairly reasonable price.
So far good. I came well out of that little episode....
Endless are the other things we have left undone. Why, we have not even been up the Walserthal, nor so much as an inch in the direction of that fairest of all our alps, the Gamperdona behind Nenzing, where twelve hundred cows are munching and mooing day and night. (The Montavon valley may take care of itself; it is full of tourists). And of hills, real hills, nothing has been climbed save the poor old Scesaplana. I had intended to take Mr. R. on some mountain which has more flavor to it, even though it be not so high—the Drei Schwestern, for instance, above Frastanz, about which my father also wrote a paper; or the Widderstein, or the Kanisfluh. There, on the Kanisfluh, he might have satisfied his craving for edelweiss.
No matter. The mountains can wait for another season.
One is sorry, none the less, not to have witnessed the boisterous procession of cattle returning from their summer pastures, the woodlands changing to gold, and that first September hoar-frost which melts at noon, when drops of moisture glisten on every spider-web; sorry not to have seen the gay fungus-people starting out of the dank earth. And here are plums on their trees, almost ripe. Such a crop there never was. Another week, and they would have been ready to be converted into the first of those ambrosial tarts which are smothered, at the last moment, under a deluge of whipped cream and then devoured so dutifully that, on rising from table, you cannot but feel a kind of bewildered reverence for the capacity of the human stomach. Only another week: how provoking!
No matter. We have had a breath of fresh air together.
The End
Footnotes
1 Called “Latschen” hereabouts, because they are “gelegt”—pressed earthwards by winter snows; or else by the old Rhætic name of “Zuondra” which we sometimes twist into “Sonderinen.” They are more generally known as “Legföhren.” These groves of Pinus pumilio deserve careful protection; they shield the meadows below from the devastating effects of cloudbursts in the upper regions, from stone-cataracts and—by welding all successive snowfalls into that first one which lies anchored among their twisted limbs—from avalanches.
2 He has surprised me, of late, by a new acquirement: a considerable familiarity with Polish history. They only began to teach it quite recently, he says; and thereby hangs a tale. It would seem that an ukase has gone forth from educational headquarters in Paris, to the effect that the youth of the entire country is to be brought up in the belief that the Poles, the old friends of France, are a prodigy among nations; every phase of their contemptible politics and degrading parliamentary wrangles during the last few centuries has to be regarded as of epoch-making importance—as opposed to the futile history of their enemies on the East. Nothing, in short, is good enough for Poland; nothing bad enough for Russia. And all because a misguided pack of French capitalists, after those Toulon celebrations, lent their millions to Russia, expecting to receive the usual three hundred per cent profit which is not yet forthcoming and, let us hope, never will be. An interesting example by what means “patriotic” convictions are nurtured, and for what ends.
3 We walked up to the Bährenloch last week. The path is neglected and quite overgrown in places; the cave seems to have lost its popularity since the war. I was glad to see that old yew tree—rather a rare growth hereabouts—still clinging to the rock near its entrance. We went in with candles and saw one bat fluttering about; I felt no great desire to take it home with me. The pets one kept! Guinea-pigs, first of all, Meerschweinle which, in a burst of infantile humor, I used to call Immermehrschweinle, alluding to their miraculous fecundity. Not a bad joke, now I think of it. And the last was a black squirrel, that ended in pitiable fashion. I took it out of its nest and brought it up on the bottle, like a baby. It grew to be my companion all the time, free to come and free to go, and there was nothing I could not do with it; we were really devoted to each other. Afterwards, having to leave the country, I gave it in charge of a certain female relative who also loved it. The cage was placed on the top of one of those enormous stoves of green majolica tiles. Winter came, and the maid lighted the fire, forgetful of the cage above. Then she remembered, and rushed back into the room. Too late! The poor beast had meanwhile been slowly, quite slowly, roasted to death. No more pets after that.
4 Here is a local and contemporary appreciation of this glory of art. “Mit höchstem Rechte verdient hier die aus dieser Landschaft gebürtige Angelika Kaufmann eine Stelle. Dieses mit den seltensten Vorzügen des Genies ausgestattete Frauenzimmer macht wirklich in der Malerei Epoche, und lebt diesmal als eine der berühmtesten Künstlerinnen des sich neigenden achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, in glücklicher Ehe in Rom, zur Ehre ihres Vaterlandes, das auf sie stolz seyn darf.” (Vorarlbergische Chronik. Bregenz, Brentano, 1793, p. 81.)
5 Professor Joseph Bergmann, in an extremely learned booklet (“Untersuchungen über die freyen Walliser oder Walser.” Vienna, Carl Gerold, 1844) has proved that our Walsers, an industrious people of Burgundian stock, emigrated hitherward from the Swiss Canton Wallis (Valais) at the end of the thirteenth century and settled in this wild valley and its surroundings. It is they who brought it to its present high state of prosperity. They have kept their Swiss accent to this day, with certain idioms of their own—not every Englishman can translate “Wie tüschalat’s Bobbe so schö im Pfülfli!”—and their costume is more strange than beautiful. In olden days nearly every settlement here (Bludenz, Feldkirch, Nenzing, etc.) had its own costume. There are only three left now; that of the Walserthal, the Montavon, and Bregenzerwald.
6 I cannot suggest what Tabalada means unless it be what I think it is—a comical perversion of its Romansh name Aulat=aqua lauta, a name appropriate up to a few years ago, for it was the most crystalline water I ever saw, till we forced some of the discolored Ill to flow into it, for factory purposes at Gais. And the real name of the “Feldbächle” is Montiola-bach, which is also Latin; all that hilly region where it rises used to be called Montiola; indeed, a great number of the place-names I shall be mentioning have origin in Romansh, which is such a detestable word that I mean to call it Rhæto-Roman in future.
Our old Rhætian inhabitants, now held to be Celts and not Etruscans as certain scholars used to maintain, were defeated by Drusus and Tiberius in 15 b. c. in this very plain—so tradition says; certainly the Walgau is marked as “Vallis Drusiana” in old charts and chronicles, though another derivation is yet more plausible (see p. 152). The province was thereafter romanized, and traces of this Latin domination can be found, for instance, in those single personal names like Florentinus, Seganus, Ursicinus, which persisted hereabouts into the twelfth century; the present double family ones, of Alemannic origin, became fixed by the end of the thirteenth. As to our Rhæto-Roman names of localities—some of them speak for themselves; there is no difficulty about Scesaplana, Alpila, Fontanella, Quadera and so on, though it is rather puzzling to find a high rocky summit called “Valbona.” Lutz is lutum, the turbid stream; Ludesch (Lodasco) stands on its banks. Bludesch was called Pludassis (paludes) by reason of its swampy situation. The Fön, the hot wind, is Favonius. Lagutz=lacus, a lake; which it doubtless used to be. Raggal (Roncal in chronicles), Rungalin and other such sites=runcare. Gamperdona=campus rotundus, which you will find most apposite, if you go there. Other place-names are not so easy to disentangle. Barplons=Pratum planum. Vanova=Via nova. The “Schlosstobel” at the foot of Blumenegg castle used to be called “Falster”=Vallis torrens. Trasseraus=tres suors (sorores). Frastafeders is simply “old Frastanz.” One thing strikes me as suggestive. That Rhætians or Romans should give names to conspicuous peaks—Vallula, Zimba, Furka, Saladina: there are dozens of them—is intelligible enough. You can see a mountain from below, without climbing up. You cannot see a lake from below. Yet the names of some of our secluded Alpine waters, like Tilisuna and Formarin, whatever their origin, are not Alemannic and are therefore pre-Alemannic; which proves that these remote and inhospitable spots were already then frequented for the sake, no doubt, of their brief summer pasturage. Whence I deduce that the population of those days must have been denser than one generally imagines. Formarin, for the rest, is pronounced “Famurin” which may be “Val Murin,” from the quantities of marmots (mure montana, contracted into our “Burmentli”) up there. If this conjecture sounds far-fetched, let me hasten to say that it is not mine, but that of Max Vermunt (“Stille Winkel in Vorarlberg”).
7 We had our ups and downs in later times. One of the “ups” was when the factory was partially burnt some thirty years ago, and the insurance compensation enabled us not only to rebuild it on a far finer scale, but to purchase the neighboring establishment of Gais which happened to be in the market.
8 The Fön, if it then existed, may be responsible for the destruction by fire of so many of the prehistoric Swiss lake settlements.
9 “Hystorische Relation,” etc., of Rhetia by Johann Georg Schlehen of Rottweyl. There is a copy in the British Museum. His name is Schlee; the Schlehen on the title-page is the accusative.
10 Justice was dispensed in sight of the gallows, the signa meri imperi, near the Hanging Stone (a conspicuous cliff on the Bludenz road)—dispensed upon a certain fateful meadow, the path to which used to be known as the “gallows’ way,” and the meadow itself “Gerichti” (Court of Justice). These names seem to have faded out of the popular memory. I like to think that the proceedings took place near that wide-branching oak, by far the finest in the district, at whose foot I used to recline in olden days. It stands between the Hanging Stone and our present railway station, opposite that detestable new cement factory, on the south side of the line. There is certainly a path leading to it from the cliff, and perhaps some dim tradition attached to this oak has saved it from the ax through all these years.
11 I have just discovered, rummaging among some old papers, a musical composition by my mother entitled “Blumenegg.” It is dated October, 1861; three years before her marriage.
12 The former of these speaks of Milton’s “habitually loose botany.” No great blemish; given the themes he loved, it might be argued that much of Milton’s peculiar aroma would evaporate, had he been meticulous in such details like Tennyson or de Tabley. Theocritus is hard to catch napping; but Ovid, for example, tells us that buxus grows on Mount Hymettus. There is no box on Hymettus, though it prospers in certain gardens of Athens (e. g., the Crown Prince’s); Ovid was thinking of the dwarf holly. It is the worst of writing poetry, that you are apt to be torn between respect for truth and the exigencies of scansion. What would the painfully correct Lucretius have done with this buxus?
13 Professor K. W. von Dalla Torre mentions him in his “Zoologische Literatur von Tirol und Vorarlberg bis inclusive 1885.” He enumerates eighteen different monographs by him, dealing with the fauna alone of this province. (His botanical works are more important.) He also notes that Bruhin is “at present (1886) in Columbus, Ohio, U. S. A.” It is a far cry to Ohio! If he stayed there any length of time, he is sure to have made a name for himself. He always signs himself “Th. A.”; Dalla Torre calls him “Theodor,” which is probably correct; in the list of subscribers to Heer’s “Urwelt der Schweiz” (1865, p. xviii) he figures as “Thomas.”
14 We generally went to Lech in threes. Now the inn at Lech was not a bad one; so good indeed, that its praises have been sung by no less an authority than the writer Ludwig Steub, who was also a frequent visitor at our house in times gone by. But our own cuisine and cellar were still better, and accordingly we were wont to take up by cart a vast store of provisions, only sleeping at the inn and occasionally ordering some little dish or a quarter of wine for the sake of appearances. To recoup himself, the innkeeper used to charge us so preposterously for these trifles that on one occasion we had a solemn row with him and refused to pay. He yielded. Not long afterwards there was printed in some local paper a spirited poem in the mock-heroic style, with the refrain:
Die Heiligen Drei Könige, mit irrendem Stern—
Die essen und trinken, und zahlen nicht gern!
I wish I had kept a copy.
15 I knew an old hunter of Ludesch who claimed to have killed seventy-five pine martens near that village. I have seen only two in my whole life hereabouts; and not a single one within the last thirty-five years, despite never-ending rambles among these forests. But we had a pair of beech martens under the eaves of our house, which they reached by climbing along the branches of a mighty walnut tree that leaned over the roof. In the daytime they were never to be found. By night they made such a din of scuttling and scampering that visitors, sleeping in rooms below, had to be warned of their existence.
16 This particular specimen is commemorated by Rudolph von Tschusi (son of the well-known ornithologist) in “Ornithologisches Jahrbuch,” IX, 1898, Heft 2. According to H. Walchner’s “Ornithologie des Bodenseebeckens” (1835) the ibis is of the “greatest rarity” on this sheet of water, only a single instance of its occurrence being then known, which is precisely why I bought this one. Apropos of woodpeckers—Bruhin, in his “Wirbelthiere Vorarlbergs” (1868) also says that he saw the lesser spotted kind only once; the bird must therefore be far from common. And this year, for the first time, I had the pleasure of spying the three-toed one. We were walking down from Lagutz to Marul (see p. 155) through that magnificent Alpine forest when we noticed a pair of them. They kept close together, one following the other and we following both; so tame were they, that we could approach within a few yards and see the yellow on the head of the male. I observed that they had the same habit as the middle-spotted woodpecker, of investigating carefully not only the trunk but the branches of trees. While watching them I thought: how wise of you to have kept out of my way till now!
17 Bludenz itself was twice destroyed by fire. See “Vorarlbergische Chronik” (Bregenz, Brentano, 1793, p. 108).
18 Woodlands have always been cherished here. Wood inspectors were appointed as early as 1626, possibly earlier; they had to traverse the forests every spring, summer and autumn, and to report the slightest damage to the trees. Four years later, an excellent rule was framed to prevent the ever-increasing damage to forest-growth by herds of goats: whoso has three cows, may keep no goat whatever; the owner of two cows may keep one goat; the possession of a single cow entitled you to three goats and no more. This stamped out the goat mischief. Such were the Lords of Blumenegg, from whom certain modern governments might well take a lesson; like sensible tyrants, they not only laid down wise regulations on this and other matters, but saw to it that they were carried out (those gallows!). In the inhospitable recesses of the Walserthal, at five hours’ march from their castle, lying in a caldron of bleak gray crags—an excellent chamois-ground—is the iron-spring and bathing establishment of Rothenbrunnen, where the Alpine rhododendrons droop over your bedroom window; it was the Blumenegg people who erected the first building here in 1650, with accommodation for forty patients. Twenty-six years later they founded a school in the remote hamlet of Sonntag. Their fishery regulations were on the same enlightened scale. As early as 1690 no fishing of any kind was permitted during the spawning season (21 September to 30 November); nets, moreover, were to have meshes wide enough to allow the escape of every fish less than seven inches in length, which happens to be the precise limit fixed, at this present moment, by the conservators of the Exe and other English rivers. For these and other details of the Blumenegg rule see the exhaustive monograph on this subject by one of our best local antiquarians, the late Joseph Grabherr, priest of Satteins (Bregenz, 1907).
19 During these works at the Spuller lake they unearthed, last year, the skull and horns of an elk; the relic was unfortunately bought by a Swiss who carried it off to his own country; it ought to have gone into the newly founded Bludenz Museum. The Spuller lake is the locality of a strange devil-legend and also of a ghost-story which have been preserved by Dr. F. J. Vonbun in his “Sagen Vorarlbergs” (Innsbruck, 1858). I will transcribe a line or two of the former, omitting his accents and pronounciation marks, in order to give a sample of our Alemannic dialect: “Es set ama wienicht-obed amol en ma zum en andera: ‘los nochber, i wetta mi zitgae, du traust di net, mer min schmalzkübelzolfa hinet vo Spullers z holla.’ Der nochber set ’woll frile, d wett gilt’ und nümt en füfspoeriga hund, stahel, fürste und schwamm und got Spullers zue. Wia-n er an stofel kunnt, bringt em der butz vo Spullers de zolfa a guets stuck scho etgega, aber der nochber set zuenem, los gueta fründ,” etc.
20 The Alpine rose thrives in the climate of Deeside; it grows taller and greener than on these hills, and loses none of its fragrance. It should not be planted in the shade.
21 At the easterly end of these Elser Schröfen there is a convenient path down between the rocks; it connects Marul, via the Els and Furkla alps, with Bludenz. Regarding the cliffs themselves—this decorative ridge seems to be of recent formation; I imagine it is the result of a rupture, and that the hill formerly trended in a soft curve towards the Furkla. When the divulsion took place none can tell; but I think I know where the lost material is to be found, if anybody cares to pick it up. This broken mountain was carried down the Galgen-tobel, and now forms the vast southward-sloping triangle of raised ground which is crossed by the driving-road from Bludenz to Nüziders. On the spot, the existence of a deltoid tract here is naturally not apparent. If you mount to any slight eminence on the other side of the Ill, you cannot fail to perceive its characteristic shape and to divine its origin; it is the work of an agency similar to that which produced the northward sloping delta of the Scesa-tobel immediately opposite. The railway Bludenz-Nüziders skirts at one point a steep grassy bank recalling that described on p. 117; I take it to have been carved into this deposit by the old Ill, in its more vigorous days.
22 At the spot where, in later years, the Arlberg railway came to stride over this torrent, a memorial tablet has been erected to him. I was unaware of its existence and only learned the fact two weeks ago—from Baedeker.
23 Douglass (John Sholto). “Die Römer in Vorarlberg.” Thüringen. Im Selbstverlage des Verfassers. 1870. 4to. Paper cover. Title page, two pages index of contents. One page with half title, 67 pages of text. At the end 4 photographic plates, one of them in color.
24 He speaks of our primitive lake-dwellers as being of a different race and anterior to these—a race that can be proved none the less to have lingered into the Roman period; which makes him wonder why there is no mention of them in Latin writers, whereas Herodotus has left us such an excellent description. (There is a hint of them in Cæsar’s account of the Britons; and a representation, on Trajan’s Column, of what might be a Dacian palafitte.) Sundry objects of this epoch have been found at our end of Lake Constance. To other evidence showing that the inner Walgau, the Ill valley between Feldkirch and Bludenz, was at one time also or at least partially a lake, I can add a small confirmatory fact, namely, the discovery by myself, on the 13 October, 1883, of one of those spindle-whorls of burnt clay—unornamented, this one—which are characteristic of the lacustrine era. I drew it out of the earth in the then fresh railway cutting below the convent of St. Peter at Bludenz, and take some little credit to myself for detecting it, and realizing its significance, at that tender age. I know not whether other relics of lake-dwellers have been found up here; this one specimen is sufficient evidence of their existence for me. It is worth noting, too, that not a single old village of the inner Walgau lies in the plain (which may also be due to fear of Ill floods). My contribution to the antiquities of later periods consists of the statuette here figured. It was found not far from Lauterach during those Rhine-regulation works mentioned on p. 54, and I was obliged to give its owner a diamond scarf-pin which had cost me £65—those were opulent days—before he could be induced to part with it. The material is bronze, all except the iron lance-blade and rivetings under the feet; its height, to the tip of the lance, is 17½ centimeters. Every detail in this little work of art is challenging, and I will not lose myself in conjectures as to its age or origin.
25 Ludwig Steub says that Droussa, Drossa, signifies aldertree or thicket of alders, that the Rhætian form of this word was probably tarusa or trusa, and that the valley is called Trusiana in chronicles, “which may be translated as valley of alders.” I have come across it also marked as Thrusiana, and may point out that the dwarf mountain alder (alnus viridis) is to this day called “Droosle” in our dialect. If Steub be correct, it is an odd circumstance, indeed, that this identical tree should once more have crept into the modern designation of this province: Vorarlberg, from the German Erle, an elder. “Arlberg”—“Arlenberg” in some old books—has also been derived from “Arla,” the dwarf pine, which is said to be one of its names in “German-speaking Rhætia.” It may be so. I have never heard these pines called “Aria” hereabouts, though they have several other names (see p. 6). They are sometimes called “Adla” in the Bregenxerwald.
26 This last part is the track from which the two young men, referred to on p. 24, contrived to fall and kill themselves. I would take any child up there, though not by night. It may be that they had no nails to their boots and slipped on some rocks freshly glazed with ice, dragging each other over the brink.
27 Nothing is known, I fancy, of the meaning of those old place-names like Schlins, Düns, Röns, and so forth. The origin of our Thüringen is held to be different from that of the German province, which has been derived from Turo, a family name; to be Celtic, and allied to Tours and Zürich (which is also marked as Türrig in old maps); to this day our people invariably call the place “z’Türrig.” Schlins is the birthplace of a remarkable man, Magister Bartholomæus Bernhardt, born 1487. He was called Velcurio from the neighboring town of Feldkirch, studied (1504) at the new University of Wittenberg which within twenty years had received over forty students from Vorarlberg; became a monk and (1519) rector of that University; thereafter to the end of his life Prior of Kemberg in Saxony. According to Sebastian Münster (1550) he was the first priest to take to himself a legitimate wife. He died 1551. His brother John, who seems to have been also a monk, wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s “Physics” and was likewise married.
28 This reads a little jaundiced. I must contemplate my oleographs.
29 They do not exist in this Adneter Kalk. We noticed some fair specimens the other day at the Freiburger Hut (Formarin).
30 This tusk has been in the Bregenz Museum since 1859, with a suitable inscription. A molar, presumably of the same animal, was found by a peasant in this torrent some twenty years ago; it is now at Invery House, Banchory, N. B.
31 “Mounts up to 7000 feet, and probably descends not much below 3000,” says Schreiber, in his Herpetologia Europea. Bludenz lies at half the latter elevation. Brehm draws the word Tattermandl from “toter Mann,” which is a philologer’s derivation; he is anything but “tot.” It might be a corruption by popular etymology, of the Latin and Italian name. Bruhin says that salamandra maculosa occurs at Thüringen. I have traversed every inch of the Thüringen territory in all seasons and weathers for the last half century, and never seen one.
32 Mattli was right. According to Bruhin’s “Wirbelthiere Vorarlbergs” (1868) the last wolf was shot at the Hanging Stone about 1830, though he does not mention this fact in his interesting paper on the fauna and flora of this cliff. The last lynx, he says, was killed about 1820; a certain Rüf, a well-known chamois hunter of the Bregenzerwald, told me that when he was a youngster he frequently came across old Lynx-traps in the woods. There are woodcuts both of lynx and wolf in Schlee’s “Rhetia”; he speaks of them as being very troublesome in the Bludenz district (p. 61). The wild boar, long since extinct, he mentions among the game animals of Bregenz and Dornbirn. I myself found the tusk of one during some drainage works in the fields between Bludenz and Rungalin. Bruhin says that a bear was killed near Nenzing in 1828 and that another one frequented an alp there for a whole summer season in 1867. Bears were passably common when Tschudi wrote his “Thierleben der Alpenwelt”; Berlepsch (about 1860) says that twelve to twenty of them were still annually killed in the Alps; soon enough, I shall be one of the few persons left who have tasted the flesh of a genuine Alpine bear. This was at Nauders in the Tyrol in May, 1897; the beast had probably come over from the Grisons.
33 Since then, the same reason has been given me by two other natives, both of whom are in a position to know. I call it “interesting,” because observations of a recent change of climate—and always in the direction of moisture—have been recorded in other parts of Europe. In the Shetland Islands, for instance, they will point out to you stretches of moor and heather once covered with grain which, owing to increased dampness, could no longer be got to mature. The same phenomenon has struck me also, but, on thinking it over, I attributed it to my own imagination; hot summers, I said to myself, and clear snowy winters, are far more likely to impress a child than rainy weather; hence we conclude rashly that in the days of our youth the climate was more continental. Yet how explain a state of affairs like this: vines were cultivated here by the Romans (even during the Stone Age, among the pile-dwellers on Lake Constance) and, assiduously, as early as the eleventh century; in 1615, again, there were no less than one hundred vineyards at Bludesch alone. The site of all of them is now nothing but grassy slopes. Can hay be more remunerative than wine? If not, there is perhaps something to be said for the change-of-climate theory. They seem to have been gay people, by the way, in those bibulous days. Many are the complaints of illicit dancing and outrageous swearing, of “Versoffenheit und Tabakfressen”—drunkenness and tobacco-chewing.
34 I have just gone through Quinet’s pages again. They are a thing apart, in French travel-literature. Here is no affectation, no mockery, no rhetoric, no complaints about this or that, no advice to the Greeks as to how they should govern themselves; nothing but the impressions of a blithe and sympathetic traveler. So he wanders through this country which then possessed “not a single two-wheeled carriage” nor domestic beasts of any kind; he gives us poignant sketches of its utter desolation—the fire-blackened villages and their few, half-starved inhabitants, the putrefying corpses, skeletons by the wayside, leagues of burnt forest and olive-groves; together with a few brighter descriptions of life in Arcadia, of those delightful Albanian children, and of chance meetings with the great Kolokotroni and others. What strikes me as distinctively non-French in Quinet is his whole-hearted love of nature, and a certain organic nobility of outlook. One would gladly quote from those stimulating reflections on the art of ancient Greece, but as I am on the subject of homesickness, I will merely transcribe what he says of Sparta (then a mere hovel) which has the true nostalgic ring. “Je laisse à d’autres à expliquer comment une ville qui ne vous est rien, bien moins, quelques tertres de cailloux que vous ne reverrez jamais, peuvent vous manquer plus que votre terre natale.” Quinet, it will be seen, wrote as citizen of the world, not of France; and that is why his book is a thing apart. It ends with a touching farewell to the whole country. “Ni demain, ni après, ne verrai-je plus mes hôtes de Dhervény ou de Mistra, ni les forêts brulées, ni les os sur la grève, ni tout ce que les hommes peuvent souffrir pour une pensée, sans cesser de la mettre à haut prix...”
There once passed through my hands a copy of these travels marginally annotated by some Greek reader in faded, yellow ink. One of his observations ran to this effect: “Ce livre est tout ce qu’il doit être, admirable de description et de vérité. Moi, Grec, je puis témoigner que ce livre est plein de vérités et de charmes.”
35 Avoid the lake salmon.
36 They are buried at Bludesch—the last one in 1669—in that crypt below the church which bears the awesome superscription: Fui non sum. Estis non critis. They also built what is now the Krone inn at that village, one of whose ceilings has taken refuge in the Bregenz Museum, and whose present proprietor was a schoolfellow of mine at Som’s.
37 Frastanz is famous for its beer and for its battle, on Saturday, 20 April, 1499, between the Swiss and the Imperial troops, which seems to have been the bloodiest ever fought in this province. There is a pretty legend connected with it (see Vonbun’s “Sagen Vorarlbergs,” Innsbruck, 1858).
38 These “water-calves” are thin, wire-like worms of the family of the Gordiidae; they pass through singular stages of development. We used to be told blood-curdling tales of their effects on the human stomach if accidentally swallowed with the water.
39 G. asclepiadea, which the Germans briefly call “Schwalbenwurzblättriger Enzian.” Old Conrad Gesner knew it as “poison-root,” not because it was poisonous in itself, but because cattle were said to eat it in order to cure themselves of the stings of poisonous animals. He learnt this piece of lore, as well as the plant’s popular name, from the botanist Aretius (Benedikt Marti), and therefore wished to call the flower “Aretia” in honor of him. Two hundred years later Haller, the great countryman of Aretius, did give the name Aretia to a certain genus of plants; and it was retained by Linné.