CHAPTER XXX
A Tramp Abroad | ||
30. CHAPTER XXX
An hour's sail brought us to Lucerne again. I judged it best to go to bed and rest several days, for I knew that the man who undertakes to make the tour of Europe on foot must take care of himself.
Thinking over my plans, as mapped out, I perceived that they did not take in the Furka Pass, the Rhone Glacier, the Finsteraarhorn, the Wetterhorn, etc. I immediately examined the guide-book to see if these were important, and found they were; in fact, a pedestrian tour of Europe could not be complete without them. Of course that decided me at once to see them, for I never allow myself to do things by halves, or in a slurring, slipshod way.
I called in my agent and instructed him to go without delay and make a careful examination of these noted places, on foot, and bring me back a written report of the result, for insertion in my book. I instructed him to go to Hospenthal as quickly as possible, and make his grand start from there; to extend his foot expedition as far as the Giesbach fall, and return to me from thence by diligence or mule. I told him to take the courier with him.
He objected to the courier, and with some show of reason, since he was about to venture upon new and untried ground; but I thought he might as well learn how to take care of the courier now as later, therefore I enforced my point.
So the two assumed complete mountaineering costumes and departed. A week later they returned, pretty well used up, and my agent handed me the following
OFFICIAL REPORT
Of a Visit to the Furka Region. By H. Harris, Agent.
About seven o'clock in the morning, with perfectly fine weather, we started from Hospenthal, and arrived at the maison on the Furka in a little under quatre hours. The want of variety in the scenery from Hospenthal made the kahkahponeeka wearisome; but let none be discouraged; no one can fail to be completely recompensée for his fatigue, when he sees, for the first time, the monarch of the Oberland, the tremendous Finsteraarhorn. A moment before all was dullness, but a pas further has placed us on the summit of the Furka; and exactly in front of us, at a hopow of only fifteen miles, this magnificent mountain lifts its snow-wreathed precipices into the deep blue sky. The inferior mountains on each side of the pass form a sort of frame for the picture of their dread lord, and close in the view so completely that no other prominent feature in the Oberland is visible from this bong-a-bong; nothing withdraws the attention from the solitary grandeur of the Finsteraarhorn and the dependent spurs which form the abutments of the central peak.
With the addition of some others, who were also bound for the Grimsel, we formed a large xhvloj as we descended the steg which winds round the shoulder of a mountain toward the Rhone Glacier. We soon left the path and took to the ice; and after wandering amongst the crevices un peu,to admire the wonders of these deep blue caverns, and hear the rushing of waters through their subglacial channels, we struck out a course toward l'autre coté and crossed
SOURCE OF THE RHONE
[Description: Etching of mountain scenery. ]
The next afternoon we started for a walk up the Unteraar
glacier, with the intention of, at all events, getting as far
as the Hutte which is
used as a sleeping-place by most of those who cross the Strahleck
Pass to Grindelwald. We got over the tedious collection of stones
and dèbris which
covers the pied of the
Gletcher, and had walked nearly three hours from the
Grimsel, when, just as we were thinking of crossing over to the
right, to climb the cliffs at the foot of the hut, the clouds,
which had for some time assumed a threatening appearance,
suddenly dropped, and a huge mass of them, driving toward
us from the Finsteraarhorn, poured down a
A GLACIER TABLE
[Description: Framed etching of a rock balanced on a pillar of ice.
]
The Grimsel is certainement a wonderful place; situated at the bottom of a sort of huge crater, the sides of which are utterly savage Gebirge, composed of barren rocks which cannot even support a single pine arbre, and afford only scanty food for a herd of gmwkwllolp, it looks as if it must be completely begraben in the winter snows. Enormous avalanches fall against it every spring, sometimes covering everything to the depth of thirty or forty feet; and, in spite of walls four feet thick, and furnished with outside shutters, the two men who stay here when the voyageurs are snugly quartered in their distant homes can tell you that the snow sometimes shakes the house to its foundations.
Next morning the hogglebumgullup still continued bad, but we made up our minds to go on, and make the best of it. Half an hour after we started, the regen thickened unpleasantly, and we attempted to get shelter under a projecting rock, but being far too nass already to make standing at allagreéable, we pushed on for the Handeck, consoling ourselves with the
On going into the châlet above the fall, we were informed that a Brücke had broken down near Guttanen, and that it would be impossible to proceed for some time; accordingly we were kept in our drenched condition for ein Stunde, when some voyageurs arrived from Meiringen, and told us that there had been a trifling accident, aber that we could now cross. On arriving at the spot,I was much inclined to suspect that the whole story was a ruse to make us slowwk and drink the more at the Handeck Inn, for only a few planks had been carried away, and though there might perhaps have been some difficulty with mules, the gap was certainly not larger than a mmbglx might cross with a very slight leap. Near Guttanen the haboolong happily ceased, and we had time to walk ourselves tolerably dry before arriving at Reichenback, wo we enjoyed a good dinè at the Hotel des Alps.
Next morning we walked to Rosenlaui, the beau idèal of Swiss scenery, where we spent the middle of the day in an excursion to the glacier. This was more beautiful than words can describe, for in the constant progress of the ice it has changed the form of its extremity and formed a vast cavern, as blue as the sky above, and rippled like a frozen ocean. A few steps cut in the whoopjamboreehoo enabled us to walk
The clouds by this time seemed to have done their worst, for a lovely day succeeded, which we determined to devote to an ascent of the Faulhorn. We left Grindelwald just as a thunder-storm was dying away, and we hoped to find guten Wetter up above; but the rain, which had nearly ceased, began again, and we were struck by the rapidly increasing froid as we ascended. Two-thirds of the way up were completed when the rain was exchanged for gnillic, with which the boden was thickly covered, and before we arrived at the top the gnillic and mist became so thick that we could not see one another at more than twenty poopoo distance, and it became difficult to pick our way over the rough and thickly covered ground. Shivering with cold, we turned into bed with a double allowance of clothes, and slept comfortably while the wind howled autour de la maison: when I awoke, the wall and the window looked equally dark, but in another hour I found I could just see the form of the latter; so I jumped out of bed, and forced it open, though with great difficulty from the frost and the quantities of gnillic heaped up against it.
A row of huge icicles hung down from the edge of the roof, and anything more wintry than the whole Anblick could not well be imagined; but the sudden appearance of the great mountains in front was so startling that I felt no inclination to move toward bed again. The snow which had collected upon la fenetre had increased the Finsterniss oder der Dunkelheit, so that when I looked out I was surprised to find that the daylight was considerable, and that the balragoomah would evidently rise before long. Only the brightest of les etoiles were still shining; the sky was cloudless overhead, though small curling mists lay thousands of feet below us in the valleys, wreathed around the feet of the mountains, and adding to the splendor of their lofty summits. We were soon dressed and out of the house, watching the gradual approach of dawn, thoroughly absorbed in the first near view of the Oberland giants, which broke upon us unexpectedly after the intense obscurity of the evening before.
DAWN ON THE MOUNTAINS
[Description: Framed etching of mountains in mist. ]I said:
"You have done well, Harris; this report is concise, compact, well expressed; the language is crisp, the descriptions are vivid and not needlessly elaborated; your report goes straight to the point, attends strictly to business, and doesn't fool around. It is in many ways an excellent document. But it has a fault,—it is too learned, it is much too learned. What is `dingblatter'?
"`Dingblatter' is a Fiji word meaning `degrees.'"
"You knew the English of it, then?"
"Oh, yes."
"What is `gnillic'?
"That is the Eskimo term for `snow.'"
"So you knew the English for that, too?"
"Why, certainly."
"What does `mmbglx' stand for?"
"That is Zulu for `pedestrian.'"
"`While the form of the Wellhorn looking down upon it completes the enchanting bopple.' What is `bopple'?"
"`Picture.' It's Choctaw."
"What is `schnawp'?"
"`Valley.' That is Choctaw, also."
"What is `bolwoggoly'?"
"That is Chinese for `hill.'"
"`kahkahponeeka'?"
"`Ascent.' Choctaw."
"`But we were again overtaken by bad hogglebumgullup.' What does `hogglebumgullup' mean?"
"That is Chinese for `weather.'"
"Is `hogglebumgullup' better than the English word? Is it any more descriptive?"
"No, it means just the same."
"And `dingblatter' and `gnillic,' and `bopple,' and `schnawp',—are they better than the English words?"
"No, they mean just what the English ones do."
"Then why do you use them? Why have you used all this Chinese and Choctaw and Zulu rubbish?"
"Because I didn't know any French but two or three words, and I didn't know any Latin or Greek at all."
"That is nothing. Why should you want to use foreign words, anyhow?"
"They adorn my page. They all do it."
"Who is `all'?"
"Everybody. Everybody that writes elegantly. Anybody has a right to that wants to."
"I think you are mistaken." I then proceeded in the following scathing manner. "When really learned men write books for other learned men to read, they are justified in using as many learned words as they please,—their audience will understand them; but a man who writes a book for the general public to read is not justified in disfiguring his pages with untranslated foreign expressions. It is an insolence toward the majority of the purchasers, for it is a very frank and impudent way of saying, `Get the translations made yourself if you want them, this book is not written for the ignorant classes.' There are men who know a foreign language so well and have used it so long in their daily life that they seem to discharge whole volleys of it into their English writings unconsciously, and so they omit to translate, as much as half the time. That is a great cruelty to nine out of ten of the man's readers. What is the excuse for this? The writer would say he only uses the foreign language where the delicacy of his point cannot be conveyed in English. Very well, then he writes his best things for the tenth man, and he ought to warn the nine other not to buy his book. However, the excuse he offers is at least an excuse; but there is another set of men who are like you; they know a word here and there, of a foreign language, or a few beggarly little three-word phrases, filched from the back of the Dictionary, and these are continually peppering into their literature, with a pretense of knowing that language,—what excuse can they offer? The foreign words and phrases which they use have their exact equivalents in a nobler language,—English; yet
When the musing spider steps upon the red-hot shovel, he first exhibits a wild surprise, then he shrivels up. Similar was the effect of these blistering words upon the tranquil and unsuspecting Agent. I can be dreadfully rough on a person when the mood takes me.
CHAPTER XXX
A Tramp Abroad | ||