OCR Text |
Show IH VALLEY OF RHONE i Beautiful Scenes That Greet Tourist in Switzerland. Regions Through Chamonlx and Zer-matt Zer-matt Are Very Mountainous, With ' Snow-Capped Peaks and Dangerous Dan-gerous Gorges. Zermatt, Switzerland. The regions, between Chamonix and Zermatt are largely of slate and very mountainous, with snow-capped distant heights and fearful gorges, through which turbulent turbu-lent mountain torrents roared. The train runs deep beside steep slopes covered cov-ered wiih a wilderness pf pines and hazel bushes, and the elder with its gorgeous masses of blood-red berries flaming out from the green depths of the uncleared, ancient forests which shelter ;t. Gigantic mossy boulders reposed re-posed ' under the generous out-, stretched boughs of the evergreens, and it required no effort of the eager fancy to imagine small gray men, clad In the brown garb of their race, seated, seat-ed, musing, on those rocks, in the heart of the mountain solitude. From such scenery we made a steep and slow descent, into the wide, green valley of the Rhone. It lay far beneath be-neath us, completely visible during our winding progress downward; fair and broad, with rows of stately Lom-bardy Lom-bardy poplars, fields of waving green asoaraeus and the soft, bendine: wil lows, nestling each to each, along the banks of the sauntering river. From Viege, otherwise known as Visp, to Zermatt. the scenery changed once more, growing wilder and far more grandly beautiful, it seemed to me, than any landscape we had seen, even in Switzerland. The mountains became be-came walls that shut us away from the rest of the world, until we could feel the very presence .of the Soul of Loneliness brooding there. We passed through gorges similar to those among the Rocky mountains and strangely dissimilar to the smoother slopes and green valleys to whom we had grown accustomed in this land. Among some exceedingly wild portions por-tions of the region we were penetrating penetrat-ing there were lonesome-looking, appallingly appal-lingly primitive chalets, or rather, wretched hovels, blackened by the weather, and frequently built against some mighty rock, which had rolled down the mountainside and which, seen across the gorge, among numerous numer-ous other rocks of varying bulk, looked like a pebble with a curious barnacle attached to it. The dwellers in these huts appeared as rugged and wild as their environments, with which they must wage fearful wars, struggling to wrest a livelihood from such barren, cruel nature. I cannot help wondering, as I recollect their dreary habitations and isolated state, what can be their view of life-contend- Typical Swiss Chalet. ing that, as human beings, they possess pos-sess some glimmerings of the light of hope and faith and charity, some faint occasional promptings of ambition, or blind yearnings toward wider horizons hori-zons and other worlds. Yet they live in the midst of an awful wilderness, almost in the manner of the cliff dwellers, born and reared and burled on the mountain slopes; in poverty, In solitude, in ignorance; clinging like blind sucklings of a wild beast, to the bosom of their Mother Earth. |