pass to where the tunnel begins. Göschenen, the village at the mouth of
the tunnel, is all railway sidings and haphazard villas for tourists,
post cards, and touts and weedy carriages; disorder and sterile chaos,
high up. How should any one stay there!
I went on up the pass itself. There were various parties of visitors on
the roads and tracks, people from towns incongruously walking and
driving. It was drawing on to evening. I climbed slowly, between the
great cleft in the rock where are the big iron gates, through which the
road winds, winds half-way down the narrow gulley of solid, living rock,
the very throat of the path, where hangs a tablet in memory of many
Russians killed.
Emerging through the dark rocky throat of the pass I came to the upper
world, the level upper world. It was evening, livid, cold. On either
side spread the sort of moorland of the wide pass-head. I drew near
along the high-road, to Andermatt.
Everywhere were soldiers moving about the livid, desolate waste of this
upper world. I passed the barracks and the first villas for visitors.
Darkness was coming on; the straggling, inconclusive street of Andermatt
looked as if it were some accident--houses, hotels, barracks,
lodging-places tumbled at random as the caravan of civilization crossed
this high, cold, arid bridge of the European world.
I bought two post cards and wrote them out of doors in the cold, livid
twilight. Then I asked a soldier where was the post-office. He directed
me. It was something like sending post cards from Skegness or Bognor,
there in the post-office.
I was trying to make myself agree to stay in Andermatt for the night.
But I could not. The whole place was so terribly raw and flat and
accidental, as if great pieces of furniture had tumbled out of a
pantechnicon and lay discarded by the road. I hovered in the street, in
the twilight, trying to make myself stay. I looked at the announcements
of lodgings and boarding for visitors. It was no good. I could not go
into one of these houses.
So I passed on, through the old, low, broad-eaved houses that cringe
down to the very street, out into the open again. The air was fierce and
savage. On one side was a moorland, level; on the other a sweep of naked
hill, curved concave, and sprinkled with snow. I could see how wonderful
it would all be, under five or six feet of winter snow, skiing and
tobogganing at Christmas. But it needed the snow. In the summer there is
to be seen nothing but the winter's broken detritus.
The twilight deepened, though there was still the strange, glassy
translucency of the snow-lit air. A fragment of moon was in the sky. A
carriage-load of French tourists passed me. There was the loud noise of
water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the
sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a
second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity,
this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that
mocks and destroys our warm being.
So I came, in the early darkness, to the little village with the broken
castle that stands for ever frozen at the point where the track parts,
one way continuing along the ridge, to the Furka Pass, the other
swerving over the hill to the left, over the Gotthardt.
In this village I must stay. I saw a woman looking hastily, furtively
from a doorway. I knew she was looking for visitors. I went on up the
hilly street. There were only a few wooden houses and a gaily lighted
wooden inn, where men were laughing, and strangers, men, standing
talking loudly in the doorway.
It was very difficult to go to a house this night. I did not want to
approach any of them. I turned back to the house of the peering woman.
She had looked hen-like and anxious. She would be glad of a visitor to
help her pay her rent.
It was a clean, pleasant wooden house, made to keep out the cold. That
seemed its one function: to defend the inmates from the cold. It was
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