CHAPTER X.

Pass of the Gemmi. Successive splendors of the view.

It is a scene as singular as it is sublime. You march up towards the base of the mountain; you look above you, around you, but there is no way; you are utterly at a loss. You still advance to within three or four feet of the smooth perpendicular rock, and still there is no outlet. Is there any cave, or subterranean passage, or are you to be hoisted, mules and all, by some invisible machinery over the crags? Thus musing, your guide suddenly turns to the left, and begins a zigzag ascent, where you never dreamed it was possible, over a steep slope of crumbling rocky fragments, that are constantly falling from above, by which at length you reach a ridgy winding shelf or wrinkle on the face of the mountain, not visible from below. Here you might have seen from the valley parties of travellers circling the rocky wall, as if they were clinging to it sideways by some supernatural power, and you may see others far above you coming down. Sometimes sick persons are borne on litters down these precipices to visit the baths, having their eyes blindfolded to avoid seeing the perils of the way.

It is a lovely day, most lovely. Far and near you can see with dazzling distinctness; trees and crags, streams, towns, meadowslopes, mountain outlines, and snowy summits. And now every step upwards increases your wonder and admiration. You rise from point to point, commanding a wider view at every turn. You overhang the most terrible precipices. You scale the face of crags, where narrow galleries have been blasted like grooves, leaving the mountain arching and beetling over you above, while there is no sort of barrier between you and the almost immeasurable gulf below. It is a passage which tries a man's nerves. My companion did not dare to ride, but dismounted, and placing

the guide outside between him and the outer edge of the grooves, crept along, leaning against the mountains, and steadying himself with his hands. The tremendous depths, without fence or protection, made him sick and dizzy. Once or twice I had the same sensation, but generally enjoyed the sense of danger, which adds so greatly to the element of sublimity.

This ascent, so perpendicular, yet by its zigzags so gradual, affords a constant change and enlargement of view. The little village and baths of Leuk look like a parcel of children's toys in wax, it is so far below you. Now you can see clear across the Dala valley with its villages and mountains, clear down into the valley of the Simplon. Now the vast snowy range of mountains on the Italian side begins to be visible. Now you can distinctly count their summits, you may tell all their names, you gaze at them as a Chaldean shepherd at the beauty of the stars, you can follow their ranges from Monte Rosa and the Velan even to the Grand St. Bernard, where the hoary giant keeps guard over the lovely Val D'Aoste, and locks the kingdom of Italy. How dazzling, how beautiful are their forms; verily, you could sit and watch them all day, if the sun would stay with them, and not tire of their study.

But now a zigzag takes you again in the opposite direction, and again you enter a tremendous gorge, by a blasted hanging gallery, where the mountains on either side frown like two black thunder-clouds about to discharge their artillery. On the other side of this awful gulf, the daring chamois hunters have perched a wooden box for a sort of watch-tower beneath a shelf in the precipice, utterly inaccessible except by a long pole from beneath, with a few pegs running through it, in imitation of a dead pine. An inexperienced chamois might take it for an eagle's nest, and here a man may lie concealed with his musket, till he has opportunity to mark his prey. How majestically that bird below us cleaves the air, and comes sailing up the gorge, and now circles the gigantic cliffs of the Gemmi, and sweeps away from us into the sky! Would it not be a glorious privilege to be able in like manner ourselves to sail off into liquid air, and mount up to heaven? Oh that I had wings like a dove, then would I fly away and be at rest. So we shall be able to soar, from glorious peak

to peak, from one part of God's universe to another, when clothed upon with our spiritual body, our house which is from heaven.

Where we stand now there is a remarkable echo from the depths of the gorge and the opposite face of the mountain. You hear the sound of your footsteps and your voices, as if another party were travelling on the other side. You shout, and your words are twice distinctly reverberated and repeated. In some places this Echo is as if there were a subterranean concert, muffled and deep, of strange beings, creatures of wild dreams, the Seven Sleepers awakened, or people talking in a madhouse. The travellers shout, then hold their breath, and look at one another, and listen with a sense of childish wonder to the strange, clear, bold answers, out-spoken across the grim black gorge in the mountain. The Poet Wordsworth seems to have heard the full cry of a hunting pack, rebellowing to the bark of a little dog, that took it into its head to wake the Echo. Thence came that fine sonnet from his tour on the Continent.

"WHAT Beast of Chase hath broken from the cover? Stern GEMMI listens to as full a cry,

As multitudinous a harmony,

As e'er did ring the heights of Latmos over,

When, from the soft couch of her sleeping Lover,
Upstarting, Cynthia skimmed the mountain dew
In keen pursuit, and gave, where'er she flew,
Impetuous motion to the stars above her.

A solitary wolf-dog, ranging on

Through the bleak concave, wakes this wondrous chime

Of aëry voices locked in unison,

Faint-far off-near-deep-solemn and sublime!

So from the body of a single deed

A thousand ghostly fears and haunting thoughts proceed!"

This last comparison unexpectedly reveals one of the most impressive thoughts ever bodied forth by Wordsworth's Imagination. There is an eternal Echo both to the evil and the good of our actions. The Universe is as a Gallery, to take up the report and send it back upon us, in music sweet as the celestial harmonies, or in crashing thunder of wrath upon the soul. Evil deeds, above all, have their Echo. The man may be quiet for a season, and hear no voice, but Conscience is yet to be roused, and he is

to stand as in the centre of Eternity, and hear the reverberation coming back upon him, in Remorse, Judgment, Retribution. The reproduction of himself upon himself would alone be retribution, the reverberation of his evil character and actions. Every man is to meet this, whose evil is not purged away by Christ; whose life is not pardoned, whose soul is not cleansed, whose heart is not penitent and made new by Divine Grace.

So neither the evil nor the good that men do is ever interred with their bones, but lives after them. There is always going on this process of reverberation, reproduction, resurrection. Wherefore let the wicked man remember, when he speaks or acts an evil thing, though in present secresy and silence, that he is yet to hear the Echo from Eternity.

"Now! It is gone! Our brief hours travel post;
Each with its thought or deed, its why or how.
But know, each parting hour gives up a ghost,
To dwell within thee, an Eternal Now."

You continue your zigzag ascent, wondering where it can at length end. Your mule treads with the utmost unconcern on the very brink of the outjutting crags, with her head and neck projecting over into the gulf, which is so deep and so sheer a perpendicular, that in some places a plumb line might be thrown into the valley below, near 1600 feet, almost without touching the rock. It makes you dizzy to look down into the valley from a much less height than this, but still you ascend, and still command a wider and more magnificent view of the Snowy Alps on the Italian side of the Canton du Valais. You are now on a level with those hanging lines of misty light, so distant and so beautiful, floating over the valley of the Simplon, where the vapor is suspended in hazy layers, just beneath the limit of perpetual snow. Above are the snow-shining mountains, below, the grey crags, forests of fir, pasturages, chalets, farms, castles, and villages.

"Fancy hath flung for me an airy bridge

Across thy long, deep Valley, furious Rhone!
Arch, that here rests upon the granite ridge
Of Monte Rosa-there on frailer stone

Of secondary birth-the Jungfrau's cone;

And from that Arch, down looking on the Vale,
The aspect I behold of every zone;

A sea of foliage tossing with the gale,

Blithe Autumn's purple crown, and Winter's icy mail."
WORDSWORTH.

And now at length you have accomplished the ascent, and reached the highest point of the pass of the Gemmi. You turn with reluctance from one of the grandest views in Switzerland, though you have been enjoying it for hours; but it is always a grief to quit a chain of snowy Alps in the landscape, for they are like a wide view of the ocean; it thrills you with delight when you come upon them. You emerge from the gorge, pass the little shed, which would be somewhat better than an umbrella in a storm, walk a few steps, and what a contrast! What a scene of winter and of savage wildness and desolation! You are 7200 feet above the level of the sea. Stupendous walls and needles of bare rock are shooting into the sky, adown whose slopes vast fields of ever-changing snow sweep restlessly, feeding a black lake in the centre of storm-beaten ridges of naked limestone. A vast pyramid of pure white snow rises so near you on the right, from behind these intervening ridges of bare rock, that it seems as if a few minutes' walk might plunge you into the midst of it. If you were to undertake it, you would find it a day's work, across frightful ravines, and over mountains. The desolation increases as you descend, till you come to the solitary auberge built upon the ruins of an avalanche, the scene, it is said, of one of the German poet Werner's tragedies.

You are suspicious here, though glad enough to have come to a place of refreshment, because Mr. Murray, whose Guide-book is the Bible of most Englishmen on the continent, has put into his pages the warning that the landlord of this inn is not well spoken of. You naturally expect to meet a surly, ill-looking fellow, who is going to cheat you, and who might on occasion murder you; but you find a pleasant looking man, who speaks pleasantly, treats you kindly, and charges no more for your fare than it is fairly worth; and you pass from the place exclaiming against the extreme injustice which has thus, upon the chance