The Sun.
London, England, 1865-09-28 00:00:00

ALP.

MS,

(From the Times' Correspondent)
RIFFLEBERG, Sept. 23.
Up, up, up, and up again ; it must go hard if a
man does not rise so high towards Heaven as to
find a cool spot upon earth. We left Visp yester-
day morning soon after 5, mounted on steeds whose
slow gait is something between the long stride of
the camel and the crushing tread of the elephant.
We had hardly reached Stalden when the sun was
high up in the valley, and we found no shelter
against its fierce heat in the few straggling fir trees
hanging here and there upon the steep road. It was
hot at St. Nicklaus, where we breakfasted on tough
beefsteak and sour Ballioz wine. Hotter still at
Branda, where we had a thimbleful of Kirschwasser
dashed into a bottle of lemonade gazeuze. The heat
had reached its acme when we stopped at the Hotel
Monte Rosa at Zermatt, and called for a pint of
Champagne Vaudois and a crust of bread. We had
nevertheless come over the whole length of this never
ending St. Nicholas Valley, and reached its head at
Zermatt at 2 in the afternoon, accomplishing the 94
hours' distance in seven hours, without computing
the stoppage of about 1k hours at St. Nicklaus. Al
this we achieved by forcing our heavy steeds into al
bone-breaking jog trot from time to time, and tak-
ing to our own legs when all other means of urging
on those sorry quadrupeds failed us. We drank
our sparkling wine and munched our dry crust at
Zermatt, and half an hour later went our way on
foot to the Riffleberg Hotel, wondering how any
human being who could possibly help it could take
up his quarters at Zermatt. It would be the same
as if one went to St. Paul's to enjoy the panorama
of London, and stopped at some of the shops below
in the churchyard. We had a stiff two hours' walk
up to the Riffieberg, a tough piece of work, yet
hardly worth mentioning, inasmuch as a good bridle
path has been made, not only to the hotel, but fur-
ther up to the Gornergrat,and no ascenGwhere horse
can go should properly be reckoned as real mountain
climbing. At the Riffieberg, at last, we found a cool
breeze for the first time this many a week, and even
the fewest imaginable drops of refreshing rain. •
I was here at this same Riffleberg Hotel 11 years
ago, arriving late at night, after crossing the Weiss
Thor from Macugnaga, the greatest Alpine feat
ever achieved by my legs in younger days. But
even after 11 years—nay, after a long lifetime,
a man who has been once on the spot, and has
only looked about him for five minutes, would
never forget a single feature in this matchless pano-
rama. There are far more beautiful spots in the
Bernese Oberland ; greater contrast between rock
and glacier on the one side, and fine meadow ver-
dure and luxurious vegetation on the other, is to be
met with at the foot of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa,
on the Piedmontese side; but nowhere in the world
are you more at home among snows and above
glaciers than at the Riffieberg, and no pyramidal
mountain rises so close at hand and at the sametime
so hopelessly above you, so apparently beyond all
human reach, as that murderous Matterhorn. The
Matterhorn, still stained with the blood of its vic-
tims of two months ago, is here the king to whom
some scores of the highest summits in Europe bow in
obeisance. Even Monte Rosa, though considerably
higher, though so much more dignified and majestic
a mountain mass, must be satisfied with playing
second part to its great rival, Mont Cervin, in the
Zermatt region. Monte Rcsa is most distinctly an
Italian mountain ; on its southern slopes, at Gres-
soney, Alagna, and Macugnaga, its greatness can be
fully appreciated, and from any part of the vast
plain from Turin to Milan it can be seen in all its
majesty, the giant of the chain, the brightest jewel
in the mountain-diadem of Italy.
The sea of snow and ice surrounding the open
platform of the Riffleberg, seen more comprehen-
sively from the summit ,of. the Gornergrat, is still
inexhausted, but it looks at this present moment far
less inexhaustible than it did at the period of my
former visit. The long drought of this extraordinary
summer has dug as deep into the frozen mass as it
is in the power of any solar influence to achieve.
The lower ends of the glaciers here, as at Grindel-
wald and Murren arc converted into dry squalid
" moraines," and the lower skirts of the Alpine
mantle look as if they had been squeezed up like half
washed linen and stretched out to dry in the warp-
ing and withering sunlight.
It is, strange as it may appear, with a kind of
melancholy feeling that one looks upon the ravages
of this never-ending summer among the beauties of
the higher Alpine region. The epithet of " ever-
lasting" seems now less than ever applicable to the
Alps. This dwindling of glaciers and waterfalls re-
minds you, on the contrary, that these huge masses
are perpetually crumbling; every wave of those
muddy roaring torrents carries with it part of their
spoil; every one of those deep chasms, of those abrupt
crags and cliffs, tellsits tale of the slow but sure work
of frost and thaw. The Alps are going, ever going,
and imagination can anticipate the time when all
their rough grandeur shall have gone altogether,
when nothing shall remain of them save only round,
smooth eminences like the older Alleghanies and
Blue Ridges of North America. Melancholy as the
thought may be, let not the reader distress himself
on his own account or mine. Let the summer be
never so long, and the sun never so hot, the Alps, I
confidently believe, will last our time.

At Zermatt and the Rifileberg I have fallen in
with the Alpine tourists properly so called—those
who, according to the classification given in one of
my former letters, belong to the first category. Only
the other evening, at Visp, the company was still
mixed. Pleasanter talk than we had with a set of
highly civilised travellers on their way across the
Simplon to the Italian lakes I hardly ever remember
enjoying in my former tours. There was a Q.C., an
M.P., with his lady, a stately beauty, who had
nothing to fear from comparison with three or four
lovely grown-up daughters; there was a middle-aged
gentleman, doing duty as a tutor or bear-leader to
his own son, at home for the holidays—the father
the most intimate friend of the son, the son proud of
nothing so much on earth as his bland, gentlemanly
father; there were, in short, a score of persons, a
handful of the sand from that ocean shore which
constitutes the English nation, and these persons,
without hardly a link of common interest among
them, with no other ties of acquaintance than such
as began and were to end with that late table d'hote
dinner, spent together as agreeable an evening as if
each of them had cudgelled his braini to call
together the choicest company at his own house.
By that instinct which goes such great lengths
towards the composition of a gentlemanly charac-
ter, each of the guests took the part naturally
suited__ to him on his very first sitting down.
We had talkers and listeners. We had those who
had much to tell us about the Valais, its actualsocial
condition, the decline of its noble families, the
dwindling of the rural
Population,. their declineboth
in physical and moral qualities, in
health and wealth , with allusions to the annals of the
Past, when lordly
families from the turbulent Italian republics, the
Tome, ty4:6,kurienfguglet
Tavelli, the Biondrate, the Delia
in the hitherto quiet and happy
with their hereditary feuds, and converting it into a
theatre of violence and bloodshed ; when the Bishops
of Zion were by their riotous vassals thrown over
the battlements of their castles ; or when, in later
times, those same ambitious and warlike prelates led
the Valaisan peasantry down the plains of Italy,
_ _

allied themselves to the mercenary mountaineers of
the Forest Cantons, andadoptingthemaxim "Point
d'argent, point de Suisse," sold themselves and their
followers to the highest bidder, ready to sell the
latter in turn, whenever interest, bigotry, or caprice
seemed in their ignorant estimation and lax con-
science to justify defection and treason.
Our dinner last evening at the Riffieberg was with
an altogether different set. We had none but men
here. Strange to say, the inn is not only exclu-
sively officered,:but actually commanded by women.
Our landlady is a sister or cousin of those brothers
Seiler who have the Monte Rosa Hotel at Zer-

__—
matt and the " Rhone Glacier" at the Furka Pass.
This lady, a young and pretty woman, is general-in-
chief ; under her a score of handmaidens ; no man in
the house except Boots, who never shows exceptfor
his night work, and whose only office, besidesblack-
ing, is that of killing the daily sheep, an act of
necessary cruelty to which no female heart could
lend itself. This table of mere men, attended by only
women, was, though on the whole perfectly orderly