Page:Whymper - Scrambles amongst the Alps.djvu/30

4 carry burdens, they will still continue, by natural selection, to do the same. This habit frequently gives rise to scenes; two mules meet; each wishes to pass on the outside, and neither will give way. It requires considerable persuasion, through the medium of the tail, before such difficulties are arranged.

I visited the baths of Leuk, and saw the queer assemblage of men, women, and children, attired in bathing-gowns, chatting, drinking, and playing at chess in the water. The company did not seem to be perfectly sure whether it was decorous in such a situation and in such attire for elderly men to chase young females from one corner to another, but it was unanimous in howling at the advent of a stranger who remained covered, and literally yelled when I departed without exhibiting my sketch. I trudged up the Rhone valley, and turned aside at Visp to go up the Visp Thal, where one would expect to see greater traces of glacial action, if a glacier formerly filled it, as one is said to have done.

I was bound for the valley of Saas, and my work took me high up the Alps on either side; far beyond limit of trees and the tracks of tourists. The view from the slopes of the Wiessmies, on the eastern side of the valley, 5000 or 6000 feet above the village of Saas, is perhaps the finest of its kind in the Alps. The full height of the three-peaked Mischabel (the highest mountain in Switzerland) is seen at one glance; 11,000 feet of dense forests, green alps, pinnacles of rock, and glittering glaciers. The peaks seemed to me then to be hopelessly inaccessible from this direction.

I descended the valley to the village of Stalden, and then went up the Visp Thal to Zermatt, and stopped there several days. Numerous traces of the formidable earthquake-shocks of five years before still remained, particularly at St. Nicholas, where the inhabitants had been terrified bevond measure at the destruction of