The Spell of Switzerland Part 12

"M. de Bons, an eye-witness, described one of these _coulees_. 'A whitish vapor rose into the air as it left the gorge. At the same instant a dull noise and a violent gust of wind apprised us of the approach of the _coulee_. The moving ma.s.s came down upon us with irresistible force but so slowly that a man at his ordinary walking pace could have gone on his way without being overtaken by it.

Enormous blocks of stone seemed literally to float on the stream; at times they stood out of the liquid ma.s.s as if they were as light as a feather; then again they would tip and sink into the mud till nothing could be seen of them. A little farther down they could be seen again coming gradually to the surface, to float for a while until finally swallowed up, repeating at various stages of their progress the same scenes and the same accidents.

"'The bed of the torrent was remarkably narrow at one point. Huge boulders were stopped there and formed a barrier against which the fragments carried along by the river were collected. For some minutes a strange conflict was waged here, the rus.h.i.+ng _debacle_ of ice and water endeavoring to flow back for a long distance; the river rose till it almost caused a freshet. At last by carrying the _debris_ along, it succeeded in effecting an outlet and overthrew all the obstacles impeding its course. Rocks, trees, lumps of ice, _debris_ of every kind all went whirling round and round with a long, savage roar, then disappeared in the current and were borne downwards across the slopes of the Bois Noir.'

"Since 1835 there has been scarcely any disturbance in the mountain.

The waters, however, are at work, and who can predict that a still more terrible catastrophe will not some day desolate the valley of the Rhone?

"The people no longer see the hand of demons in these devastations nor do they exorcize the mountain; but a pious custom has it that each year a procession makes its way to a hill above La Ra.s.se with a cross standing on it and there invokes the Creator's protection by their prayers."

To the eye that sees, the solid rock is just as much liquid and in commotion as the flowing river; it is all in a state of flux. The mountain-tops are plunging down into the valleys and then the rains and the rivers grasp them and roll them and reduce them, until the porphyry and the granite and the limestone become almost microscopic sand, which, as every one knows, blows and flows like water. These beautiful little lakes, which one sees everywhere in Switzerland, if they should be able to write their autobiographies--indeed they are able to write their autobiographies and in hieroglyphics which Science can read--would tell us and do tell us of many a rock-fall which has stopped the descent of rivers.

I remember some weeks later, as we were riding in the "Moto," as I call the touring-car, up to Flims--a most absurd and flimsy squas.h.i.+ng up of the Latin name flumina, the streams--my attention was called to the enormous glacial rock-fall which ages ago blocked up the whole valley of the Rhine to a depth of between two and three thousand feet.

The river, much surprised, had to go to work to cut through the ma.s.s of _debris_. There are still several of the lakes which came from the same catastrophe--if that can be called a catastrophe--which probably affected no human being for the worse. Many of these rock-falls, however, have ruined whole populations; churches and houses have been swept away. Sometimes, after a long-continued rain, the whole side of a mountain-slope will begin to sweep down. One sees the same thing in a smaller scale on the side of a gulley where a road has been lowered.

The laws of gravitation, the erosive powers of water, the effects of frost, are just the same at wholesale as they are at retail.

The bay sweeping in between the cone of the Dranse and the Pointe d'Yvoire is called La Grande Conche. We lengthened our course by following the sh.o.r.e, though we kept well out beyond the mouths of the two torrents which Emile told us were Le Redon and Le Foron. Yvoire is different from the other promontories of the lake: the huge blocks of stone which are scattered about make it evident that it is the remains of a terminal moraine. This and huge boulders which have been discovered in the bottom of the lake prove that the hollow valley in which the lake lies was scooped out by a glacier which as it melted left its freight of stone brought down from distant mountain-sides.

Just off Yvoire, which looks very attractive with its glistening beaches and its fine old castle, between a kilometer and a half and two kilometers away, and at a depth of about sixty meters, is a fis.h.i.+ng-bank called L'Ombliere. There the much esteemed fish "l'omble chevalier," or in German _der Ritter_, comes to breed and be caught.

There will generally be seen cl.u.s.tered together the fishermen's boats with their lateen sails c.o.c.k-billed. Occasionally a storm comes up suddenly and works havoc. They still talk of the tornado of 1879, when eleven Savoy fishermen were drowned.

There are about twenty-two different kinds of fish inhabiting the lake, several of them good eating. I should think it might be possible to introduce the whitefish of our Great Lakes: the Leman salmon is not superior to that n.o.ble ranger of the depths.

We saw a good many wild birds. Emile gave us their names in French: _les besolets_ or sea-swallows--the kind that Rousseau went out to shoot, _les gros-sifflets_ with their sharp whistle, _les crenets_ as Rousseau calls the curlews, _les sifflasons_ which we could see running along the beach just beyond Yvoire, and the _grebe_ which he said was mighty good eating. Most of the Mediterranean sea-gulls which, like human beings, like a change of scenery, and which in winter add greatly to the life of the lake, had returned to the south.

Beyond Nernier the sh.o.r.es contract and we enter "the Little Lake,"

which it is supposed occupies the valley excavated by the Arve. We were fortunate to round the point in good time, for our weather had been too good to last; the hard greenish coloured clouds streaking toward the southeast after a reddish sunrise had betokened a change; it had been clouding up all the forenoon, and before we got out into the open off La Pointe d'Yvoire, _Le Sudois_ was blowing "great guns"

and a heavy sea was running. It seemed best to take the swallow's swiftest flight for Geneva, not pausing as we intended to do at Beauregard or the Port de Tougues or indulging in historic reminiscences suggested by the valley of Hermance where the torrent of that name serves to separate the canton from the departement--Switzerland from France. Afterwards, when we pa.s.sed through it in our Moto, we had a chance to see its quaint streets, its houses with vines clambering over them, its red-tiled roofs. Once we had to turn out carefully to avoid a yoke of oxen which seemed to think they owned the whole place.

The glimpse of La Belotte (to mention only one of the dozen places that charmed us as we approached the great city) would have inspired a painter. Boats were drawn up along the gently shelving sh.o.r.e; there were several picturesque brown houses which looked from the distance like fish-houses, only neater than most of those we see along our New England coast. A _naue_ with two b.u.t.terfly sails was just coming in from up the lake. Men were evidently hurrying to make the boats safe from the gale, if it should develop into a real storm.

The lake approach to Geneva even under a grey and threatening sky gives as it were the key-note to its extraordinary charm. Its n.o.ble waterfront, its lofty buildings, its background of escarped rocks and its general air of prosperity, beckon a friendly welcome. We darted in between the two phares or lighthouses which decorate the long jetties, and turning aside from the surf current, we came alongside the pleasant Quai du Mont Blanc.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WATERFRONT AND THE ILE ROUSSEAU, GENEVA]

CHAPTER XII

GENEVA

Shortly after we reached the Grand Hotel des Bergues, which is so beautifully situated on the quai of the same name, it began to rain.

My room looked down on the Ile Rousseau with its cl.u.s.tering trees. The five tall poplars stood dignified and disdainful and only bent their heads when a gust of wind swept them; but the old chestnut-trees turned up their pallid green leaves and looked unhappy. Pradier's bronze monument streamed with raindrops. The white swans ignored the downpour and sailed about like little boats. The enforced monotony of quietude required by confinement even in a commodious c.o.c.kpit made exercise indispensable, and, after luncheon, we protected ourselves against the weather and sallied out for a walk. We had all the long afternoon. I proposed to go to Ferney and pay our respects to the memory of Voltaire, but we found it was too early in the season. A few weeks later, however, one beautiful bright Wednesday, we ran over in the Moto and carried out my pious desire.

My next proposition was to walk down to the junction of the two rivers. There is nothing more fascinating on earth than such an union; it is a perpetually renewed marriage. From far-separated sources, as if from different families, the two streams come. Like human beings, each has received a mult.i.tude of accessions as if from varied ancestry. Then at last they meet and cast in their lots together, never again to be parted till they are swallowed up in the great Ocean of Death which is Life.

With them it is a perpetual circle or cycle of reincarnation or rather redaquation. The greedy air sucks up the water and carries it away on its windy wings until it is caught like a thief by the guardian mountains and compelled to disgorge. The mountains are unable to keep it even in the form of snow. It flows down their sides in the slower rivers called glaciers, which toss up mighty waves and carry with them great freight of boulders. Then the fierce Sun shouts down: "Surrender," and he liberates the imprisoned ice and, once more changed into water, it gallops down the mountains revenging itself for its years or centuries of imprisonment in the chains of the Frost by carrying away with it the very foundations on which the mountains rest, until, undermined, the proud peaks fall with a mighty crash.

The Rhone and the Arve do not fulfil the marriage injunction all at once and become one. The muddy grey Arve brings down a quant.i.ty of sand and rolls considerable-sized pebbles along its channel. The Rhone emerges clear and blue. Read Ruskin's famous description from the Fourth Book of the "Modern Painters:"--

"The blue waters of the arrowy Rhone rush out with a depth of fifteen feet of not flowing but flying water; not water neither, melted glacier matter, one should call it; the force of the ice is in it and the wreathing of the clouds, the gladness of the sky and the countenance of time."

So we plashed along, crossing the Rhone by the Pont de la Coulouvreniere, where we paused to wonder at the great city water works installed in 1886 by the clever engineer, Turretini. The so-called Forces Motrices, utilizing the swift descent of the Rhone makes Geneva an ideal manufacturing city. Imagine six thousand horses at work, never wearied, never requiring grain, noiseless, joyous!

Indeed there is something rather fine in the idea of turning the old element, Water, into its Protean manifestation, light and electric power. It goes through the turbines, sets them whirling and comes out, having lost nothing by this tremendous output of energy--just as clear, just as beautiful, just as sparkling. It does not harm an element any more than it harms a man or a horse to do some useful work.

But it is evident that Switzerland, like other parts of the world, is going to have some trouble to unite the interests of those that would convert her hundreds of waterfalls into centres of manufacturing-power and the interests of those that would keep scenic beauties free from all mercantile desecration. What would the World of Travel say if some concessionaire should take possession of the Staubbach, or as more certain the Trummelbach, and pipe it in an ugly steel stand-pipe to create electrical energy for the purpose of manufacturing nitrates!

Yet even now there is a project for damming the Rhone between Pyremont and Bellegarde. This structure would be one hundred and one meters in height and would cause the water to back up even to the Swiss frontier, submerging the whole valley.

I may as well say here that I renewed acquaintance with my steams.h.i.+p friend, M. Criant, and had the pleasure of going with him and my nephew, some weeks later, when the river was much diminished in volume, to that wonderful curiosity of nature called La Perte du Rhone. We examined the narrow deep gorge between the Cret d'Eau and the Vuache Mountain and just above where the Rhone and the Valserine meet, the river narrows to about fifteen meters in width. Here for a distance of twenty kilometers it suddenly disappears. M. Criant explained the cause of this "loss." The bed of the stream consisted of two strata or matra.s.ses--the upper harder than the lower. Stones of various sizes brought down by the Arve and whirled around by the swift current of the big torrent--falling not far from twenty-five meters between Bellegarde and Malpertuis made pot-holes, and then when they reached the softer strata they excavated it, making a tunnel: through this the stream when reduced in volume makes its tortuous and invisible way.

M. Criant did not believe at all in the wisdom of building this dam which would be one of the highest in the world. It would cover the Perte du Rhone with a lake nearly seventy meters deep, and although power enough would be created to supply all Lyons and perhaps be carried as far as Paris, still it would be a menace to the safety of the towns below. He agreed with his friend Professor Blondel, of the Ecole Superieure des Ponts et Chaussees, that the whole valley of the Rhone is in unstable equilibrium, and such a ma.s.s of water with its enormous weight would be likely to tear out its walls and overwhelm even Lyons with its catastrophe. He told me what was said by another friend of his, M. E. A. Martel. He did this as a compliment, and I hardly dared tell him what the Congress of the United States was likely to do in turning over the wonderful Hetch-Hetchy Valley to the water-seeking vandals of San Francisco. M. Martel said:--

"In the United States, that great country, famous for its monumental works and the utilization of hydraulic forces, the discussion of the two projects would not even be entered into; for the Americans who, generally speaking, are not embarra.s.sed with a sentiment for art, at least respect and wors.h.i.+p the natural beauties of their country. We must recognize their talent for being able to conciliate at once the protection of nature and the development of industries. Long since they would have declared the Perte and the Canyon of the Rhone to be a National Park and the two dams (lower down) would have become an accomplished fact.

"At Niagara Falls an agreement was made with the Canadian Government so that the primitive natural aspect of the banks themselves was preserved. Its immediate sh.o.r.es are freed from all installations, constructions and parasitic shops. But this has not prevented the establishment and development, in a discreet and invisible way, of methods of taking the water above the falls, while the machinery that transforms the force of the water into electric energy is placed below, thereby not injuring the beautiful features of the landscape."

M. Criant showed how easy it would be to solve the difficulty here in a more economical way and at the same time make the approach to this wonderful curiosity of nature more feasible.

My nephew and I walked down as far as the end of the fascinating Sentier des Saules, out to the very point where the two swirling streams begin their pa.s.sionate wooing. If it had been a pleasant afternoon we should have crossed the Arve by the Pont de Saint-Georges and penetrated the Bois de la Batie, but an umbrella has no place in a grove, and so we came back by the boulevard named for the same popular saint, past the Velodrome and the gas works, the cemetery of Plainpalais to the Place Neuve. Here we admired Le Grand Theatre, standing by itself with ample approaches and artistic facade adorned with sculptures and stately columns.

It is a splendid thing for a man, whether prince or p.a.w.nbroker, enriched through the forced or accidental gift of the people, to return his fortune in the form of a benefaction _en bloc_. This the true osmose of wealth, to use a chemical figure. The slow flowing of countless littles into the hands of the One Overmaster Great is suddenly reversed. So it was with the fortune of Duke Charles II of Brunswick, who died in 1873 and left Geneva twenty millions of francs for public purposes. This has enabled Geneva to build the opera-house, and to carry on many other munic.i.p.al undertakings. Duke Charles had fifteen years of sovereignty though a good part of that time he had to be studying his lessons while a regent ruled for him. When he became of age he became a tyrant and his people drove him out. He gave Napoleon the Little pecuniary aid and expected to be reinstated, but after 1848 that was hopeless. In 1870 he retired to Geneva and died there.

Of course the duke himself had to be commemorated by a decorative monument and place was found for it between the Quai du Mont Blanc and the plaza des Alpes. It takes up considerable room. There is a platform more than sixty-seven meters long (two hundred and twenty-two feet) and nearly twenty-five meters (seventy-eight feet) wide and about twenty-one meters (sixty-six feet) high. On this stands a three-story hexagonal canopy sheltering a sarcophagus bearing a rec.u.mbent figure of the duke by Iguel, who also designed the reliefs depicting historic events in Brunswick. At each of the six corners are marble statues of his Guelf kinsmen. At a pedestal to the right is a bronze equestrian statue of Charles II. Two colossal lions of yellow marble, like those in Pilgrim's Progress warranted not to bite, guard the entrance. The architect, Franel, went for his inspiration to the flamboyant Gothic tomb of the Della Scala princes at Verona but it is generally considered that he did not improve on his model. The equestrian statue was at first mounted on top of the monument and there are pictures of it in that position but apparently people wondered how a horse could have climbed so high and so they made him back down.

Sculpture at its best is the most decorative of all the arts, at least for out-of-doors, but mediocre statuary ought to be regarded as what Mrs. Malaprop called a statuary offence. Geneva is not much more fortunate than other cities in the appropriateness of its sculptures.

Victor Hugo, who made a flying visit to Geneva in September, 1839, thought the city had lost much by its so-called improvements. He did not like it that the row of old worm-eaten dilapidated houses in the Rue des Domes, which made such a picturesque lake-front, had been demolished, and he thought the white quais with the white barracks which the worthy Genovese regard as palaces could not compare with the old dirty ramshackle city which he had known a dozen or so years previous. He complained bitterly because they had been putting it through a process of raking, sc.r.a.ping, levelling and weeding out, so that with the exception of the b.u.t.te Saint-Pierre and the bridges across the Rhone there was not an ancient structure left. He called it "a plat.i.tude surrounded by humps."

"Nothing," he said, "is more unattractive than these little imitation Parises which one now finds in the provinces, in France and out of France. In an ancient city with its towers and its carved house-fronts, one expects to find historic streets, Gothic or Roman bell-towers; but one finds an imitation Rue de Rivoli, an imitation Madeleine resembling the facade of the Bobino Theater, an imitation Column Vendome looking like an advertising-tower."

I wonder what he would have thought of the Duke Charles II imitation.

Nevertheless time has justified the Genevans; its brand-new quais are no longer glaringly new, and "its yellow and its white and its plaster and its chalk" have been toned down by time. It has grown into a truly imperial city. I was surprised at the number of buildings of seven stories and more; it cannot be called an imitation of Paris.

In one of the second-hand book-shops--I wonder why they are always on quais, where there are quais--I picked up an amusing little volume ent.i.tled, "The Present State of Geneva," published in 1681 and purporting to have been composed in Italian for the Great Duke of Florence by Signior Gregorio Seti. He begins with this bold statement:--"Geneva, as appears by some chronicles of the County of Vaux, is one of the ancientist cities of Europe, being commonly supposed to have been built by Lema.n.u.s, son of Hercules, the great King of the Gaules, who gave his name likewise to the Lake Lema.n.u.s.

The first foundation of it was laid in the Year of the World 3994, upon a little rising Hill covered with Juniper Trees called by the French _Geneuriers_, from whence it afterwards took the name of _Geneura_."

He goes on to say:--"In the time of Julius Caesar this City was of great renown and by him called the Bulwork of Helvetia and frontiere town of the Allobrogi, which name at present it deserves more than ever.

"When the eruption was made upon the _Swissers_ in the year of G.o.d 230, by the Emperor Heliogabalus Geneva was almost utterly destroyed by Fire but in the Time of Aurelian the Emperour about the Year of Grace 270, it was by the same Emperour rebuilt, who having bestowed many priviledges on those that came to repair it, commanded it for the future to be called Aurelia, but the inhabitants could not easily banish from their minds the ancient name of Geneva which to this day it bears, though during the Life of Aurelian they called it Aurelia."

He tells how on the south it is "adorned with a spatious Neighboring Plain reaching to the very Walls and encompa.s.sed by two large Rivers, the _Rone_ and the _Arue_. This Plain," he says, "serves the Citizens for a place of diversion and Recreation and here they walk to take the Air and refresh themselves in the delightful Gardens which inviron it, of which there is a great number. There likewise they train and exercise their Souldiers and divert themselves at Play in a long Mall.

"This Plain is commonly called the Plain Palace and in a Corner thereof where the _Arue_ falls into the _Rone_ there is a spatious burying place for the dead."

At that time there were four bridges. All four had originally houses and shops on them but in 1670 a terrible fire broke out on one of the largest and most inhabited of them and destroyed seventy houses, leaving one hundred and thirty families homeless and taking the lives of more than a hundred persons. The new bridges that took the places of the old ones were by edict freed from all such inc.u.mbrances, which, however picturesque, are certainly dangerous and unsanitary.

The little book contained a good deal of information in small s.p.a.ce, in spite of its erratic spelling. It stated, for instance, that Calvin was originally buried in Plain Palace, but when the Genevians heard that the Savoyards were coming "to dig up and insult over his bones they were removed and buried within the cloyster of Saint Peter's Church."