on to the road, and from there to Brienz was but a short way
along a fine hard surface in a hot morning sun, with the gentle lake
on my right hand not five yards away, and with delightful trees upon
my left, caressing and sometimes even covering me with their shade.

I was therefore dry, ready and contented when I entered by mid morning
the curious town of Brienz, which is all one long street, and of which
the population is Protestant. I say dry, ready and contented; dry in
my clothes, ready for food, contented with men and nature. But as I
entered I squinted up that interminable slope, I saw the fog wreathing
again along the ridge so infinitely above me, and I considered myself
a fool to have crossed the Brienzer Grat without breakfast. But I
could get no one in Brienz to agree with me, because no one thought I
had done it, though several people there could talk French.

The Grimsel Pass is the valley of the Aar; it is also the eastern
flank of that great _massif,_ or bulk and mass of mountains called the
Bernese Oberland. Western Switzerland, you must know, is not (as I
first thought it was when I gazed down from the Weissenstein) a plain
surrounded by a ring of mountains, but rather it is a plain in its
northern half (the plain of the lower Aar), and in its southern half
it is two enormous parallel lumps of mountains. I call them 'lumps',
because they are so very broad and tortuous in their plan that they
are hardly ranges. Now these two lumps are the Bernese Oberland and
the Pennine Alps, and between them runs a deep trench called the
valley of the Rhone. Take Mont Blanc in the west and a peak called the
Crystal Peak over the Val Bavona on the east, and they are the
flanking bastions of one great wall, the Pennine Alps. Take the
Diablerets on the west, and the Wetterhorn on the east, and they are
the flanking bastions of another great wall, the Bernese Oberland. And
these two walls are parallel, with the Rhone in between.

Now these two walls converge at a point where there is a sort of knot
of mountain ridges, and this point may be taken as being on the
boundary between Eastern and Western Switzerland. At this wonderful
point the Ticino, the Rhone, the Aar, and the Reuss all begin, and it
is here that the simple arrangement of the Alps to the west turns into
the confused jumble of the Alps to the east.

When you are high up on either wall you can catch the plan of all
this, but to avoid a confused description an