fulfil it. From Brienz to the top of the Grimsel is, as the
crow flies, quite twenty miles, and by the road a good twenty-seven.
It is true I had only come from over the high hills; perhaps six miles
in a straight line. But what a six miles! and all without food. Not
certain, therefore, how much of the pass I could really do that day,
but aiming at crossing it, like a fool, I went on up the first miles.

For an hour or more after Brienz the road runs round the base of and
then away from a fine great rock. There is here an alluvial plain like
a continuation of the lake, and the Aar runs through it, canalized and
banked and straight, and at last the road also becomes straight. On
either side rise gigantic cliffs enclosing the valley, and (on the day
I passed there) going up into the clouds, which, though high, yet made
a roof for the valley. From the great mountains on the left the noble
rock jutted out alone and dominated the little plain; on the right the
buttresses of the main Alps all stood in a row, and between them went
whorls of vapour high, high up--just above the places where snow still
clung to the slopes. These whorls made the utmost steeps more and more
misty, till at last they were lost in a kind of great darkness, in
which the last and highest banks of ice seemed to be swallowed up. I
often stopped to gaze straight above me, and I marvelled at the
silence.

It was the first part of the afternoon when I got to a place called
Meiringen, and I thought that there I would eat and drink a little
more. So I steered into the main street, but there I found such a
yelling and roaring as I had never heard before, and very damnable it
was; as though men were determined to do common evil wherever God has
given them a chance of living in awe and worship.

For they were all bawling and howling, with great placards and
tickets, and saying, 'This way to the Extraordinary Waterfall; that
way to the Strange Cave. Come with me and you shall see the
never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar,' and so forth. So that my
illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very
quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as
to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this
vulgarity and beastliness.

If a man goes to drink good wine he does not say, 'So that the wine be
good I do not mind eating strong pepper and smelling hartshorn as I
drink it,' and if a man goes to read a good