Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1683 page)

They came, at length, to the poor little town of Brieg, at the foot of the Simplon.  They came there after dark, but yet could see how dwarfed men’s works and men became with the immense mountains towering over them.  Here they must lie for the night; and here was warmth of fire, and lamp, and dinner, and wine, and after-conference resounding, with guides and drivers.  No human creature had come across the Pass for four days.  The snow above the snow-line was too soft for wheeled carriage, and not hard enough for sledge.  There was snow in the sky.  There had been snow in the sky for days past, and the marvel was that it had not fallen, and the certainty was that it must fall.  No vehicle could cross.  The journey might be tried on mules, or it might be tried on foot; but the best guides must be paid danger-price in either case, and that, too, whether they succeeded in taking the two travellers across, or turned for safety and brought them back.

In this discussion, Obenreizer bore no part whatever.  He sat silently smoking by the fire until the room was cleared and Vendale referred to him.

“Bah!  I am weary of these poor devils and their trade,” he said, in reply.  “Always the same story.  It is the story of their trade to-day, as it was the story of their trade when I was a ragged boy.  What do you and I want?  We want a knapsack each, and a mountain-staff each.  We want no guide; we should guide him; he would not guide us.  We leave our portmanteaus here, and we cross together.  We have been on the mountains together before now, and I am mountain-born, and I know this Pass — Pass! — rather High Road! — by heart.  We will leave these poor devils, in pity, to trade with others; but they must not delay us to make a pretence of earning money.  Which is all they mean.”

Vendale, glad to be quit of the dispute, and to cut the knot: active, adventurous, bent on getting forward, and therefore very susceptible to the last hint: readily assented.  Within two hours, they had purchased what they wanted for the expedition, had packed their knapsacks, and lay down to sleep.

At break of day, they found half the town collected in the narrow street to see them depart.  The people talked together in groups; the guides and drivers whispered apart, and looked up at the sky; no one wished them a good journey.

As they began the ascent, a gleam of run shone from the otherwise unaltered sky, and for a moment turned the tin spires of the town to silver.

“A good omen!” said Vendale (though it died out while he spoke).  “Perhaps our example will open the Pass on this side.”

“No; we shall not be followed,” returned Obenreizer, looking up at the sky and back at the valley.  “We shall be alone up yonder.”

ON THE MOUNTAIN

The road was fair enough for stout walkers, and the air grew lighter and easier to breathe as the two ascended.  But the settled gloom remained as it had remained for days back.  Nature seemed to have come to a pause.  The sense of hearing, no less than the sense of sight, was troubled by having to wait so long for the change, whatever it might be, that impended.  The silence was as palpable and heavy as the lowering clouds — or rather cloud, for there seemed to be but one in all the sky, and that one covering the whole of it.

Although the light was thus dismally shrouded, the prospect was not obscured.  Down in the valley of the Rhone behind them, the stream could be traced through all its many windings, oppressively sombre and solemn in its one leaden hue, a colourless waste.  Far and high above them, glaciers and suspended avalanches overhung the spots where they must pass, by-and-by; deep and dark below them on their right, were awful precipice and roaring torrent; tremendous mountains arose in every vista.  The gigantic landscape, uncheered by a touch of changing light or a solitary ray of sun, was yet terribly distinct in its ferocity.  The hearts of two lonely men might shrink a little, if they had to win their way for miles and hours among a legion of silent and motionless men — mere men like themselves — all looking at them with fixed and frowning front.  But how much more, when the legion is of Nature’s mightiest works, and the frown may turn to fury in an instant!

As they ascended, the road became gradually more rugged and difficult.  But the spirits of Vendale rose as they mounted higher, leaving so much more of the road behind them conquered.  Obenreizer spoke little, and held on with a determined purpose.  Both, in respect of agility and endurance, were well qualified for the expedition.  Whatever the born mountaineer read in the weather-tokens that was illegible to the other, he kept to himself.

“Shall we get across to-day?” asked Vendale.

“No,” replied the other.  “You see how much deeper the snow lies here than it lay half a league lower.  The higher we mount the deeper the snow will lie.  Walking is half wading even now.  And the days are so short!  If we get as high as the fifth Refuge, and lie to-night at the Hospice, we shall do well.”

“Is there no danger of the weather rising in the night,” asked Vendale, anxiously, “and snowing us up?”

“There is danger enough about us,” said Obenreizer, with a cautious glance onward and upward, “to render silence our best policy.  You have heard of the Bridge of the Ganther?”

“I have crossed it once.”

“In the summer?”

“Yes; in the travelling season.”

“Yes; but it is another thing at this season;” with a sneer, as though he were out of temper.  “This is not a time of year, or a state of things, on an Alpine Pass, that you gentlemen holiday-travellers know much about.”

“You are my Guide,” said Vendale, good humouredly.  “I trust to you.”

“I am your Guide,” said Obenreizer, “and I will guide you to your journey’s end.  There is the Bridge before us.”

They had made a turn into a desolate and dismal ravine, where the snow lay deep below them, deep above them, deep on every side.  While speaking, Obenreizer stood pointing at the Bridge, and observing Vendale’s face, with a very singular expression on his own.

“If I, as Guide, had sent you over there, in advance, and encouraged you to give a shout or two, you might have brought down upon yourself tons and tons and tons of snow, that would not only have struck you dead, but buried you deep, at a blow.”

“No doubt,” said Vendale.

“No doubt.  But that is not what I have to do, as Guide.  So pass silently.  Or, going as we go, our indiscretion might else crush and bury
me
.  Let us get on!”

There was a great accumulation of snow on the Bridge; and such enormous accumulations of snow overhung them from protecting masses of rock, that they might have been making their way through a stormy sky of white clouds.  Using his staff skilfully, sounding as he went, and looking upward, with bent shoulders, as it were to resist the mere idea of a fall from above, Obenreizer softly led.  Vendale closely followed.  They were yet in the midst of their dangerous way, when there came a mighty rush, followed by a sound as of thunder.  Obenreizer clapped his hand on Vendale’s mouth and pointed to the track behind them.  Its aspect had been wholly changed in a moment.  An avalanche had swept over it, and plunged into the torrent at the bottom of the gulf below.

Their appearance at the solitary Inn not far beyond this terrible Bridge, elicited many expressions of astonishment from the people shut up in the house.  “We stay but to rest,” said Obenreizer, shaking the snow from his dress at the fire.  “This gentleman has very pressing occasion to get across; tell them, Vendale.”

“Assuredly, I have very pressing occasion.  I must cross.”

“You hear, all of you.  My friend has very pressing occasion to get across, and we want no advice and no help.  I am as good a guide, my fellow-countrymen, as any of you.  Now, give us to eat and drink.”

In exactly the same way, and in nearly the same words, when it was coming on dark and they had struggled through the greatly increased difficulties of the road, and had at last reached their destination for the night, Obenreizer said to the astonished people of the Hospice, gathering about them at the fire, while they were yet in the act of getting their wet shoes off, and shaking the snow from their clothes:

“It is well to understand one another, friends all.  This gentleman — ”

“ — Has,” said Vendale, readily taking him up with a smile, “very pressing occasion to get across.  Must cross.”

“You hear? — has very pressing occasion to get across, must cross.  We want no advice and no help.  I am mountain-born, and act as Guide.  Do not worry us by talking about it, but let us have supper, and wine, and bed.”

All through the intense cold of the night, the same awful stillness.  Again at sunrise, no sunny tinge to gild or redden the snow.  The same interminable waste of deathly white; the same immovable air; the same monotonous gloom in the sky.

“Travellers!” a friendly voice called to them from the door, after they were afoot, knapsack on back and staff in hand, as yesterday; “recollect!  There are five places of shelter, near together, on the dangerous road before you; and there is the wooden cross, and there is the next Hospice.  Do not stray from the track.  If the
Tourmente
comes on, take shelter instantly!”

“The trade of these poor devils!” said Obenreizer to his friend, with a contemptuous backward wave of his hand towards the voice.  “How they stick to their trade!  You Englishmen say we Swiss are mercenary.  Truly, it does look like it.”

They had divided between the two knapsacks such refreshments as they had been able to obtain that morning, and as they deemed it prudent to take.  Obenreizer carried the wine as his share of the burden; Vendale, the bread and meat and cheese, and the flask of brandy.

They had for some time laboured upward and onward through the snow — which was now above their knees in the track, and of unknown depth elsewhere — and they were still labouring upward and onward through the most frightful part of that tremendous desolation, when snow begin to fall.  At first, but a few flakes descended slowly and steadily.  After a little while the fall grew much denser, and suddenly it began without apparent cause to whirl itself into spiral shapes.  Instantly ensuing upon this last change, an icy blast came roaring at them, and every sound and force imprisoned until now was let loose.

One of the dismal galleries through which the road is carried at that perilous point, a cave eked out by arches of great strength, was near at hand.  They struggled into it, and the storm raged wildly.  The noise of the wind, the noise of the water, the thundering down of displaced masses of rock and snow, the awful voices with which not only that gorge but every gorge in the whole monstrous range seemed to be suddenly endowed, the darkness as of night, the violent revolving of the snow which beat and broke it into spray and blinded them, the madness of everything around insatiate for destruction, the rapid substitution of furious violence for unnatural calm, and hosts of appalling sounds for silence: these were things, on the edge of a deep abyss, to chill the blood, though the fierce wind, made actually solid by ice and snow, had failed to chill it.

Obenreizer, walking to and fro in the gallery without ceasing, signed to Vendale to help him unbuckle his knapsack.  They could see each other, but could not have heard each other speak.  Vendale complying, Obenreizer produced his bottle of wine, and poured some out, motioning Vendale to take that for warmth’s sake, and not brandy.  Vendale again complying, Obenreizer seemed to drink after him, and the two walked backwards and forwards side by side; both well knowing that to rest or sleep would be to die.

The snow came driving heavily into the gallery by the upper end at which they would pass out of it, if they ever passed out; for greater dangers lay on the road behind them than before.  The snow soon began to choke the arch.  An hour more, and it lay so high as to block out half the returning daylight.  But it froze hard now, as it fell, and could be clambered through or over.  The violence of the mountain storm was gradually yielding to steady snowfall.  The wind still raged at intervals, but not incessantly; and when it paused, the snow fell in heavy flakes.

They might have been two hours in their frightful prison, when Obenreizer, now crunching into the mound, now creeping over it with his head bowed down and his body touching the top of the arch, made his way out.  Vendale followed close upon him, but followed without clear motive or calculation.  For the lethargy of Basle was creeping over him again, and mastering his senses.