An hour’s sail brought us to Lucerne again. I judged it best to go to bed and rest several days, for I knew that the man who undertakes to make the tour of Europe on foot must take care of himself. Thinking over my plans, as mapped out, I perceived that they did not take in the Furka Pass, the Rhone Glacier, the Finsteraarhorn, the Wetterhorn, etc. I immediately examined the guide-book to see if these were important, and found they were; in fact, a pedestrian tour of Europe could not be complete without them. Of course that decided me at once to see them, for I never allow myself to do things by halves, or in a slurring, slipshod way.
I called in my agent and instructed him to go without delay and make a careful examination of these noted places, on foot, and bring me back a written report of the result, for insertion in my book. I instructed him to go to Hospenthal as quickly as possible, and make his grand start from there; to extend his foot expedition as far as the Giesbach fall, and return to me from thence by diligence or mule. I told him to take the courier with him.
He objected to the courier, and with some show of reason, since he was about to venture upon new and untried ground; but I thought he might as well learn how to take care of the courier now as later, therefore I enforced my point. I said that the trouble, delay, and inconvenience of traveling with a courier were balanced by the deep respect which a courier’s presence commands, and I must insist that as much style be thrown into my journeys as possible.
So the two assumed complete mountaineering costumes and departed. A week later they returned, pretty well used up, and my agent handed me the following:
Official Report
OF A VISIT TO THE FURKA REGION.
By H. Harris, Agent
About seven o’clock in the morning, with perfectly fine weather, we started from Hospenthal, and arrived at the maison on the Furka in a little under quatre hours. The want of variety in the scenery from Hospenthal made the Kahkahponeeka wearisome; but let none be discouraged; no one can fail to be completely r’ecompens’ee for his fatigue, when he sees, for the first time, the monarch of the Oberland, the tremendous Finsteraarhorn. A moment before all was dullness, but a pas further has placed us on the summit of the Furka; and exactly in front of us, at a hopow of only fifteen miles, this magnificent mountain lifts its snow-wreathed precipices into the deep blue sky. The inferior mountains on each side of the pass form a sort of frame for the picture of their dread lord, and close in the view so completely that no other prominent feature in the Oberland is visible from this bong-a-bong; nothing withdraws the attention from the solitary grandeur of the Finsteraarhorn and the dependent spurs which form the abutments of the central peak.
 
With the addition of some others, who were also bound for the Grimsel, we formed a large xhvloj as we descended the steg which winds round the shoulder of a mountain toward the Rhone Glacier. We soon left the path and took to the ice; and after wandering amongst the crevices un peu, to admire the wonders of these deep blue caverns, and hear the rushing of waters through their subglacial channels, we struck out a course toward l’autre cravasse and crossed the glacier successfully, a little above the cave from which the infant Rhone takes its first bound from under the grand precipice of ice. Half a mile below this we began to climb the flowery side of the Meienwand. One of our party started before the rest, but the hitze was so great, that we found ihm quite exhausted, and lying at full length in the shade of a large gestein. We sat down with him for a time, for all felt the heat exceedingly in the climb up this very steep bolwoggoly, and then we set out again together, and arrived at last near the Dead Man’s Lake, at the foot of the Sidelhorn. This lonely spot, once used for an extempore burying-place, after a sanguinary battue between the French and Austrians, is the perfection of desolation; there is nothing in sight to mark the hand of man, except the line of weather-beaten whitened posts, set up to indicate the direction of the pass in the owdawakk of winter. Near this point the footpath joins the wider track, which connects the Grimsel with the head of the Rhone schnawp; this has been carefully constructed, and leads with a tortuous course among and over les pierres, down to the bank of the gloomy little swosh-swosh, which almost washes against the walls of the Grimsel Hospice. We arrived a little before four o’clock at the end of our day’s journey, hot enough to justify the step, taking by most of the partie, of plunging into the crystal water of the snow-fed lake.
 
 
The next afternoon we started for a walk up the Unteraar glacier, with the intention of, at all events, getting as far as the Hutte which is used as a sleeping-place by most of those who cross the Strahleck Pass to Grindelwald. We got over the tedious collection of stones and débris which covers the pied of the gletcher, and had walked nearly three hours from the Grimsel, when, just as we were thinking of crossing over to the right, to climb the cliffs at the foot of the hut, the clouds, which had for some time assumed a threatening appearance, suddenly dropped, and a huge mass of them, driving toward us from the Finsteraarhorn, poured down a deluge of haboolong and hail. Fortunately, we were not far from a very large glacier-table; it was a huge rock balanced on a pedestal of ice high enough to admit of our all creeping under it for gowkarak. A stream of puckittypukk had furrowed a course for itself in the ice at its base, and we were obliged to stand with one fuss on each side of this, and endeavor to keep ourselves chaud by cutting steps in the steep bank of the pedestal, so as to get a higher place for standing on, as the wasser rose rapidly in its trench. A very cold bzzzzzzzzeee accompanied the storm, and made our position far from pleasant; and presently came a flash of blitzen, apparently in the middle of our little party, with an instantaneous clap of yokky, sounding like a large gun fired close to our ears; the effect was startling; but in a few seconds our attention was fixed by the roaring echoes of the thunder against the tremendous mountains which completely surrounded us. This was followed by many more bursts, none of welche, however, was so dangerously near; and after waiting a long demi-hour in our icy prison, we sallied out to talk through a haboolong which, though not so heavy as before, was quite enough to give us a thorough soaking before our arrival at the Hospice.
The Grimsel is certainement a wonderful place; situated at the bottom of a sort of huge crater, the sides of which are utterly savage gebirge, composed of barren rocks which cannot even support a single pine arbre, and afford only scanty food for a herd of gmwkwllolp, it looks as if it must be completely begraben in the winter snows. Enormous avalanches fall against it every spring, sometimes covering everything to the depth of thirty or forty feet; and, in spite of walls four feet thick, and furnished with outside shutters, the two men who stay here when the voyageurs are snugly quartered in their distant homes can tell you that the snow sometimes shakes the house to its foundations.
Next morning the hogglebumgullup still continued bad, but we made up our minds to go on, and make the best of it. Half an hour after we started, the regen thickened unpleasantly, and we attempted to get shelter under a projecting rock, but being far to nass already to make standing at all agréable, we pushed on for the Handeck, consoling ourselves with the reflection that from the furious rushing of the river Aar at our side, we should at all events see the celebrated wasserfall in grande perfection. Nor were we nappersocket in our expectation; the water was roaring down its leap of two hundred and fifty feet in a most magnificent frenzy, while the trees which cling to its rocky sides swayed to and fro in the violence of the hurricane which it brought down with it; even the stream, which falls into the main cascade at right angles, and toutefois forms a beautiful feature in the scene, was now swollen into a raging torrent; and the violence of this “meeting of the waters,” about fifty feet below the frail bridge where we stood, was fearfully grand. While we were looking at it, gléecklicheweise a gleam of sunshine came out, and instantly a beautiful rainbow was formed by the spray, and hung in mid-air suspended over the awful gorge.
On going into the chalet above the fall, we were informed that a bruecke had broken down near Guttanen, and that it would be impossible to proceed for some time; accordingly we were kept in our drenched condition for ein stunde, when some voyageurs arrived from Meiringen, and told us that there had been a trifling accident, aber that we could now cross. On arriving at the spot, I was much inclined to suspect that the whole story was a ruse to make us slowwk and drink the more at the Handeck Inn, for only a few planks had been carried away, and though there might perhaps have been some difficulty with mules, the gap was certainly not larger than a mmbglx might cross with a very slight leap. Near Guttanen the haboolong happily ceased, and we had time to walk ourselves tolerably dry before arriving at Reichenback, so we enjoyed a good dinér at the Hotel des Alps.
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