Essays of Travel Tale 12 - Davos in Winter

Robert Louis Stevenson (0:00)

Section 12 of Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson. The sleeper box recording is in the public domain. Chapter 9 Davos in Winter.

A mountain valley has at the best a certain prison-like effect on the imagination. But a mountain valley, an alpine winter, and an invalid's weakness make up among them a prison of the most effective kind. The roads, indeed, are cleared, and at least one footpath dodging up the hill. But to these the health seeker is rigidly confined. There are for him no cross-cuts over the field, no following of streams, no unguided rambles in the wood.

His walks are cut and dry. In five or six different directions, he can push as far and no farther than his strength permits, never deviating from the line laid down for him, and beholding at each repetition the same field of wood and snow from the same corner of the road. This of itself would be a little trying to the patience in the course of months, but to this is added by the heaped mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence of detail, and an almost unbroken identity of color.

Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The sun touches it with rosy and golden lights. Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it when regarded near at hand with wonderful depths of colored shadow. And though winterly transformed, it is still water and has watery tones of blue.

But when all is said, these fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety and pleasantness of the earth's face. Even a boulder whose front is too precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in your walk, a perfect gem of color reminds you almost painfully of other places and brings into your head the delights of more Arcadian days, the path across the meadow, the hazel dell, the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colors, and the whisper of the woods.

And scents here are as rare as colors. Unless you get a gust of kitchen and passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long, but the faint and choking odor of frost. Sounds too are absent. Not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh bells ring, and that is all. You work all winter through to no other accompaniment, but the crunching of your steps upon the frozen snow.

It is the curse of the alpine valleys to be each one village from one end to the other. Go where you please. Houses will still be in sight before and behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations nested in the wood. Nor is that all. For about the health resort, the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids about their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to learn to yodel, and by German couples silently, and, as you venture to fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love's young dream. You may perhaps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks about. Alas, no muse will suffer this immanence of interruption. And, at the second stampede of yodelers, you find your modest inspiration fled. Or you may only have a taste for solitude. It may try your nerves to have someone always in front, whom you are visibly overtaking, and someone always behind, who is audibly overtaking you, to say nothing of a score or so, who brush past you in an opposite direction. It may annoy you to take your walks, and seats in public view. Alas, there is no help for it among the Alps. There are no recesses, as in Gourbio Valley by the oil mill, no sacred solitude of olive gardens on the Roquebruna road, no nook upon St. Martin's Cape, haunted by the voice of breakers, and fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the Rosemary, and the sea pines, and the sea. For this publicity, there is no cure and no alleviation. But the storms of which you will complain so bitterly, while they endure, checker, and by their contrast, brighten the sameness of the fair weather scenes. When sun and storm contend together, when the thick clouds are broken up, and pierced by arrows of golden daylight, there will be startling rearrangements and transfigurations of the mountain summits. A sun-dazzling spire of alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms and blackness, or perhaps the edge of some great mountain shoulder will be designed in living gold and appear for the duration of a glance bright like a constellation and alone in the unapparent. You may think you know the figure of these hills, but when they are thus revealed, they belong no longer to the things of earth. Meteors, we should rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure, but for a moment and return no more. Other variations are more lasting, as when, for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some windless hours and the thin, spirey mountain pine trees stand each stock still and loaded with a shining birthing. You may drive through a forest so disguised the tongue-tied torrent, struggling silently in the cleft of a ravine and all still except the jingle of the sleigh bells. And you shall fancy yourself in some untrodden northern territory, Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska.