Notes of Foreign Travel

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 Excerpt: ...the snowy top Simplon.--The Hospice. 173 of the Fletschhorn rising nearly 13,000 feet, and now it towers above us close at hand. We dine capitally at Simplon, and after resting the horses for two hours, climb up past the old Hospice at the base of the Schonhorn, rising snow-capped, and are at the highest point on the Simplon Pass, 6595 feet, 500 feet less than the corresponding point on the St. Gothard. Here is a broad, open valley of good pasture land, and all about and far as the eye can see, snowy peaks, including the towering cone of the Wetterhorn, on the right the Rossboden Glacier with its hilly moraine, and many a shining top of the long Bernese range. We called at the Hospice, a large solid stone building, were shown by a polite brother the comfortable rooms where travellers may lodge, the refectory, a long, high hall, where a table was spread with a coarse but clean linen cover, had a bottle of sourish white wine produced in the high valleys near by, peeped into the pretty chapel where services of song were going on by three of the brothers with pleasant voices and not a listener in sight, dropped into the iron-bound chest the sum which elsewhere comes to one in the form of a bill of charges, patted a handsome St. Bernard puppy and began the steep descent. On the way up we gathered by the roadside pink crocuses, blue gentians, Alpine roses, until a height was reached where only the last is found. All along on either side of the pass we saw little cascades falling as from the clouds out of their snowy sources, some gleaming deep within the narrow channels they have been for unknown ages chamfering in the solid face of the rock, others glancing in wider fall from shelf to shelf, like an endless web of unfolding lace. Those French engineers who carri...