THE SW ISS WONDERLAND
BY M. J. LANDA.
THERE is so much to do, so much to see, in Switzerland summertime that it is immaterial whether you scamper round, or stay in one place and laze. Any guide-book will select the spot ; . you have only to open it at random. It may be in one of the world-renowned lakeside resorts, such as Lucerne, or Montreux ; it may be up, ever so high, in the mountains amid the eternal snowfields and their weird glaciers ; or in some secluded valley or Dantesque gorge, like that of the Aare, near Meiringen ; or in the neighbourhood of any one of the hundreds of fascinating waterfalls—you will find yourself in a land of enchantment all the time. You can select your height—up to a couple of miles, vertical, you will find hotels ; you may select your language—French, German and Italian are official, each predominating in its sphere—and you will find English, or " American," serviceable everywhere. You may even choose your climate—hot in the lower valleys, freezing amid the snow-peaks, with all the gradations at altitudes between ; you may even pick the colour of your landscape, from luscious green, to the bare browns and greys of the rocks, the dazzling blue of the lakes, and the marbled
variations of the ice regions. . - You may mingle all these sensations without fatigue by sitting comfortably in the electric trains which run and climb and play hide and seek through tunnels as they zig-zag up the mountain spirals, whirling the landscape round about you and rushing you across torrential streams and through romantic ravines ; you may feel like a human fly as you are drawn up the stupendous steep of the Ritom line ; you may wonder whether an engineer or a contortionist devised the hairpin-bend roads over the passes along which the motor-post bears you swiftly ; you may lounge dreamily in a boat on a placid lake tucked away on a shelf higher than the loftiest peak in Great Britain. You may, as in. St. Moritz, believe yourself in an Alpine Piccadilly, and hard by, and elsewhere, imagine yourself plunged back into mediaeval days amid old world castles, perched dizzily as in the picture books, or in some quaint village with comic opera costumes and customs and a dialect to match. Or you may go tobogganning or snowballing in the blazing sunshine—perhaps the most hectic delight of all to the newcomer. You can golf, play tennis, and dance amid the most picturesque surroundings.
And what you cannot mix for yourself, nature does for you. It is entrancing to sit and watch the setting sun use the white summits as his twilight palette. Rose-pink he paints them, and sometimes orange, bringing the tourists with cries of ecstasy from the dinner table ; and when he has disappeared and the valley is shrouded in the deepening dusk he keeps his caress on his beloved peaks which refuse to surrender their whiteness well into the night.
Everywhere the air is exhilarating, and the nights, especially at heights from 3,000 to 5,500 feet high, idyllically beautiful. Switzerland is ideal alike for the mountaineer and the idler, and a paradise for the walker. I know dozens of alluring spots, uncharted in the guide-books, some within a mile or two of a railway, others in the deeper recesses. There is a forest that might have been taken from a fairy-book a few miles from Interlaken ; it is up near Isenfluh, 5,000 feet or so, at the edge of a beautiful ravine with a great rock that seems like a Wagnerian castle of magic on the height opposite. There is an unknown Zermatt at Ober-Steinberg at the end of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, opposite the magnificent Shmadribaeh Fall. There is a grand waterfall without a name near Engstlen Alp on the Joch Pass in an eerie wood of gnarled, fantastic trees that excite wonder whether nature has forgotten it as well as the guide-books. I believe I am the only person who knows the place. There is no rail or motor to this glorious retreat, nearly 6,000 feet high. And I know others which I am going to keep all to myself at present. You will find no greater pleasure than discovering your own peculiar spot, except perhaps the joy of hugging it to yourself in secret afterwards.
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