EMERGE FROM WINTER

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4845, 14 May 1936, Page 7

EMERGE FROM WINTER

MONKS OF ST. BERNARD. London, April 15. I talked to-day on the Continental telephone to men for whom Easter is the end of long months of hibernation, writes Mr. Duxley Barker in the Evening Standard. From these London offices my trunk call reached out across the Continent to Geneva, and from thence was directed by a dozen rapid voices, all seeming to question simultaneously and never to answer, through the Swiss towns and villages, up into the mountains. At last, after a minute's tumult of French, and the grating noises indigenous to any-long distance call, there was a sudden quiet, and a man's smooth voice said: "This is the Hospice of the Grand St. Bernard. I am one of the monks. : ' I was talking to the famous St. Bernard monastery, from which, since the fourteenth century, the monks and the great St. Bernard dogs have set out to rescue travellers caught in the deep snow of the pass. All the winter the Hospice has been in scant communication with the outside world, and for several weeks it was entirely cut off, I was told, except for the telephone. The snow will not clear away until the end of June, but this week-end the first of the year's tourists arrived. They were a score or so of German men and women, and they reached the hospice by the only possible means of transport —skis. Even in this small community, hibernating in the snow, the winter has not lacked excitement. "A month ago," said the monk, "one of the bitches had a litter of eight puppies, and they all live. That is important, my friend,. It brings the total number of our dogs to over 20. "Other news? Well, we have been happy. We have warmth in the hospice, and food, plenty of food, enough food for the passing by of an army. The snow has been thick and well packed, so that ski-ing has been excellent. It remains so, and we are really still in the midst of winter, but when Easter comes then the summer is nearer, and our visitors are on their way."