THE SNOW WORLD HOLIDAY.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVII, Issue 10376, 11 February 1910, Page 6

THE SNOW WORLD HOLIDAY.

(By E. F. Benson.)

The annual denationalisation of the ! air and snows of Switzerland is com- ; plete. Up to about three thousand feet above sea level the country belongs . to the natives still, except where trainloads of foreigners claim it for thenpassage, but above that, wherever there are an hotel and a plateau facing sunwards, snow, ice, and air have become the temporary property of those who in ever-increasing numbers leave the fogs and mud-soup of our enervating winters to bask in the : iuteuser lights and breathe the ampler ether. Day bv day during the past fortnight the steamers from Folkstone and Dover have carried more travellers bound tor the white altitudes, and the restaurant at Bale station flows more copiously everv day with milk and honey (and c'offe and rolls) for those who have flashed through France in the.hery caterpillars of nocturnal trains to sustain them through the sedater passage by the railways of the highland republic All except those who have taken their way through Paris to go to the resorts on or near the Rhone \ alley meet here, ships that pass m the night, before thev embark on their different ways. One train, the august Engadme express, takes some 'to Chur, and up from there over the gossamer iron bridges and through the corkscrew tunnels up to St. Moritz; another to Sarins and through the rocky gorges fringed with pines by Klosters to the broad white valley of Davos. Another passes through Berne and along the shores of the Lakes of Thun to Interlaken, where again a fresh partition takes place, and folk pass up to tne left to Beatenberg, straight on to Grmdelwald under the shadow of the Wetterhorn and Eiger, and this year, for the first time, up the valley of Lauterbrunnen and on to the village of Wengen that basks on its plateau m a golden sunshine, high above the grey, mists that hang about up to a couple of thousand feet"above sea level. In the main the objects ot all these travellers is the same. They want to be out all. day in a windless bath ot sun, and while out to slide about, instead of walking, in the required direction with tho utmost possible speed. Some do it on the level with skates; others in places as little level as possible sitting or lying on toboggans or standing on skis. But they all slide. The thing sounds simple ; if there is a hill, it would appear that you can toboggan or ski down it; if there is a lake hard frozen, it would seem that you could skate on it. But these simplicities are,, not nearly enoii'di for the outward and upward bound. The tobogganer must tor the most part have his run constructed lor ; him, so that he can descend it with the utmost possible speed. A new hillside of snow is not nearly adequate, and'his track lias to be laid with high-steep-sloping banks at the curves, that are designed, in any case, to -prevent ■ his running out of it, and the whole '■ run from "top to bottom has to be , spraved with water. So that he runs I not on snow at all. but on a surlace of smooth, precipitous ice. Similarly, lor • the skater, a mere frozen lake is laughably insufficient, for snow falls and • covers it. and, lying unevenly owing to ■ wind and drift,' cracks and spoils the perfection of the surface when it is [ swept. So for him a space must be pre- . pared, levelled to the nicety of a bil- \ Hard table, and then slowly built up by successive freezings of water poured on , to it. And. every day after he has finished his perfectly useless evolutions, which for some reason or other make ; joy to sprout and flower in his heart, .. his billiard-table of a rink is swept and sprinkled again with water, so that on . every fresh morning a fresh surface invites him. Most of these winter resorts have ac--1 quired a speciality ot their own. St. Moritz gives tobogganing in excelsis, ' and daily-after the middle ot January ' or thereabouts well into March the : Cresta run, in its lower sections at first 1 and later from the top, extends its > riband of steelv ice down the hillside I towards Celerina. For the skater there 1 are a multiple of rinks, and every morn- ! in«r the virgin ice beckons. Romantic \ is'the setting of one of these, for in a ' hollow of snow-clad pines the huge L bandv-rink lies like a natunal lake among the hills. So, too, the praises : of Davos inspire every skater's lyre, ' and there the ardent ski-er localises " many dreams, and the runner ot the " bob-sleighs when safe in bed imagine a divine manipulation of the weird cor- ' ners. Grindelwald has a skating rink of ' peculiarly satiny texture, and the ' Christmas holiday-maker who does not mind skating in the shadow of great peaks finds there ideal material. Vilia rs, above Ollon, in the Rhone \ alley, has a rink huge in size and sunny in aspect. Montana is sought by the ski- . runner, and Lenzerheid, above Chur, ri- , vals ; its slones. . The fortunate writer of these notes '. had the luck to leave London on a cer- , tain' terrible December day—terrible, f that is. to him now. It was supposed to be fine, which means (in Loudon) , that it did not during the morning aei tually rain. But barring the detail ! that' there was no palpable moisture '. falling in well-defined drops, it is hard i here and now in the sunlight at Wen- ; gen to imagine a dirtier day. The i streets were mud-soup, and the - mud seemed to have got into the sky [ as well; it was morning only because : it happened to be night no longer. Then > I entered the fiery caterpillar. [ Two davs" later what I did was this. « I left the hotel at Wengen about eleven \ in the morning and marched in a blaze I of sun up a snow-covered path on skis. L- (The ski is a long, thin, wooden affair - fixed to the boot in the manner of a s skate; uphill you walk on it, downhill > you slide on it. You also fall down ' on it.) The air—so said.a silly ther- > mometer —was a few degrees below ; freezing point, but nobody pays any attention to what the silly thermometer - says, since it does not matter how cold - it "is, but how warm you are. Still, • the snow agreed with the thermometer, - and was crisp and dry and powdery, ! but to the traveller the air was a bath : of radiant warmth, delicious to move • in, divine t6 be still in. At first the ; track lay open on white frozen hill- \ sides; then burrowed among snow-laden ; pines; then, steadily mounting upward, came out again in the open, and the . hush of high places- wove its spell. r Higher and higher as we climbed rose ' the tall hierarchy—hills no longer —of i Europe. Straight in front the Eiger towered above its glaciers an,d silent precipices; by it sat the. White Monk, ■ and the Juiigfrau looked down a little ; on them both. She had been their \ queen for so many thousand v _years that sovereignty was unconsciously exercised. . There they rose, the great white Pres- '■ ences, things to be perceived by the heart more than the eye. And yet they allowed my friend with whom I travelled to photograph them, and stood quite still for that operation. Once ami again there came across the valley bc- . tween us and them a little low mutter, as if one of them had purred, and, looking up, one could see the streak of . downward smoke that marked the path of a falling avalanche. And as the shadows grew longer in the valleys Ave turned and slid downwards again, and the great peaks stood rosy long after the sun had set on our lesser eminence, at Wengen. To-morrow, for a change, we shall skate all day; the rink lies at the door, blazing in the sun.