A Month in Switzerland (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. WALK BACK TO ST. NIKLAUS?AGRICULTURE?LIFE? RELIGION IN THE VALLEY Whate'er men do, or wish, or fear; their griefs Distractions, joys.?Juvenal. September 3.?Left Zermatt at 2 P.M. on foot. Walked briskly, but did not get to St. Niklaus till near 6 o'clock. All the way down hill. In coming up was only a quarter of an hour longer; this I can't understand. A very warm day. Those who went in chars, as did my wife and the blue boy, appeared to suffer more from the heat than I did who was walking. In my four hours' walk, having been so lately over the same ground, I paid attention to the methods and results of cultivation, and endeavoured to make out something of the life of the inhabitants of the valley. As to the former, it appeared that all the cultivated land had been reclaimed by a slow and laborious process. The original condition of mountain valley land is to be more or less covered withrocks and stones, with some soil beneath and between. Sometimes the whole surface is completely covered with rocky debris, which has been brought down, like avalanches, on the occurrence of unusually copious torrent floods, which were, in fact, avalanches of water and of mountain shingle commingled. The first step in the work of reclamation is to get rid of the stones. This is cither done by removing them to a distance, or piling them up in heaps, or burying them on the spot. One of these methods will be best in one place, and another in another. All the soil that can be procured?sometimes there is enough of it on the surface, sometimes it has to be mined for in a stratum beneath the upper stratum of fragments of rock?is then levelled. Of this land, thus laboriously made, all that can be irrigated by lateral canals brought from the Visp, or diverted from the mountain to...