166 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



1777, when he carried out his project of visiting the Orisons, used 

 the Spliigen. 



The tour round which he centres his third ' Voyage ' is that of 

 1783. Crossing the Col de Jaman from Vevey, he passed down 

 the Simmenthal, noting its picturesque wooden cottages and dairy 

 farms. Small properties, he points out, are invariably found to 

 stand in the way of good agriculture. At Spiez, on the Lake 

 of Thun, he embarked on a boat the crew of which was an old 

 woman, a girl, and one man, and landed at the inn at Neuhaus. 

 Interlaken had not yet grown from a convent and a nunnery into 

 a tourist resort. But on the Grimsel track there were plenty of 

 inns, good and indifferent, at Brienz, Meiringen, Guttannen, the 

 Grimsel Hospice, Obergestelen. This is accounted for by the 

 considerable traffic to and from Italy that then followed the 

 Grimsel and the Gries. Most of the villagers at Guttannen spoke 

 Italian, and the innkeeper had cut on his walls an Italian motto : 

 ' H passato mi castiga, il presente mi displace, il futuro mi 

 spaventa,' which, de Saussure remarks, ' might have better suited 

 an Englishman devoured by spleen.' The Handegg chalet served 

 as a restaurant ; but the waterfall, hid in its chasm, escaped the 

 traveller's notice. He observes the polished rocks that make the 

 track dangerous for mules, but again they fail to suggest to him 

 their glacial origin. 



At the Grimsel Hospice the accommodation was rough, but 

 the food good, and the innkeeper's family very hospitable. De 

 Saussure found a guide to take him to the Aar Glaciers, the lower 

 ends of which he explored pretty thoroughly. They were already 

 among the recognised sights of the Oberland, and often visited 

 by the early Alpine artists. At Obergestelen de Saussure was 

 taken ill, and the greedy innkeeper tried to turn him out of the 

 house, so as not to lose his Sunday customers, but finally, ' by means 

 of money, which was the real object of this villain, he was persuaded 

 to let me stay.' 



absence. Taking refuge in the Bernese territory, he fared little better from the 

 local government, who found an excuse they thought sufficient for interning him 

 in the castle of Aarburg as a political prisoner. Here he sought occupation in 

 drawing a panorama of the portion of the Alps visible from his terrace in fine 

 weather, and endeavouring to identify the summits and ascertain their heights. 

 In neither effort was he very successful. What were the summits he wrongly 

 identified as belonging to the St. Gotthard group, to which he assigned heights of 

 over 16,000 and 17,000 feet, must be left uncertain. 



