364 PRÆTERITA-II

besides having often to stand for hours together writing notes in church or gallery, had kept me in fair training; and I did the twenty miles up hill from Vogogna to Macugnaga without much trouble, but in ever hotter indignation all the way at the extreme dulness of the Val Anzasca, “the most beautiful valley in the Alps”-according to modern guide books.¹ But tourists who pass their time mostly in looking at black rocks through blue spectacles, cannot be expected to know much about a valley:-on the other hand, ever since the days of Glenfarg and Matlock,² I have been a stream-tracker and cliff-hunter, and rank mountains more by the beauty of their glens than the height of their summits: also, it chanced that our three first journeys abroad had shown me the unquestionably grandest defiles of the Alps in succession-first the Via Mala, then the St. Gothard, then the tremendous granites of the Grimsel; then Rosenlaui and Lauterbrunnen, Val d’Aosta and Courmayeur; then the valley of the Inn and precipices of Innsbruck-and at last the Ortlerspitze and descent from the Stelvio to Como; with the Simplon and defile of Cluse now as well known as Gipsy Hill at Norwood: and the Val Anzasca has no feature whatever in any kind to be matched with any one of these. It is merely a deep furrow through continuous masses of shaly rock, blistered by the sun and rough with juniper, with scattered chestnut-trees and pastures below. There are no precipices, no defiles, no distinct summits on either flank; while the Monte Rosa, occasionally seen at the extremity of the valley, is a mere white heap, with no more form in it than a haycock after a thunder-shower.

132. Nor was my mind relieved by arrival at Macugnaga itself; I did not then, nor do I yet, understand why the village should have a name at all, more than any other group of half-a-dozen chalets in a sheltered dip of

¹ [So Murray’s Switzerland, 1891, vol. ii. p. 467: “The Val Anzasca combines all that is most lovely in Italian with all that is most grand in Swiss scenery.”]

² [See, for Glenfarg, i. § 5; and for Matlock, i. § 83 (above, pp. 16, 75).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]