On we went the next morning, wrapping ourselves warmly, for the air was chill as November, though at Lucerne, only twenty-four hours before, we had suffered a torrid heat. Just beyond Andermatt, at Hospenthal, we left the St. Gothard, to follow the Furka pass. All around was barren desolation, as we went on, still ascending, leaving every sign of human life behind. Rocky and black the mountains rose, bearing only lichens and ferns. Occasional patches of snow appeared, lying in the beds of the last year's torrents, or scattered along beside the road. But here, where Nature had bestowed little to soften and beautify, she had spread upon the barren land, and tucked in among the rocks, a covering of exquisitely delicate flowers. You cannot realize, until you have seen them, the variety, beauty, and profusion of the Alpine flowers. Looking back in memory upon the bare rocks, doomed to stand here through all time in solitude and in the midst of desolation, as though in expiation of some sin, it is pleasant to remember that at their feet and in their clefts these little flowers nestle and bloom.
We gathered nosegays and made snowballs, and at noon gained the summit of the Furka, and rested an hour or two at the inn--the only sign of house or hut we had seen since morning. The rough _salons_, the passage, the doorway, even the space outside, were alive with tourists. It is a continual jar upon one's sense of the fitness of things, something to which you never become thoroughly accustomed, until all freshness of sight-seeing is passed--this coming suddenly upon the world in the midst of the unutterable solitude of nature; this plunging into a crowd dressed in the latest style, and discussing universal frivolities where the very rocks and hills seem to stand in silent adoration. But after the first moment you, too, form one of the frivolous throng, the sight and sound of which shock the sensibilities of the next comer.
From the inn a tongue of land, green and dotted with flowers, falls into the valley below. On either side rises a mountain, scarred by the torrents dried away now, and stained this day with the last year's snow, while beyond--ever beyond, like some heavenly heights we vainly strove to gain--rose the Bernese Alps.