In fair weather the passage of the mountain is not difficult, though tiring.  But woe to men and beasts alike if they encounter storms!  Not a few perish in the passes; and it frequently happens that their only chance is to unyoke the horses and leave the sledges in a snow-wreath, seeking for themselves such shelter as may possibly be gained, frost-bitten, after hours of battling with impermeable drifts.  The wine is frozen into one solid mass of rosy ice before it reaches Pontresina.  This does not hurt the young vintage, but it is highly injurious to wine of some years’ standing.  The perils of the journey are aggravated by the savage temper of the drivers.  Jealousies between the natives of rival districts spring up; and there are men alive who have fought the whole way down from Fluela Hospice to Davos Platz with knives and stones, hammers and hatchets, wooden staves and splintered cart-wheels, staining the snow with blood, and bringing broken pates, bruised limbs, and senseless comrades home to their women to be tended.

Bacchus Alpinus shepherded his train away from us to northward, and we passed forth into noonday from the gallery.  It then seemed clear that both conductor and postillion were sufficiently merry.  The plunge they took us down those frozen parapets, with shriek and jauchzen and cracked whips, was more than ever dangerous.  Yet we reached La Rosa safely.  This is a lovely solitary spot, beside a rushing stream, among grey granite boulders grown with spruce and rhododendron:  a veritable rose of Sharon blooming in the desert.  The wastes of the Bernina stretch above, and round about are leaguered some of the most forbidding sharp-toothed peaks I ever saw.  Onwards, across the silent snow, we glided in immitigable sunshine, through opening valleys and pine-woods, past the robber-huts of Pisciadella, until at evenfall we rested in the roadside inn at Poschiavo.

IV

The snow-path ended at Poschiavo; and when, as usual, we started on our journey next day at sunrise, it was in a carriage upon wheels.  Yet even here we were in full midwinter.  Beyond Le Prese the lake presented one sheet of smooth black ice, reflecting every peak and chasm of the mountains, and showing the rocks and water-weeds in the clear green depths below.  The glittering floor stretched away for acres of untenanted expanse, with not a skater to explore those dark mysterious coves, or strike across the slanting sunlight poured from clefts in the impendent hills.  Inshore the substance of the ice sparkled here and there with iridescence like the plumelets of a butterfly’s wing under the microscope, wherever light happened to catch the jagged or oblique flaws that veined its solid crystal.