Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)
General
Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896
Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)
Benson family
without rolls of flannel and mustard plasters and cylinders of
cotton-wool. Each one of us had an alpen-stock and huge hob-nailed
boots, and when you consider that there were eight persons, each
marvellously equipped for mental, physical, and artistic enterprises,
you must only wonder that some mode of conveyance, if not all, was not
fit to bear the strain of this transportation. But arrive at Gimmelwald
we did, and while Maggie was prodigal with rose-madder this train of
equipment somehow got inside the inn. Beth swooped on her flannel and
her mustard plasters, my father established his Cyprian library in our
sitting-room, my mother clutched her medicine-chest, and there was left
an enormous pile of books, apparatus for botany, climbing, and
entomology, which remained in a passage and was gradually broken up
between its owners. I think that the last pressing-case for dried
flowers, the last killing-bottle for the extinction of butterflies, can
hardly have been clawed from that common heap before it was time to pack
it all up again.
Of that month certain indelibly vivid impressions remain. One was the
ascent of the Schilthorn, popularly supposed to be 10,000 (ten thousand)
feet in height, and to possess the witching attraction of owning
“everlasting” snow. It was not, unless it has abbreviated itself very
much since, anything near ten thousand feet high, and, as for the
everlasting snow, we climbed through torrid uplands and finished by a
mild rocky ascent without ever setting foot on any snow perishable or
everlasting. True, there were patches of it on the northern face, and
perhaps those may be there still. But it was an enchanting expedition,
for we carried our alpen-stocks and the guide had a rope round his
shoulders, and we started at five in the morning. My father had a
guide-book with a Schilthorn panorama, and we sat on the top and
rejoiced in the fact that we were ten thousand feet up in the air and
that small quantities of everlasting snow were below us, and we followed
his guiding finger as he pointed out the jewels in the crown of
mountains that surrounded us.... We passed through Murren on the way
down, and there saw English people playing lawn-tennis on one of the
hotel courts, and never shall I forget my father’s upraised eyebrows and
mouth of scorn as he said, “Fancy, playing lawn-tennis in sight of the
Jungfrau!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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