Zuoz and S-chanf have become of late years something of an
educational centre, and also a resort for winter sports. Zuoz has
provided itself with a Kursaal, which it terms Castell, a finely
situated building in good Engadine style designed by Nichol Hartmann.
Recent building in the district gives gratifying evidence of the
influence of the Heimatschutz, a league for the preservation of old
architecture, and the assimilation of its styles and spirit in new
construction.
Two miles below S-chanf is the hamlet of Capella, so called from the
chapel of St. Güerg of which but a fragment remains. Near it
formerly stood an enormous pine tree sacred to St. George, the patron
of the Upper Engadine, which was an object of profound veneration
throughout the valley. When, on S-chanf declaring for the
Reformation, the aged tree was felled, its fall was probably a
greater wrench with the past than any thesis or formula of faith.
What echoes of old rites, what ghosts of forgotten creeds, may have
haunted the shade of its sombre foliage! {37} That its sacred
character was originally connected with St. George is most unlikely;
it was more probably a relic of a faith and worship to which St.
George was as of yesterday, and which primitive Christianity
recognized as too deeply rooted in the popular imagination to be
lightly discarded. There was a large humanity in those early
missionaries that went for much in their success. They would not
rudely cut away props on which men's souls had leaned, but left them
to stand while they might, consecrated to a new significance. Some
better thing might be reserved for the succeeding time, but without
them it was not to be made perfect.
Soon after this the road crosses the Sulsanna, coming from its
cascaded valley, and the changing character of the scenery ahead
reminds us that we are nearing the end of the upper valley of the
Inn. A mile beyond Capella, in a green basin below the road, is
Sinuos-chel, the last hamlet, a few picturesque houses, one of them
quaintly frescoed, with a demure little church. The valley narrows
to a ravine; the Inn whitens to a torrent as it rages down the gorge
that it has cut for itself through the bar of schist that once dammed
it into a lake; two bridges, one in stone upon the present road, the
other the historic wooden Punt Ota on the grass-grown road above,
span the foaming yellow brook that is the immemorial boundary of the
Upper Engadine.
{38}
IV
THE LOWER ENGADINE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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