The division of the Engadine into Upper and Lower is not a piece of arbitrary map-making. We seem to pass into a new country when, leaving the broad upper valley, lying wide-stretched to the sky, where only human supervision prevents the Inn spreading out into lakes and marshes, we go down into the deep trough bordered by picturesque peaks and ridges, where the river that has so long been the companion of the road flows far below it between steep walls of rock. And not only does the scenery change, but the climate, the flora, the very dialect of the people and their character in history is different. Descending from the Punt Ota to the roofed wooden bridge that takes us to the right bank of the Inn, we are hemmed in by heights in a land of clamant streams. The sombre severity of Upper Engadine scenery is broken into a romantic variety of detail: austere masses of mountain give place to splintered peaks and ragged ridges, their sides are more furrowed, a luxuriant forest vegetation clothes their steeper slopes, and the meadows on the gentler slopes are more interspersed with tilth. [Illustration: PIZ KESCH FROM THE SERTIG PASS.] The first village is Zernez, spread on a flat green widening of the valley, the slender spire and frescoed walls of its church standing on a little eminence {39} beside it. The church and a few picturesque old houses are all that escaped a fire that destroyed the rest of the village in 1872. A beautiful railway route runs hence by the Fuorn Pass, the Val Mustair, and the Stelvio road under the dazzling snows of the Ortler, to Trafoi in Austria. Soon after passing the frontier is the defile of Calven, where on Easter Monday, 1499, eight thousand hastily mustered men of the lately formed Leagues attacked and routed a strongly entrenched and well equipped Imperial army of nearly double their number, a brilliant feat of arms that laid the foundation of Rhaetian independence.* For about four miles of its course the railway passes through the National Park; a clause in the agreement between the Confederation and the commune of Zernez permits quarrying and wood-cutting for its construction and upkeep in the sequestrated region. * I have described this remarkable little war at greater length in 'The Upper Engadine,' pp. 9-20. For a couple of miles road and river thread a pine-clad gorge in which the normally longitudinal valley of the Inn becomes transverse; before us towers the huge Piz Linard, posted in front of and dominating the vast Silvretta maze of fell and glacier. Then another widening of the valley gives standing ground for the picturesque village of Susch; an ancient tower rises by the quaint minaret of its church; on a wooded hill beside it is one of the many 'chiefless {40} castles breathing stern farewell' that add a note of historical romance to the scenery of the Engadine.