Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from On the Rhine, and Other Sketches of European Travel
One branch of the river bursts from un der a tumbled mass of ice and rock - one of those marvelous seas of ice which are the.ch'ief peculiarity of the Alps, and which sometimes, as in the case of the glacier of the Rheinwald, present among other features that of an immense frozen waterfall. Passing through the village of Hinterrhein, whose inhabitants are the descendants of a colony planted there by Barbarossa to guard the old military road over the Alps, and which boasts of a Roman temple and other less well-de fined remains of human dwellings of the same period, the Rhine enters the grand gorge of the Via Mala, between Andeer and Rongella, on the road below the Spliigen Pass and village. Every such pass has its Devil's Bridge or its Hell or its Bottomless Pit, and tradition tells of demons who pelted each other with the riven masses of rock, or giants who in malice split the rocks and dug the chasms across which men dared no long er pass. But it needs no such figures of speech to make a mountain-gorge one of the sublimest scenes in Nature, one which thrills the beholder with simple admiration and delight. The Via Mala is one of the most splendid of these scenes. A sheer descent of two thousand feet of rock, with clinging shrubs, and at the bottom the trunks of pines and firs that have lost their hold and grown into mossy columns stretched across the stream and often broken by its force; a winding, dizzy road leading over single arched bridges and half viaducts built into the black rock; a foam-white stream below; a succession of miniature water .
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