Eastern Passage by Farley Mowat

Author:Farley Mowat [Mowat, Farley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-6493-7
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2010-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

One night the weather broke, and in the morning we heard that ploughs had reached the col of the Grand St. Bernard. It was time for us to go. The brothers gathered in the courtyard to wave us off and to give us a farewell present. It was a short-handled shovel.

“Leave it in the hospice at the Pass,” Domenico told us. “You may not need it but then again you may.”

They gave us another parting gift as well. When we stopped that night, we found six straw-wrapped bottles of their own best wines stowed in Liz’s trunk.

Ten minutes after leaving Aosta we were climbing into heavy clouds that dimmed the car lights to a pallid glimmer. The scenery we should have seen must have been spectacular. To the right the Matterhorn, and to the left Mont Blanc. We saw nothing. In second gear, sometimes in first, we groped through an impenetrable murk. So it went for an hour, by which time we had climbed six thousand feet.

Then we emerged between two layers of cloud and could see a little way about us. Behind was the steeply inclined trough of the valley, clogged with roiling clouds. Around us was arctic tundra, barren and rocky, leading the eye to the snowy peaks of mountains on a level with us. Ahead was a wall of rock rising, so it seemed, perpendicular to our path but scarred by a road climbing its face in tortuous switchbacks.

We drove on and in places our wheels spun. Water vapour reached the carburetor and the consequent lurchings did nothing to ease the strain of manoeuvring along the ledge. Snowbanks appeared and grew deeper until they hemmed us in, sometimes ten feet deep. Masses of wet snow slid into the ruts and several times we had to halt and dig our way clear. The murk closed in again and brought with it a driving wind laden with sleet that clogged the windshield wipers.

The desolation seemed absolute until we swung around the last hairpin bend of hundreds and there before us was the striped barrier of a customs post. Seldom have I seen a sweeter sight.

Only one man was on duty, a half-frozen youngster who gaped at us from a face blue with chill then quickly raised the barrier to let us by. He was a realist who understood that passports and papers were meaningless up here.

“Go with God!” he cried, and fled back to his hut.

We were now on the col at more than eight thousand feet. A gale from Switzerland drove over the pass into our faces. Liz crawled on until the grey bulk of the hospice of St. Bernard loomed ahead. An unadorned, massive, oblong stone structure several storeys high, it looked more like an enormous barracks than a hospice. It seemed to be abandoned. Nobody came to the heavy door when I pounded on the panels, but it was not locked so we pulled it ajar and went inside. We wandered up and down damp, stone-slabbed corridors, finding no human beings.

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