Top of Europe

HUGH and COLLEEN GANTZER unravel the charms of white snow fields and high peaks in a picture postcard land on

WE have fallen in love with Interlaken. We had stepped out of our soundless, efficient train the day before yesterday, checked into our hotel and gone for a walk in the soft dusk of a Swiss evening. There was a mountain at the end of every street; quaint old houses superbly maintained; masses of flowers in front of shops and in roundabouts and restaurants; a grand hotel in the late 19th Century manner called the Victoria Jungfrau; a wide, green park with pollard trees, and the spires of churches and mansions rising against the snow-dusted Alps; and the rushing Aare river with incredibly blue water. It was so startlingly blue that we thought it had been polluted.

Interlaken, literally "Between the lakes", lies between the glacial lakes Brienz to the east and Thun to the west. When the glaciers retreated, about two million years ago, they left a vast moraine, deposits of alluvial soil and rock, between Brienz and Thun. Interlaken grew on this fertile, glacial plain: 570m high and on the northern feet of the high ranges. Though it was first settled by the tribes of the legendary Asterix, the Celts, Interlaken owes its urban development to the Augustian priests and nuns who opened a monastery and a convent here in the 12th and 13th Centuries.

We had learnt all this yesterday, and had then driven out to a beautiful, narrow, valley. It was dotted with little cottages and lush, green fields, watered by 72 ice-melt streams cascading like spun sugar down sheer, stark cliffs. From this almost-hidden fold we had ascended in a mountain lift to the dark cleft of the Trommelbachfalle. Twenty thousand litres of water roared down every second, fed by the ice walls of the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau. It was awesomely impressive.

When we were driving back to Interlaken, the thunder of the falls still ringing in our ears, the clouds had cleared and a lasso of light had reached out of the sky and thrown a noose around the glittering, white 4,158m high Jungfrau.

And now we are waiting for our guide, the grey haired and extremely fit Ernst Burkhard, to take us to that icy Top of Europe.

* * *

It has been an exhilarating day. Hemmingway was right: encounters with high mountains burn the fat off one's soul!

This morning we strode out with Ernst, through the misting, feather-rain, past the park and the pollard trees, to Interlaken Ost station where we boarded a Swissrail train. It was, as always, the epitome of efficiency. We left Swissrail at a small station and crossed over to a smaller train of the private Jungfrau Rail, the Jungfraubahnen. We sat in our own, reserved section, while disciplined hordes of Japanese streamed into the other section, filling the compartment with bowing, smiling, camera-buzzing chatter. Both Interlaken and Jungfrau are very popular with the Japanese.

The little train started. A slight thud!-thud!-thud! intruded into the usual clickety-clack as the cog wheels engaged the ratchet track. We climbed out of the drizzle-softened green valleys and into the mountains. Glittering mossy slopes gave way to wooded stretches with patches of snow, then to great stands of conifer forests crisp with the icing sugar of frost; merging into dark forests in which even the barest branches were heavy with rugs of snow and long, crystal icicles hung from the eaves of stations. We were now in a frozen land; everything around us shimmered in white. Whenever we had to change trains, we picked our way across the tracks very, very carefully: snow crushed under our feet, ice cracked and we stepped, very gingerly, around slippery glassy, patches of black-ice. A young Japanese woman in high heels lost her balance and would have had a nasty fall if her companions had not grabbed her, filling the chill air with a bright burst of giggles.

Groups of skiers now began to join us, clomping around in their heavy boots, tracking snow out of the platform and into the compartment.

We got under way again. Now, occasionally, the steeper white slopes above us were scarred with black barriers, one above the other, to hold back snow-slides.

At Kleine Scheidegg station, 2,061 m above sea level, our train paused, as if to take a deep breath. And then we plunged into one of the greatest engineering feats of this mountain railway: a 7.2 km tunnel cut into the base of the Eiger, the Monch and on to the Jungfraujoch. It was a long ride through the rock of the mountains but, wisely, they had scooped out stations in between where all passengers disembarked for comfort stops and glimpses of the high world outside through toughened glass windows set into the rock.

Finally, at the end of the tunnel, we emerged into the brightly lit Jungfrajoch complex: and what a complex. Here, on multiple levels at 3,454m, accessed by stairs and lifts, is a restaurant, a conference hall, a museum, a small cinema, places for picnickers to eat their food, a fast-food self-service outlet, a post office and souvenir shops. It is rather like the "Starship Enterprise" of "Star Trek" except that, here, the views outside are not to black space and bright stars but of the white snowfields and high peaks.

We were as excited as children in a fair. We bought postcards, had them defaced in the highest post office in Europe, had our photographs imprinted against a view of the Jungfraujoch, and ate a memorable gourmet lunch in the most elevated restaurant in Europe. We also walked, with great circumspection, through the Ice Palace: a tunnel cut into the glacier, past alcoves filled with ice sculptures. When we learnt that the glacier moves, creeping down the mountain, we were jolted into the realisation that we were inside a moving river of ice! It was a sobering thought.

And then we boarded a lift to woosh! us through the rock to the steel and concrete Sphinx Observatory. It is anchored in the permafrost of the mountain, protected from lightning strikes by a Farady Cage of sheet metal and wire netting. This is the scientific heart of the Jungfraujoch. Here, environmentalists, meteorologists, astronomers, physicists and geologists observe the heavens, keeping watch on solar and cosmic radiation, the slow movement of the glaciers and of the earth beneath them, the changing patterns of the weather and pollution. Here, surely, was the 21st Century version of those mystical Masters who keep a watch over mankind!

Evening crept upon us too soon and it was time for all visitors to leave the stimulating Top of Europe.Reluctantly, we boarded our train again; clickity-clacked thud!-thudded! through the great tunnel and, at Kleine Scheidegg, took another route back. Snow ploughs growled; a pack of huskies pulled a sledge, yapping happily; skiers clomped around the snow banks of stations, sailed up on lifts, sped down quilted white slopes. Conifers appeared, forests, woodlands, farms, chalets, the broad blue spread of lakes; then the picture postcard views of our beautiful Interlaken.

We disembarked and looked up. There, above it all, towered the white eminence of vibrant Jungfrau.

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