IN A SWISS HOTEL.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 321, 17 December 1910, Page 2

IN A SWISS HOTEL.

A MIRACLE OF SEVEN STOREYS. In Switzerland the hotels occur in all conceivable and inconceivable situations. The official guide of the Swiss Society of Hotelkeepers gives us photographs of over eight hundred grand hotels, and it is by no means complete ; in fact, some of the grandest consider themselves too grand to be in it, pictorally. Just as Germany is the land of pundits and aniline dyes, France of revolutions, England of beautiful women, and Scotland of sixpences, so is Switzerland the land of huge modern caravanserais. You may put Snowdon on the top of Ben Nevis and climb up the height of the total by the aid of railways, furniculars, racks and-pinions, diligences, and sledges ; and when noticing but your own feet will take you any further, you will see, in Switzerland a grand hotel, magically and incredibly raised aloft in the mountains ; solitary—no town, no houses, nothing but this hotel hemmed in on all sides by snowy crags, aud made impregnable by precipices and treacherous snow and ice. I always imagine that at the next great redrawing of the map of Europe, when the lesser nationalities are to disappear, the Switzers will take armed -refuge in their farthest grand hotels, and there defy the mandates of the Concert.

For the hotel, no matter how remote it be, lacks nothing that is mentioned in the dictionary of comfort. Beyond its walls your life is not worth twelve- hours' purchase. You would not die of hunger, because you would perish of cold. At best you might hit on some peasant's cottage in which the standards of existence had not changed for a century. But once pass within the portals of the grand hotel, and you hecome the spoiled darling of an intricate organisation that laughs at mountains, avalanches, and frost.

You are surrounded by Luxuries surpassing even the luxuries offered by the huge modern caravanserais of London. (For example, I believe that no London caravanserai is steamheated throughout.) You have the temperature of the South, or of the North, by turning a handle, and the light of suns at midnight. You have the restaurants of Piccadilly and the tea-rooms of St. James's Street. You eat to the music of wild artistes in red uniforms. You are amused by conjurers, bridge-drives, and cotillons You can read the periodical literature of the world while reclining on upholstery from the most expensive houses in Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. You have a postoffice, a telegraph-office, and a telephone ,; pianos, pianolas, and musi-cal-boxes. You go up to bed in a lift, and come down again to lunch in one. You need only ring a bell, and a specially-trained man in clothes more glittering than yours will answer you softly in any language you please, and do anything you want, except carry you bodily. And.on the other side tif n pane of glass is the white peak, the virgin glacier, twenty degrees of frost, starvation, death —and nature as obdurate as she was ten thousand years ago. Within tho granrl hotel civilisation is no powerful that it governs the very colour of your necktie of an evening. Without it, cut ofE from it, in those mountains you would be fighting your fellows for existence according to the codes of primitive humanity. Put your noso against the dark window, after dinner, while the band is soothing your digestion with a waltz, and in the distance you may see a greenish light. It is a star. And a little below it you may sec a yellow light glimmering. It is another grand hotel, by day generally invisible, another eyrie dj luxe. You go home, and calmly say that you have been staying at the Grand Hotel Blanc. But does it ever occur to you to wonder how it was all done ? Does it ever occur to you that orchestras, lamp-shades, fresh eggs, fresh fish, vanilla ices, cham- ! pagne, and cut dowers do not grow ■■ on snow-wreathed crags ? ; You have rot been staying in a , hotel, but in a miracle of seven j storeys. In the sub-basement lie the ] wines. In the basement women are j for ever washing linen and men for- ] ever cooking. On the ground-floor j all is eating and drinking and rhy- ! thm. Then come five storeys of j slumber ; and above that the attics where the tips are divided..—Arnold Bennett, in the "Pall Mall Magazine."