Locked at Sixty

The telephone went a little after midnight: the village constable at Oberried, shouting down a trunk line that a gentleman from Zurich was dead in the hotel on top of the mountain, and that nobody could get up to him before morning. I took the first train up the valley and got down from it in the dark, into snow over my boot-tops. It had snowed all night and stopped towards dawn, and the village lay under it without a mark.

The valley station stood beyond the last of the houses, a block of grey concrete with one lit window. Out of its upper end two cables climbed over the pines and went into the cloud. Against the platform sat the gondola — the car, the railwaymen call it — small and red, windows all round, with a night's snow lying on its roof.

Inside it was warm and smelt of oil. A man in his middle fifties was going round the big electric motor with a rag, in gloves so black with grease that they shone: Sepp Zurbuchen, machinist of the valley station. Beside the motor a steel lever as long as my arm stood up out of the floor, and from it hung a length of chain and a padlock. The padlock was open. I asked him what the chain was for.

"The wind lock," Zurbuchen said, as if every motor had one. "There is a gauge on the roof of the top station, and the machinist up there rings me what it reads, in kilometres the hour. When the top station reads over sixty I cut the motor and chain it, and the car stays down here until the wind drops under. It is not for me to judge; sixty is sixty. Last winter I had it chained three days together, and twenty guests up there playing cards."

He gave me the timetable in the same breath. In winter the first car goes up at ten past seven and the last comes down at half past six, and outside those hours it runs only when the hotel sends down for one. There was a path, but it was four hours on ski by daylight, and it had been shut since December for avalanches.

On the wall by the door hung a black telephone with no dial. I asked if that was how the news had come down.

"The Bahntelefon," he said. "The railway's own wire. It is slung along the cable from pylon to pylon and it speaks to three places — here, the machine room at the top, and an extension in the hotel office. Nothing to do with the post-office line. The hotel's night porter rang me on it at twenty-four minutes to midnight. I know the minute because I wrote it down. Every call on that wire goes in the book with its hour. Regulations."

I asked to see the book. He shook his head without ill will. It was station property and did not leave the station; but he would copy out last night's page and send it up to me on the second car, at half past nine.

At ten past seven a bell rang. Zurbuchen slid the gondola door shut on me and went to his lever, and the car lifted off the platform and swung once. For twelve minutes there was nothing in the windows but white, above and below, and the hum of the cable overhead.