Switzerland, Through the Eiger

The Rhine Falls are only 23 meters high. They are also 150 meters wide, and in summer about 600,000 liters of water go over them every second, which is the part the height leaves out.

In the middle of it all stands one rock. A small boat crosses the basin through the spray and drops you on it, and about a hundred steps take you up to a platform at the top with the river going past on both sides. Nobody says much up there. Nobody could hear it.

Then Lucerne, which looks exactly like the lid of a chocolate box and has no plans to apologize. The Chapel Bridge has crossed the Reuss since the 14th century, burned in 1993 and reopened eight months later. Up the hill a lion lies dying in the rock for the Swiss Guards killed in Paris in 1792. Mark Twain called it the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world. The evening is yours.

The train out of Lucerne climbs the Brünig Pass on a toothed rail, past three lakes in three different blues, and the whole carriage takes the same photograph three times. Then Lake Brienz, then Grindelwald, under the north face of the Eiger.

The afternoon goes up. A gondola climbs to First, 2,166 meters, where a steel walkway is bolted to the cliff and sticks out 45 meters over the drop, on a floor you can see through. Everyone walks out slowly the first time. The second time they are already posing.

After that the mountain is yours: a walk to a lake that holds the peaks upside down on a still day, or a bench and the view, which is not a lesser option. Two nights in Grindelwald start tonight and dinner is wherever you like. Tomorrow the train goes into the Eiger, so look at it properly now.

On 27 August 1893 an industrialist named Adolf Guyer-Zeller went walking above Mürren with his daughter, watched a train inch up toward Kleine Scheidegg, and that night, in room 42 of his hotel, sketched a railway straight through the Eiger and the Mönch. It took sixteen years of tunneling. He died in 1899, and the line never reached the summit he drew it to. It stopped at 3,454 meters, which turned out to be plenty.

A gondola lifts you to the foot of the Eiger and his train does the rest, almost all of it inside the mountain, with one stop at windows cut through the rock onto the ice. At the top: the highest railway station in Europe, the longest glacier in the Alps running away south for about 22 kilometers, lunch, and a palace two Grindelwald guides began cutting into the glacier in 1934 with picks and saws.

Down the other side to Lauterbrunnen and Trümmelbach: ten waterfalls inside a mountain, carrying up to 20,000 liters a second off the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau. Remember this water. Some of it is going to Bern too, the slow way, through two lakes. Dinner together in Grindelwald.

The Aare leaves Lake Thun a shade of turquoise that looks edited, and this morning you go with it: a raft, a guide and about three hours of river down to Bern. The current does most of the work. You mostly look up.

Bern swims in this river. It is on Switzerland's official list of living traditions, and the lido below the parliament building is free. The water averages about 17 degrees in July, a little more in August, and on a hot day the river past the lido fills up anyway. When it is warm enough, the confident swimmers slip over the side for the last stretch and float into town, getting out where Bern gets out. When it is not, everyone stays in the raft and waves at the people who did.

Then the old town, which the river wraps on three sides, and the train to Zurich for the farewell dinner. Same people as the welcome dinner on day 1. Slightly damp. Completely different table.

Last breakfast. A swimsuit is still drying over a chair somewhere, the camera roll is half glacier and half the same three people pulling the same face at altitude, and the group chat has been renamed twice since the river.

Anyone with a later train has Zurich for the morning. On the way to the station, fill the bottle at a fountain one more time. You have now met this water falling, frozen, underground and on the move, and it still tastes of nothing at all, which in Zurich is the point.

Then the goodbyes, to people who were strangers five days ago. In Switzerland even those happen on time.