Norman Douglas

“ How good it is to be at home again, simmering and bubbling with contentment as you recognize the old things in their old places!
On the right flank of this owl’s den there used to be a bare patch famous for its strawberries. It is now afforested and the strawberries are gone; they have strawed—strayed—elsewhere; they follow the clearings. But that hay-hut remains, that hut of the early school, built of massive timbers between which the hay comes leaking out; the roof is green with antique moss, and sulphur-hued lichen decks its beams. ”

“ Seven o’clock—how long one has lingered in this pleasant tavern! Now we leave, after many farewellings, and wander homewards due east, not passing the church at all; we cross the streamlet which has accompanied us hither and immediately enter that wood, familiar by this time, the once awe-inspiring forest of the——. It is already dark here, under the firs, but the rich, resinous perfumes of daylight are still hanging in the air; no dew has fallen to quench them. So we move along the dim path in silence; we have talked ourselves out, at Schlins. ”

“ Not a single wooden bridge is left over Lutz or Ill. They were swept away, every one of them, in the floods of 1910 and 1911 and now, for the first time, their place is taken by solid but hideous structures of cement. One is sorry to let the old ones go; one calls to mind the bridge at Ludesch built as long ago as 1498 and ever since then kept in repair, with its sloping wooden roof, its sudden twilight within and odor of hot fir-wood, as of a scented tunnel ”

“ Forgotten inside the castle, on the moss. Back again, to crawl about on hands and knees till the precious{83} object has been found; then once more to the fox-meadow. So we wander homeward, in full content. The dew-drenched field sends a pleasant shiver up through our boots, and a chorus of crickets is chirping lustily in its damp earth. Stars are out; the Tschallenga hill, confronting us, has become pitch-black; those Rhætian peaks are like steel, and their snow-patches have a dead look at this hour. Tawny exhalations, as of lingering day, flit about the Swiss mountains on our west. ”

“ This floor is thickly carpeted with moss in every part. No brambles or inconvenient shrubs grow here; nothing but firs and moss, and creeping ivy, and hepatica, and daphne and the tender Waldmeister plant, that calls up memories of May. Once inside that green enceinte, a suggestion of remoteness overcomes you; the world and its jargon are left behind. There is silence save for the rushing torrent with its waterfall, three hundred feet below. In former days, this castle must have towered grandly over Ludesch and the whole valley. ”

“ Young people never will realize when a joke has grown threadbare, and he now distilled so much fresh laughter out of its shape, its color, its brim and other details of construction, its general fit, its suitability to my particular style, likening me at one time to his own countryman Napoleon and at another to a certain old female cousin of whose existence I had hitherto been unaware, that I was on the verge of getting annoyed when I hit upon the genial expedient of making him translate his miserable witticisms into the English tongue. ”

“ The “flourishing” pines and firs of which I spoke just now have been judiciously planted; these are self-sown. They are paying for the privilege.
We also intended to visit the Schnepfenstrich, a piece of forest between Bludesch and Nenzing where, in days gone by, one used to lie in wait for the woodcock at nightfall. What excitement in the dim gloaming of March—Oculi: da kommen sie—among those patches of trees with their scent of dampness and sprouting leaves, listening for the call of the male bird and waiting to see him glide past, mysterious as a phantom! ”

“ What is one to do with people, future candidates for government posts, who cannot tell the difference between an adverb and a conjunction, who, if you ask them to define a reflexive verb, gaze at you with an air of injured innocence, almost as if you had asked them to say what is the capital of China, the position of their own colony of Obok, and whether Chili belongs to Germany or to Austria? ”

“ The mere sight of his son, at the Bludenz swimming baths, used to send us into fits. Nobody had ever seen such a “Waldmensch.” He might have been a gorilla in this respect—an uncommon kind of gorilla; for not every gorilla, I fancy, can afford to wear a regular parting down its back. No gorilla, either, could climb in better style; or smile, if they smile at all, to better purpose. The Brunnenmacher’s laughing face charmed away hunger and fatigue and wet clothes and all the ills of mountaineering. ”

“ When all is said and done, when you have scoured Europe and other regions in search of the picturesque and admired landscapes and ruins innumerable, that shattered old fastness of Blumenegg, up there, still remains one of the fairest places on earth. It is desolation itself, a harmonious desolation, among its dreamy firs and beeches; firs within, firs and beeches without. ”

“ Those ravages are healed here; trees and moss have done their work so well that an exquisite tonalité pervades the spot. Blumenegg is all in one key. Men have left it to crumble alone; and alone it crumbles, slowly and graciously, to earth. Nothing and nobody intrudes, save the wild things of nature; you must look for it. A much-frequented path—short cut from the Walserthal to the railway-station—runs close by; who ever steps aside? Resting in that enchanted{80} penumbra, one gains the impression that Blumenegg is neither sad nor smiling ”

“ They have anointed our boots with badger’s fat, in case we traverse any wet fields. We are only going along the main road towards Ludesch. That bench on the old Lutz embankment—that bench invariably occupied by a poor hump-backed woman reading—is sure to be empty at this hour.
It is. We sit down to smoke under the dripping firs, and I go ghost-hunting all alone, in the dark. The memories that are crowded into these few hundred yards! They spring up at my feet, from the damp forest earth. ”

“ Said the Brunnenmacher:
“I am an old man, and have at least three times as many children dependent on me as you have. That makes a difference. Besides, you are rich. Rich people can afford to break their necks. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? There it is, staring you in the face all day long. I could never resist the temptation, if I were in your place. Only think: it would be quite an unusual kind of honor for you, an Englishman, to have been the first up there. ”

“ The consequence is, that Lutz and Ill have put on new faces and grown painfully proper; they are no longer the wantons they were. And therefore all the fascinating wilderness of gray shingle and bowlders alongside, sparsely dotted with buckthorn, or white willow, or stunted little ghosts of birches—all that broad sunny desolation of their banks, where one chased crimson-winged grasshoppers and looked for garnets in those water-worn blocks of gneiss: all, all a thing of the past! ”

“ From here the Montiola meanders for half a mile or so, icy cold and full of trout, through a flowery swamp region towards the reservoirs, where it takes its theatrical plunge into the village below.
A distant rocky peak, just to the left of the Hoher Frassen, confronts you on stepping out of the northern forest. This is the “Rothe Wand” which, considering its respectable height of 2701 meters, is a decidedly coy mountain, and more clever at hiding itself than most of them; you may obtain another clear view of it from the platform of Frastanz station. ”

“ Now ever since a recent date which I forget, when the upper Rhine misbehaved itself so shockingly that the Austrian and Swiss Governments were forced to undertake some costly works with a view to ensuring better conduct in the future, our own two rivers, the Lutz and Ill, which were likewise subject to devastating floods, began to be hemmed in by stone embankments more systematically and more remorselessly than they had ever yet been in days of old, when they also gave an infinity of trouble. ”

“ It does one good to be with such people, so blithe and natural and intelligent; I could go on talking to her for ever and ever; and I nearly did.
Then up, at last, through the firs to the venerable ruin of Jagdberg. Hard by the castle they have erected the so-called “Josefinum”—a kind of refuge{173} and school for poor children of both sexes, waifs and strays, the scum of the province. It contains about fifteen girls and fifty boys, many of questionable parentage or none at all, ailing in body and mind—squint-eyed and one-legged and tuberculous and mangy and feeble-minded and depraved. ”

“ The Brunnenmacher was short and fat and bearded and fair-haired and laughing, like many of them hereabouts; Mattli would have struck you at the first glance as something apart from his fellows, something primordial. He towered above the average height, he stooped from sheer tallness; the very scarecrow of a man, dusky, clean-shaven, sallow of complexion, with a harassed and hunted look in his eye and a voice that seemed to{129} come from caverns far away. A lonely, wolfish creature! I never saw him smile. ”

“ Here, at the right{7} season, you may capture as many Apollo butterflies as you please. A little boy and girl, scrambling homeward one day from this summit, dislodged with infinite trouble a huge bowlder and, while somebody was not looking, sent it on a career of delirious leaps down the incline above Raggal village. Such was its momentum after a couple of hundred yards that it went clean through a hay-hut, empty but solid, tossing its wooden blocks into the air as if they were feathers. The destruction of some poor peasant’s property was considered a great joke. ”

“ Yet how explain a state of affairs like this: vines were cultivated here by the Romans (even during the Stone Age, among the pile-dwellers on Lake Constance) and, assiduously, as early as the eleventh century; in 1615, again, there were no less than one hundred vineyards at Bludesch alone. The site of all of them is now nothing but grassy slopes. Can hay be more remunerative than wine? If not, there is perhaps something to be said for the change-of-climate theory. They seem to have been gay people, by the way, in those bibulous days. ”

“ It was only a frolicsome shower, pattering deliciously among the beeches yonder. Soon it reached us and drove us under a fir. Here, as the drops were trickling through the branches, my companion drew from his pocket that talisman, that vade mecum and sine qua non, and performed a selection of pieces grave and gay; I went to inspect a small cross that stood close at hand—one of four which are erected in this forest to the memory of woodcutters who have perished at their trade. ”

“ They used to be quite a feature of the countryside. When you crossed our petrifying stream, for instance, you beheld a horde of them scattered over the slanting field below the road, and some were of prodigious size, bearing bushes and little trees on their backs. Not one of those is left; I know of only a single remaining block which is decorated with timber; you will never find it, though you may certainly pass a spot, not far from Jordan castle, where twenty-three can still be counted lying about—dwarfs, mostly, or half submerged in the earth. The peasant makes war on these things ”

“ The roof is gone, and so are nearly all the internal partitions; nothing but the shell survives. This shell, this massive outer wall of blocks partly hewn and partly in the rough—water{75}-worn bowlders, dragged up from the Lutz-bed below—is encrusted with moss wherever moss can grow; out of that moss sprout little firs and little beeches, drawing what nourishment they can from the old stones. They garnish the ruin. So Blumenegg is invaded by nature; and nature, here, has been left untouched. A castle in a tale! ”

“ It was what we saw a few days ago during our latest stroll to the ruined Jagdberg. I make a point, namely, of losing myself on the way there (it is quite easy; you have only to bear a little to the north in the woods) because, in so doing, you never fail to see something, however insignificant, which you never saw before. So it fell out. We duly lost our way and, floundering down a thickly wooded incline, came to the margin of a small crescent-shaped bog, surrounded by old firs. It was as solitary a spot as you might wish to find; for all one knew, the foot of man had never trodden here. ”

“ The transformation of wood into cement is proceeding relentlessly all over the country; to my infinite disgust. Those numerous wooden watertroughs for the use of householders and their cattle, which used to be quite a feature of the streets, are now all being manufactured out of this damnably durable material; there is a cement-factory near our station, and I wish somebody would drop a bomb on it. ”

“ All is moist here, and mysterious. An owl sallies forth on our left and circles twice directly overhead, so close that we can discern her eyes and beak. Then up through misty fields past a decrepit hay-hut, one of the survivors of the old school like that near the crayfish-stream, one of those whose planks are encrusted with sulphur-hued lichen. Now Mr. R. produces his talisman and plays as we walk in the gloaming; many new morceaux have been “found” since that day at Blumenegg. ”

“ From this point you can climb direct to the castle. We preferred to wander awhile up the Gstinswald which clothes the right flank of the Lutz river, in order to see what has happened to that mysterious and solitary peasant-house which lay on a grassy slope in the forest. It is still there, but those skulls of foxes and badgers and other beasts, nailed by its occupant to a certain wooden door—skulls that held a fascination for us children—are gone. And what of the snowdrops? This, and a little hillock near Ludesch, were the only places where they could be found; tiger-lilies grew elsewhere ”