LET’S VISIT SWITZERLAND, let’s look round that stupendous mountain country where forests grow up sheer walls of rock. Let’s climb up to dazzling snowfields, and then go down again to green meadows where rivers and streams roar along as though afraid they won’t reach the sea in time and get away. The sun blazes down into the deep valley; it blazes up above too, on the hard masses of snow, with the result that over the ages they fuse into glistening blocks of ice and form rolling avalanches or piled-up glaciers. Two such glaciers lie inside the wide ravines below the Schreckhorn and the Wetterhorn, near the little mountain town of Grindelwald. So extraordinary are they to look at that many foreigners come here in summer from all countries of the world. They arrive over the high snow-covered mountains, they arrive from below, from the deep valleys, and then have to climb uphill several hours, and as they’re climbing, the valley beneath sinks ever deeper; they look down into it as if viewing it from an air balloon. High up, the clouds often hang like thick, heavy curtains of smoke round the mountain peaks, while down in the valley, where the many brown chalets are scattered, a ray of sunshine is still giving light, picking out a spot in brilliant green as though it were transparent. Water roars, hums and whistles down below, water trickles and chimes up above; there it appears like fluttering silver ribbons down over the rock.
On both sides of the road up here stand cottages built of logs. Every cottage has its little potato-garden, and this is a necessity, because behind the doors are many mouths; it’s full to bursting here with children, and they have insatiable appetites for food. They swarm forward from all the cottages, thrusting themselves in front of travellers whether these come on foot or by coach. The entire pack of children is intent on business. The little ones offer beautifully carved wooden chalets for sale, just like those you see built here in the mountains. Whether it’s rainy weather or sunshine, the swarm of children comes forth with its wares.
Some twenty years ago, there’d be standing here every so often, but always somewhat apart from the other children, a little boy who also wanted to engage in business. He’d stand there with such an earnest expression and with both hands clenching his wooden box as if he didn’t really want to let go of it. But it was precisely this earnestness, and the boy’s being so little, that made him noticed and actually called upon, and he often made the best sales of anybody; he himself didn’t know why. Higher up on the mountain lived his maternal grandfather who carved the delicate, appealing chalets, and up there in his living-room was an old cupboard chock-full of carvings of all kinds: nutcrackers, knives, forks, and boxes patterned with charming leaf tracery and leaping chamois. Everything to delight the eyes of children was there, but the little boy – Rudy was his name – looked with greater pleasure and longing at the old gun beneath the roof-beam. It would one day be his, his grandfather had said, but first he must become big and strong enough to use it.
Small as the boy was, he was put in charge of minding the goats, and if being able to scramble about alongside them is being a good goatherd, well then yes, Rudy was a good goatherd. He even climbed a bit higher than his charges; he liked getting birds’ nests from high in the trees. He was adventurous and plucky, but you saw him smile only when he was standing beside the roaring waterfall or when he heard an avalanche rumble. He never played with the other children; he got together with them only when his grandfather sent him down to make sales, something Rudy didn’t much care for. Rather he preferred clambering about by himself on the mountainside, or sitting in his grandfather’s house and listening to him tell stories about old times and the breed of people nearby in Meiringen where he was from. Those people had not been living there from the first age of the world’s history, Grandfather said, they’d arrived later as migrants. They’d come from far up in the north where their kinsfolk still lived and were called ‘Swedes’. It took great wisdom to know this, and now Rudy knew it too! But he acquired even more wisdom from his other regular associates, the household’s members of the animal family. There was a large dog, Ajola, an inheritance from Rudy’s father, and a tomcat. He in particular was of great importance to Rudy; he’d taught him to climb.
‘Come with me out onto the roof!’ the cat had said, quite distinctly and comprehensibly, because when you’re a child and can’t talk, you can understand chickens and ducks, cats and dogs completely. They speak to us every bit as intelligibly as Father or Mother do, you simply have really to be a child for this to be so. Even Grandfather’s walking-stick can emit neighs, can turn into a horse with head, legs and tail. In the cases of some children this comprehension recedes later than in others, and people say of these that they’re backward, that they’re staying children an unconscionably long time. People say such a lot of things!
‘Come with me, little Rudy, out onto the roof!’ was about the first thing the cat said and Rudy understood. ‘Falling down’s all imagination. You don’t fall when you’re not frightened of doing so. Come on, place one back paw – so! Then the other – like this! Now stretch out your front paws. Have your eyes skinned, and your limbs nimble. If a gap appears, just jump, keeping a good grip of yourself! That’s what I do.’
And that’s what Rudy did too. So he’d often be sitting on the ridge of the roof together with the cat, and sitting with him in the treetop, and yes, high up on the edge of the precipice as well, where the cat himself would not venture.
‘Higher! Higher!’ said the trees and bushes, ‘Look at where we climb up to, how high up we reach, how tightly we cling to the furthest little pinnacles of rock!’
And Rudy would make his way up the mountain, often before the sun reached so far up, and there he’d take his morning-drink, that drink which only Our Lord can brew. But ordinary mortals can read the recipe for it, which is as follows: the fresh scent of the mountain’s herbs and the valley’s curly mint and thyme. The overhanging clouds absorb everything heavy into themselves, and then the winds pull them through the spruce forests. The essence of the scent turns into air, gentle, fresh air, getting ever fresher; this was Rudy’s morning-drink.
The sunbeams, the daughters of the sun who bring blessings with them, would kiss his cheeks, and Dizziness herself would stand by in wait for him but not daring to come close. And the swallows from his grandfather’s house, who had no fewer than seven nests there, flew up to him and the goats, singing: ‘We and you! You and us!’ They brought him greetings from his home, even from the two hens, whom Rudy didn’t have much to do with.
Even though he was so young, he had travelled, and not such a short distance either for a nipper like him. He was born over in Canton Valais, and taken across the mountains to here. Recently he’d gone on foot to visit the nearby Staubbach Falls, which billow like a silver veil in front of that snow-clad, dazzling white mountain, the Jungfrau (the Virgin). And in Grindelwald he’d come into contact with the great glacier, but that is a tragic story; it was there his mother met her death: ‘It was there that little Rudy,’ said his grandfather, ‘got all his child’s merriness knocked out of him. Why, when the boy wasn’t so much as a year old, he laughed more than he cried – that’s what his mother once wrote. But ever since he found himself inside the ice chasm, quite another disposition has got into him.’ His grandfather didn’t as a rule talk much about all this, but the entire mountainside knew the facts of the case.
Rudy’s father had been, as we know, a mail-coach man. The large dog now at Rudy’s home had always accompanied him on his route over the Simplon down to the Lake of Geneva. Rudy’s family on his father’s side still lived in the Rhône Valley, in Canton Valais; his paternal uncle was a seasoned chamois-hunter and a well-respected mountain guide. Rudy was only a year old when he lost his father, and his mother very much wanted to take her little child back home to her own family in the Bernese Oberland. Her father lived some hours’ distance from Grindelwald; he carved in wood, and earned so much that he could support himself pretty comfortably. In the month of June, carrying her little child, she set off in the company of two chamois-hunters, taking the homewards route over the Gemmi Pass to reach Grindelwald. Already they’d done the longest stretch of the journey, and had reached the snowline by way of the mountain ridge’s highest point. Already they were within sight of her native valley, with all its familiar scattered wooden chalets. There remained now only the hazard of going over the topmost section of the one great glacier.
Freshly fallen snow lay all around, and covered a ravine, not right to the bottom where the water was roaring along, but nonetheless to a depth greater than a man’s height. The young woman with her child in her arms slipped, fell in and was gone. They heard no scream, not even a groan, but they did hear a little child crying. More than an hour went by before her two hunter-escorts managed to fetch, from the nearest house down below, ropes and poles which might possibly be of help. And after tremendous effort two dead bodies (as it seemed) were hauled up from the ice chasm. Every means was employed, and the men succeeded in bringing the child back to life, but not the mother. And so the old grandfather came to have a daughter’s son instead of a daughter in his home, the little child who laughed more than he cried. But it seemed now as if he’d been broken of this habit. The change in him had almost certainly occurred inside the crevasse, in the cold eerie world of ice where the souls of the damned are locked up till Judgement Day, as the Swiss countryman believes.
Not unlike rushing water that’s been frozen and then pressed into green blocks of glass, the glacier lies down there, one huge lump of ice tipped onto another. In the depths the furious flow of melted snow and ice roars along; deep caves, mighty chasms appear. An extraordinary glass palace it all is, and inside this the Ice Virgin lives, the glacier queen. She, the deadly, the destructive one, is half child of the air, half the river’s powerful mistress, which is why she can outpace the chamois up on the snow-mountains’ loftiest peaks, where even the most adventurous mountaineers have to hew steps in the ice for themselves as footholds. She sails down the torrential river on a slender spray of spruce, and leaps from boulder to boulder, her long snow-white hair fluttering around her and her blue-green coat gleaming like the water in the deep Swiss lakes.
‘Go on – crush! Take a hard grip! Power belongs to me!’ she says; ‘they stole a beautiful boy from me, a boy I had kissed, but not kissed to death. He is back among humankind, minding the goats on the mountain, scrambling upwards, always upwards, away from all the other children – but not away from me. He is mine, and I will get him!’
And she ordered Her Dizziness to carry out errands on her behalf. In summer it was too muggy for the Ice Virgin to stay outside where the curly mint thrives. Dizziness rose up and then ducked down; but next appeared first one, then three emanations of this spirit, for Dizziness has many sisters, a whole tribe of them. And the Ice Virgin chose the strongest of all the ones who prevail indoors and out-of-doors alike. They sit on banisters and balustrades, they scamper like a squirrel along the mountain-edge, they jump out in front of you and tread air as the swimmer treads water, and entice their victim forth, and so down into the abyss. Both Dizziness and the Ice Virgin grab at human beings the way the polyp grabs at everything that moves within its reach.
‘Me grab him!’ said Dizziness, ‘No, I’m not able to do that! The cat, that wretch, has taught him his own tricks. The human child has enough power of his own to keep me away. Why, I can’t even get near the little lad when he hangs on a branch over the precipice and I’m right there taking the trouble to tickle the soles of his feet or giving him a ducking in the air. I simply can’t do it!’
‘We can do it!’ said the Ice Virgin, ‘you and me! Me! Me!’
‘No, no!’ This last rang out as if it were the mountain echo of church bells ringing, but it was the song, the speech, the chorus of all the other spirits of nature blending together, gentle, loving and good: the daughters of the sunbeams. Every evening they lie down in a circle on the mountain peaks, spreading out their rose-coloured wings which, as the sun sinks, flush ever more deeply red. The high Alps are aglow, people actually call it ‘the alpenglow’. When the sun has set, the daughters go onto the tops of the mountains, into the white snow, and sleep there till the sun rises, when they can emerge once again. They’re particularly fond of flowers, butterflies and human beings, and among all these they’ve specially singled out Rudy. ‘You won’t capture him! You’ll never have him!’ they said.
‘I’ve captured and kept far bigger and stronger human beings!’ said the Ice Virgin.
Then the sun’s daughters sang a song about the wanderer whose cloak the whirlwind seized and carried off in its furious flight. The wind took the outer covering away but not the man himself. ‘You, Force’s children, can grab Rudy all you want, but you’ll never be able to hold onto him. He is stronger, he is more soulful, even than ourselves. He climbs higher than the sun, our mother. He is in possession of the magic word which is binding on wind and water so that they have to serve and obey him. You just loosen all the heaviness and oppression of his weight and he’ll rise up higher still.’
That’s how the chorus rang out, beautifully, like a peal of bells!
And every morning the sunbeams shone in through the one little window in the grandfather’s house, in on the peaceful child. The sunbeams’ daughters kissed him, they wanted to thaw out, to warm away, to expel those kisses of ice the glacier’s Royal Virgin had given him when he lay in his dead mother’s lap in the deep ice chasm and was rescued from it as by a miracle.