Monte Verità

They told me afterwards they had found nothing. No trace of anyone, living or dead. Maddened by anger, and I believe by fear, they had succeeded at last in breaking into those forbidden walls, dreaded and shunned through countless years—to be met by silence. Frustrated, bewildered, frightened, driven to fury at the sight of those empty cells, that bare court, the valley people resorted to the primitive methods that have served so many peasants through so many centuries: fire and destruction.

It was the only answer, I suppose, to something they did not understand. Then, their anger spent, they must have realized that nothing of any purpose had been destroyed. The smoldering and blackened walls that met their eyes in the starry, frozen dawn had cheated them in the end.

Search parties were sent out, of course. The more experienced climbers among them, undaunted by the bare rock of the mountain summit, covered the whole ridge, from north to south, from east to west, with no result.

And that is the end of the story. Nothing more is known.

Two men from the village helped me to carry Victor’s body to the valley, and he was buried at the foot of Monte Verità. I think I envied him, at peace there. He had kept his dream.

As to myself, my old life claimed me again. The second war churned up the world once more. Today, approaching seventy, I have few illusions; yet often I think of Monte Verità and wonder what could have been the final answer.

I have three theories, but none of them may be true.

The first, and the most fantastic, is that Victor was right, after all, to hold to his belief that the inhabitants of Monte Verità had reached some strange state of immortality which gave them power when the hour of need arrived, so that, like the prophets of old, they vanished into the heavens. The ancient Greeks believed this of their gods, the Jews believed it of Elijah, the Christians of their Founder. Throughout the long history of religious superstition and credulity runs this ever-recurrent conviction that some persons attain such holiness and power that death can be overcome. This faith is strong in eastern countries, and in Africa; it is only to our sophisticated western eyes that the disappearance of things tangible, of persons of flesh and blood, seems impossible.

Religious teachers disagree when they try to show the difference between good and evil: what is a miracle to one becomes black magic to another. The good prophets have been stoned, but so have the witch doctors. Blasphemy in one age becomes holy utterance in the next, and this day’s heresy is tomorrow’s credo.

I am no great thinker, and never have been. But this I do know, from my old climbing days: that in the mountains we come closest to whatever Being it is that rules our destiny. The great utterances of old were given from the mountaintops: it was always to the hills that the prophets climbed. The saints, the messiahs, were gathered to their fathers in the clouds. It is credible to me, in my more solemn moods, that the hand of magic reached down that night to Monte Verità and plucked those souls to safety.

Remember, I myself saw the full moon shining upon that mountain. I also, at midday, saw the sun. What I saw and heard and felt was not of this world. I think of the rock face, with the moon upon it; I hear the chanting from the forbidden walls; I see the crevasse, cupped like a chalice between the twin peaks of the mountain; I hear the laughter; I see the bare bronzed arms outstretched to the sun.

When I remember these things, I believe in immortality…

Then—and this is perhaps because my climbing days are over, and the magic of the mountains loses its grip over old memories, as it does over old limbs—I remind myself that the eyes I looked into that last day on Monte Verità were the eyes of a living, breathing person, and the hands I touched were flesh.

Even the spoken words belonged to a human being. “Please do not concern yourself with us. We know what we must do.” And then that final, tragic word, “Let Victor keep his dream.”

So my second theory comes into being, and I see nightfall, and the stars, and the courage of that soul which chose the wisest way for itself and for the others; and while I returned to Victor, and the people from the valley gathered themselves together for the assault, the little band of believers, the last company of those seekers after Truth, climbed to that crevasse, between the peaks, and so were lost.

My third theory is one that comes to me in moods more cynical, more lonely, when, having dined well with friends who mean little to me, I take myself home to my apartment in New York. Looking from the window at the fantastic light and color of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding. Then, I tell myself, perhaps the inhabitants of Monte Verità had long prepared themselves against departure, and when the moment came it found them ready, neither for immortality nor for death, but for the world of men and women. In stealth, in secret, they came down into the valley unobserved, and, mingling with the people, went their separate ways. I wonder, looking down from my apartment into the hub and hustle of my world, if some of them wander there, in the crowded streets and subways, and whether, if I went out and searched the passing faces, I should find such a one and have my answer.

Sometimes, when traveling, I have fancied to myself, in coming upon a stranger, that there is something exceptional in the turn of a head, in the expression of an eye, that is at once compelling and strange. I want to speak, and hold such a person instantly in conversation, but—possibly it is my fancy—it is as though some instinct warns them. A momentary pause, a hesitation, and they are gone. It might be in a train, or in some crowded thoroughfare, and for one brief moment I am aware of someone with more than earthly beauty and human grace, and I want to stretch out my hand and say, swiftly, softly, “Were you among those I saw on Monte Verità?” But there is never time. They vanish, they are gone, and I am alone again, with my third theory still unproven.

As I grow older—nearly seventy, as I have said, and memory shortens with the lengthening years—the story of Monte Verità becomes more dim to me, and more improbable, and because of this I have a great urge to write it down before memory fails me altogether. It may be that someone reading it will have the love of mountains that I had once, and so bring his own understanding to the tale, his own interpretation.

One word of warning. There are many mountain peaks in Europe, and countless numbers may bear the name of Monte Verità. They can be found in Switzerland, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in the Tyrol. I prefer to give no precise locality to mine. In these days, after two world wars, no mountain seems inaccessible. All can be climbed. None, with due caution, need be dangerous. My Monte Verità was never shunned because of difficulties of height, of ice and snow. The track leading to the summit could be followed by anyone of sure and certain step, even in late autumn. No common danger kept the climber back, but awe and fear.

I have little doubt that today my Monte Verità has been plotted upon the map with all the others. There may be resting camps near the summit, even a hotel in the little village on the eastern slopes, and the tourist lifted to the twin peaks by electric cable. Even so, I like to think there can be no final desecration, that at midnight, when the full moon rises, the mountain face is still inviolate, unchanged, and that in winter, when snow and ice, great wind and drifting cloud make the climb impassable to man, the rock face of Monte Verità, her twin peaks lifted to the sun, stares down in silence and compassion upon a blinded world.

We were boys together, Victor and I. We were both at Marlborough, and went up to Cambridge the same year. In those days I was his greatest friend, and if we did not see so much of each other after we left the Varsity it was only because we moved in rather different worlds: my work took me much abroad, while he was busily employed running his own estate up in Shropshire. When we saw each other, we resumed our friendship without any sense of having grown apart.

My work was absorbing, so was his; but we had money enough, and leisure too, to indulge in our favorite pastime, which was climbing. The modern expert, with his equipment and his scientific training, would think our expeditions amateur in the extreme—I am talking of the idyllic days before the First World War—and, looking back on them, I suppose they were just that. Certainly there was nothing professional about the two young men who used to cling with the hands and feet to those projecting rocks in Cumberland and Wales, and later, when some experience was gained, tried the more hazardous ascents in southern Europe.

In time we became less foolhardy and more weather-wise, and learned to treat our mountains with respect—not as an enemy to be conquered, but as an ally to be won. We used to climb, Victor and I, from no desire for danger or because we wanted to add mountain peaks to our repertoire of achievement. We climbed from desire, because we loved the thing we won.

The moods of a mountain can be more varying, more swiftly changing, than any woman’s, bringing joy, and fear, and also great repose. The urge to climb will never be explained. In olden days, perhaps, it was a wish to reach the stars. Today, anyone so minded can buy a seat on a plane and feel himself master of the skies. Even so, he will not have rock under his feet, or air upon his face; nor will he know the silence that comes only on the hills.

The best hours of my life were spent, when I was young, upon the mountains. That urge to spill all energy, all thought, to be as nothing, blotted against the sky—we called it mountain fever, Victor and I. He used to recover from the experience more quickly than I did. He would look about him, methodical, careful, planning the descent, while I was lost in wonder, locked in a dream I could not understand. Endurance had been tested, the summit was ours, but something indefinable waited to be won. Always it was denied to me, the experience I desired, and something seemed to tell me the fault was in myself. But they were good days. The finest I have known…

One summer, shortly after I returned to London from a business trip to Canada, a letter arrived from Victor, written in tremendous spirits. He was engaged to be married. He was, in fact, to be married very soon. She was the loveliest girl he had ever seen, and would I be his best man? I wrote back, as one does on these occasions, expressing myself delighted and wishing him all the happiness in the world. A confirmed bachelor myself, I considered him yet another good friend lost, the best of all, bogged down in domesticity.

The bride-to-be was Welsh and lived just over the border from Victor’s place in Shropshire. “And would you believe it,” said Victor in a second letter, “she has never as much as set foot on Snowdon! I am going to take her education in hand.” I could imagine nothing I should dislike more than trailing an inexperienced girl after me on any mountain.

A third letter announced Victor’s arrival in London, and hers too, in all the bustle and preparation of the wedding. I invited both of them to luncheon. I don’t know what I expected. Someone small, I think, and dark and stocky, with handsome eyes. Certainly not the beauty that came forward, putting out her hand to me and saying, “I am Anna.”

In those days, before the First World War, young women did not use makeup. Anna was free of lipstick, and her gold hair was rolled in great coils over her ears. I remember staring at her, at her incredible beauty, and Victor laughed, very pleased, and said, “What did I tell you?” We sat down to lunch, and the three of us were soon at ease and chatting comfortably. A certain reserve was part of her charm, but because she knew I was Victor’s greatest friend I felt myself accepted, and liked into the bargain.

Victor certainly was lucky, I said to myself, and any doubt I might have felt about the marriage went on sight of her. Inevitably, with Victor and myself, the conversation turned to mountains, and to climbing, before lunch was halfway through.

“So you are going to marry a man whose hobby is climbing mountains,” I said to her, “and you’ve never even gone up your own Snowdon.”

“No,” she said, “no, I never have.”

Some hesitation in her voice made me wonder. A little frown had come between those two very perfect eyes.

“Why?” I asked. “It’s almost criminal to be Welsh, and know nothing of your highest mountain.”

Victor interrupted. “Anna is scared,” he said. “Every time I suggest an expedition she thinks out an excuse.”

She turned to him swiftly. “No, Victor,” she said, “it’s not that. You just don’t understand. I’m not afraid of climbing.”

“What is it, then?” he said.

He put out his hand and held hers on the table. I could see how devoted he was to her, and how happy they were likely to become. She looked across at me, feeling me, as it were, with her eyes, and suddenly I knew instinctively what she was going to say.

“Mountains are very demanding,” she said. “You have to give everything. It’s wiser, for someone like myself, to keep away.”

I understood what she meant, at least I thought then that I did; but because Victor was in love with her, and she was in love with him, it seemed to me that nothing could be better than the fact that they might share the same hobby, once her initial awe was overcome.

“But that’s splendid,” I said, “you’ve got just the right approach to mountain climbing. Of course you have to give everything, but together you can achieve that. Victor won’t let you attempt anything beyond you. He’s more cautious than I am.”

Anna smiled, and then withdrew her hand from Victor’s on the table.

“You are both very obstinate,” she said, “and you neither of you understand. I was born in the hills. I know what I mean.”

And then some mutual friend of Victor’s and my own came up to the table to be introduced, and there was no more talk of mountains.

They were married about six weeks later, and I have never seen a lovelier bride than Anna. Victor was pale with nerves, I remember well, and I thought what a responsibility lay on his shoulders, to make this girl happy for all time.

I saw much of her during the six weeks of their engagement, and, though Victor never realized it for one instant, came to love her as much as he did. It was not her natural charm, nor yet her beauty, but a strange blending of both, a kind of inner radiance, that drew me to her. My only fear for their future was that Victor might be a little too boisterous, too lighthearted and cheerful—his was a very open, simple nature—and that she might withdraw into herself because of it. Certainly they made a handsome pair as they drove off after the reception—given by an elderly aunt of Anna’s, for her parents were dead—and I sentimentally looked forward to staying with them in Shropshire, and being godfather to the first child.

Business took me away shortly after the wedding, and it was not until the following December that I heard from Victor, asking me down for Christmas. I accepted gladly.

They had then been married about eight months. Victor looked fit and very happy, and Anna, it seemed to me, more beautiful than ever. It was hard to take my eyes off her. They gave me a great welcome, and I settled down to a peaceful week in Victor’s fine old home, which I knew well from previous visits. The marriage was almost definitely a success, that I could tell from the first. And if there appeared to be no heir on the way, there was plenty of time for that.

We walked about the estate, shot a little, read in the evenings, and were a most contented trio.

I noticed that Victor had adapted himself to Anna’s quieter personality, though quiet, perhaps, is hardly the right definition for her gift of stillness. This stillness—for there is no other word for it—came from some depth within her and put a spell upon the whole house. It had always been a pleasant place in which to stay, with its lofty rambling rooms and mullioned windows; but now the peaceful atmosphere was somehow intensified and deepened, and it was as though every room had become impregnated with a strange brooding silence, to my mind quite remarkable, and much more than merely restful, as it had been before.

It is odd, but looking back to that Christmas week I can recollect nothing of the traditional festivity itself. I don’t remember what we ate or drank, or whether we set foot inside the church, which surely we must have done, with Victor as the local squire. I can only remember the quite indescribable peace of the evenings, when the shutters had been fastened and we sat before the fire in the great hall. My business trip must have tired me more than I realized, for sitting there, in Victor and Anna’s home, I had no desire to do anything but relax and give myself up to this blessed, healing silence.

The other change that had come upon the house, which I did not fully take in until I had been there a few days, was that it was much barer than it had been before. The multiple odds and ends, and the collection of furniture handed down from Victor’s forebears, seemed to have disappeared. The big rooms were now sparse and the great hall, where we sat, had nothing in it but a long refectory table and the chairs before the open fire. It seemed very right that it should be so, yet, thinking about it, it was an odd change for a woman to make. The usual habit of a bride is to buy new curtains and carpets, to bring the feminine touch into a bachelor house. I ventured to remark upon it to Victor.

“Oh yes,” he said, looking about him vaguely, “we have cleared out a lot of stuff. It was Anna’s idea. She doesn’t believe in possessions, you know. No, we didn’t have a sale, or anything like that. We gave them all away.”

The spare room allotted to me was the one I had always used in the past, and this was pretty much as it had been before. And I had the same old comforts—cans of hot water, early tea, biscuits by my bed, cigarette box filled, all the touches of a thoughtful hostess.

Yet once, passing down the long corridor to the stair-head, I noticed that the door of Anna’s room, which was usually closed, was open; and knowing it to have been Victor’s mother’s room in former days, with a fine old four-poster bed and several pieces of heavy solid furniture, all in keeping with the style of the house, ordinary curiosity made me glance over my shoulder as I passed the open door. The room was bare of furniture. There were no curtains to the windows, and no carpet on the floor. The wooden boards were plain. There was a table and a chair, and a long trestle bed with no covering upon it but a blanket. The windows were wide open to the dusk, which was then falling. I turned away and walked down the stairs, and as I did so came face to face with Victor, who was ascending. He must have seen me glance into the room and I did not wish to appear furtive in any way.

“Forgive the trespass,” I said, “but I happened to notice the room looked very different from your mother’s day.”

“Yes,” he said briefly, “Anna hates frills. Are you ready for dinner? She sent me to find you.”

And we went downstairs together without further conversation. Somehow I could not forget that bare, sparse bedroom, comparing it with the soft luxury of my own, and I felt oddly inferior that Anna should consider me as someone who could not dispense with ease and elegance, which she, for some reason, did so well without.

That evening I watched her as we sat beside the fire. Victor had been called from the hall on some business, and she and I were alone for a few moments. As usual I felt the still, soothing peace of her presence come upon me with the silence; I was wrapped about with it, enfolded, as it were, and it was unlike anything I knew in my ordinary humdrum life; this stillness came out of her, yet from another world. I wanted to tell her about it but could not find the words. At last I said, “You have done something to this house. I don’t understand it.”

“Don’t you?” she said. “I think you do. We are both in search of the same thing, after all.”

For some reason I felt afraid. The stillness was with us just the same, but intensified, almost overpowering.

“I am not aware,” I said, “that I am in search of anything.”

My words fell foolishly on the air and were lost. My eyes, that had drifted to the fire, were drawn, as if compelled, to hers.

“Aren’t you?” she said.

I remember being swept by a feeling of profound distress. I saw myself, for the first time, as a very worthless, very trivial human being, traveling here and there about the world to no purpose, doing unnecessary business with other human beings as worthless as myself, and to no other end but that we should be fed and clothed and housed in adequate comfort until death.

I thought of my own small house in Westminster, chosen after long deliberation and furnished with great care. I saw my books, my pictures, my collection of china, and the two good servants who waited upon me and kept the house spotless always, in preparation for my return. Up to this moment my house and all it held had given me great pleasure. Now I was not sure that it had any value.

“What would you suggest?” I heard myself saying to Anna. “Should I sell everything I have and give up my work? What then?”

Thinking back on the brief conversation that passed between us, nothing that she said warranted this sudden question on my part. She implied that I was in search of something, and instead of answering her directly, yes or no, I asked her if I must give up all I had? The significance of this did not strike me at the time. All I knew then was that I was profoundly moved, and whereas a few moments before I had been at peace, I was now troubled.

“Your answer may not be the same as mine,” she said, “and anyway, I am not certain of my own, as yet. One day I shall know.”

Surely, I thought to myself in looking upon her, she has the answer now, with her beauty, her serenity, her understanding. What more can she possibly achieve, unless it is that up to the present she lacks children, and so feels unfulfilled?

Victor came back into the hall, and it seemed to me his presence brought solidity and warmth to the atmosphere; there was something familiar and comfortable about his old smoking jacket worn with his evening trousers.

“It’s freezing hard,” he said. “I went outside to see. The thermometer is down to thirty. Lovely night, though. Full moon.” He drew up his chair before the fire and smiled affectionately at Anna. “Almost as cold as the night we spent on Snowdon,” he said. “Heavens above, I shan’t forget that in a hurry.” And turning to me with a laugh he added, “I never told you, did I, that Anna condescended to come climbing with me after all?”

“No,” I said, astonished. “I thought she had set herself against it.”

I looked across at Anna, and I noticed that her eyes had grown strangely blank, without expression. I felt instinctively that the subject brought up by Victor was one she would not have chosen. Victor, insensitive to this, went prattling on.

“She’s a dark horse,” he said. “She knows just as much about climbing mountains as you or I. In fact, she was ahead of me the whole time, and I lost her.”

He continued, half laughing, half serious, giving me every detail of the climb, which seemed hazardous in the extreme, as they had left it much too late in the year.

It seemed that the weather, which had promised well in the morning for their start, had turned by midafternoon, bringing thunder and lightning and finally a blizzard; so that darkness overtook them in the descent, and they were forced to spend the night in the open.

“The thing I shall never understand,” said Victor, “is how I came to miss her. One moment she was by my side, and the next she had gone. I can tell you I had a very bad three hours, in pitch darkness and half a gale.”

Anna never said a word while he told the story. It was as though she withdrew herself completely. She sat in her chair, motionless. I felt uneasy, anxious. I wanted Victor to stop.

“Anyway,” I said, to hasten him, “you got down all right, and none the worse for it.”

“Yes,” he said ruefully, “at about five in the morning, thoroughly wet and thoroughly frightened. Anna came up to me out of the mist not even damp, surprised that I was angry. Said she had been sheltered by a piece of rock. It was a wonder she had not broken her neck. Next time we go mountain climbing, I’ve told her that she can be the guide.”

“Perhaps,” I said, with a glance at Anna, “there won’t be a next time. Once was enough.”

“Not a bit of it,” said Victor cheerfully, “we are all set, you know, to go off next summer. The Alps, or the Dolomites, or the Pyrenees, we haven’t decided yet on the objective. You had better come with us and we’ll have a proper expedition.”

I shook my head, regretfully.

“I only wish I could,” I said, “but it’s impossible. I must be in New York by May and shan’t be home again until September.”

“Oh, that’s a long way ahead,” said Victor, “anything may happen by May. We’ll talk of it again, nearer the time.”

Still Anna said no word, and I wondered why Victor saw nothing strange in her reticence. Suddenly she said good night and went upstairs. It was obvious to me that all this chatter of mountain climbing had been unwelcome to her. I felt an urge to attack Victor on the subject.

“Look here,” I said, “do think twice about this holiday in the mountains. I am pretty sure Anna isn’t for it.”

“Not for it?” said Victor, surprised. “Why, it was her idea entirely.”

I stared at him.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Of course I’m sure. I tell you, old fellow, she’s crazy about mountains. She had a fetish about them. It’s her Welsh blood, I suppose. I was being lighthearted just now about that night on Snowdon, but between ourselves I was quite amazed at her courage and her endurance. I don’t mind admitting that what with the blizzard, and being frightened for her, I was dead beat by morning; but she came out of that mist like a spirit from another world. I’ve never seen her like it. She went down that blasted mountain as if she had spent the night on Olympus, while I limped behind her like a child. She is a very remarkable person: you realize that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said slowly, “I do agree. Anna is very remarkable.”

Shortly afterwards we went upstairs to bed, and as I undressed and put on my pajamas, which had been left to warm for me before the fire, and noticed the thermos flask of hot milk on the bedside table, in case I should be wakeful, and padded about the thick carpeted room in my soft slippers, I thought once again of that strange bare room where Anna slept, and of the narrow trestle bed. In a futile, unnecessary gesture, I threw aside the heavy satin quilt that lay on top of my blankets, and before getting into bed opened my windows wide.

I was restless, though, and could not sleep. My fire sank low and the cold air penetrated the room. I heard my old worn traveling clock race round the hours through the night. At four I could stand it no longer and remembered the thermos of milk with gratitude. Before drinking it I decided to pamper myself still further and close the window.

I climbed out of bed and, shivering, went across the room to do so. Victor was right. A white frost covered the ground. The moon was full. I stood for a moment by the open window, and from the trees in shadow I saw a figure come and stand below me on the lawn. Not furtive, as a trespasser, not creeping, as a thief. Whoever it was stood motionless, as though in meditation, with face uplifted to the moon.

Then I perceived that it was Anna. She wore a dressing gown, with a cord about it, and her hair was loose on her shoulders. She made no sound as she stood there on the frosty lawn, and I saw, with a shock of horror, that her feet were bare. I stood watching, my hand on the curtain, and suddenly I felt that I was looking upon something intimate and secret, which concerned me not. So I shut my window and returned to bed. Instinct told me that I must say nothing of what I had seen to Victor, or to Anna herself; and because of this I was filled with disquiet, almost with apprehension.

Next morning the sun shone and we were out about the grounds with the dogs, Anna and Victor both so normal and cheerful that I told myself I had been overwrought the previous night. If Anna chose to walk barefoot in the small hours it was her business, and I had behaved ill in spying upon her. The rest of my visit passed without incident; we were all three happy and content, and I was very loath to leave them.

I saw them again for a brief moment, some months later, before I left for America. I had gone into the Map House, in St. James’s, to buy myself some half dozen books to read on that long thrash across the Atlantic—a journey one took with certain qualms in those days, the Titanic tragedy still fresh in memory—and there were Victor and Anna, poring over maps, which they had spread out over every available space.

There was no chance of a real meeting. I had engagements for the rest of the day, and so had they, so it was hail and farewell.

“You find us,” said Victor, “getting busy about the summer holiday. The itinerary is planned. Change your mind and join us.”

“Impossible,” I said. “All being well, I should be home by September. I’ll get in touch with you directly I return. Well, where are you making for?”

“Anna’s choice,” said Victor. “She’s been thinking this out for weeks, and she’s hit on a spot that looks completely inaccessible. Anyway, it’s somewhere you and I have never climbed.”

He pointed down to the large-scale map in front of them. I followed his finger to a point that Anna had already marked with a tiny cross.

“Monte Verità,” I read.

I looked up and saw that Anna’s eyes were upon me.

“Completely unknown territory, as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “Be sure and have advice first, before setting forth. Get hold of local guides, and so on. What made you choose that particular ridge of mountains?”

Anna smiled, and I felt a sense of shame, of inferiority beside her.

“The Mountain of Truth,” she said. “Come with us, do.”

I shook my head and went off upon my journey.

During the months that followed I thought of them both, and envied them too. They were climbing, and I was hemmed in, not by the mountains that I loved but by hard business. Often I wished I had the courage to throw my work aside, turn my back on the civilized world and its dubious delights, and go seeking after truth with my two friends. Only convention deterred me, the sense that I was making a successful career for myself, which it would be folly to cut short. The pattern of my life was set. It was too late to change.

I returned to England in September, and I was surprised, in going through the great pile of letters that awaited me, to have nothing from Victor. He had promised to write and give me news of all they had seen and done. They were not on the telephone, so I could not get in touch with them direct, but I made a note to write to Victor as soon as I had sorted out my business mail.

A couple of days later, coming out of my club, I ran into a man, a mutual friend of ours, who detained me a moment to ask some question about my journey, and then, just as I was going down the steps, called over his shoulder, “I say, what a tragedy about poor Victor. Are you going to see him?”

“What do you mean? What tragedy?” I asked. “Has there been an accident?”

“He’s terribly ill in a nursing home, here in London,” came the answer. “Nervous breakdown. You know his wife has left him?”

“Good God, no,” I exclaimed.

“Oh, yes. That’s the cause of all the trouble. He’s gone quite to pieces. You know he was devoted to her.”

I was stunned. I stood staring at the fellow, my face blank.

“Do you mean,” I said, “that she has gone off with somebody else?”

“I don’t know. I assume so. No one can get anything out of Victor. Anyway, there he has been for several weeks, with this breakdown.”

I asked for the address of the nursing home, and at once, without further delay, jumped into a cab and was driven there.

At first I was told, on making inquiry, that Victor was seeing no visitors, but I took out my card and scribbled a line across the back. Surely he would not refuse to see me? A nurse came, and I was taken upstairs to a room on the first floor.

I was horrified, when she opened the door, to see the haggard face that looked up at me from the chair beside the gas fire, so frail he was, so altered.

“My dear old boy,” I said, going towards him, “I only heard five minutes ago that you were here.”

The nurse closed the door and left us together.

To my distress Victor’s eyes filled with tears.

“It’s all right,” I said, “don’t mind me. You know I shall understand.”

He seemed unable to speak. He just sat there, hunched in his dressing gown, the tears running down his cheeks. I had never felt more helpless. He pointed to a chair, and I drew it up beside him. I waited. If he did not want to tell me what had happened I would not press him. I only wanted to comfort him, to be of some assistance.

At last he spoke, and I hardly recognized his voice.

“Anna’s gone,” he said. “Did you know that? She’s gone.”

I nodded. I put my hand on his knee, as though he were a small boy again and not a man past thirty, of my own age.

“I know,” I said gently, “but it will be all right. She will come back again. You are sure to get her back.”

He shook his head. I had never seen such despair, and such complete conviction.

“Oh no,” he said, “she will never come back. I know her too well. She’s found what she wants.”

It was pitiful to see how completely he had given in to what had happened. Victor, usually so strong, so well-balanced.

“Who is it?” I said. “Where did she meet this other fellow?”

Victor stared at me, bewildered.

“What do you mean?” he said. “She hasn’t met anyone. It’s not that at all. If it were, that would be easy…”

He paused, spreading out his hands in a hopeless gesture. And suddenly he broke down again, but this time not with weakness but with a more fearful sort of stifled rage, the impotent, useless rage of a man who fights against something stronger than himself. “It was the mountain that got her,” he said, “that Goddamned mountain, Monte Verità. There’s a sect there, a closed order, they shut themselves up for life—there, on that mountain. I never dreamed there could be such a thing. I never knew. And she’s there. On that damned mountain. On Monte Verità…”

I sat there with him in the nursing home all afternoon, and little by little had the whole story from him.

The journey itself, Victor said, had been pleasant and uneventful. Eventually they reached the center from which they proposed to explore the terrain immediately below Monte Verità, and here they met with difficulties. The country was unknown to Victor, and the people seemed morose and unfriendly, very different, he said, to the sort of folk who had welcomed us in the past. They spoke in a patois hard to understand, and they lacked intelligence.

“At least, that’s how they struck me,” said Victor. “They were very rough and somehow undeveloped, the sort of people who might have stepped out of a former century. You know how, when we climbed together, the people could not do enough to help us, and we always managed to find guides. Here, it was different. When Anna and I tried to find out the best approach to Monte Verità, they would not tell us. They just stared at us in a stupid sort of way, and shrugged their shoulders. They had no guides, one fellow said; the mountain was—savage, unexplored.”

Victor paused, and looked at me with that same expression of despair.

“You see,” he said, “that’s when I made my mistake. I should have realized the expedition was a failure—to that particular spot at any rate—and suggested to Anna that we turn back and tackle something else, something nearer to civilization anyhow, where the people were more helpful and the country more familiar. But you know how it is. You get a stubborn feeling inside you, on the mountains, and any opposition somehow rouses you.

“And Monte Verità itself…” he broke off and stared in front of him. It was as though he was looking upon it again in his own mind. “I’ve never been one for lyrical description, you know that,” he said. “On our finest climbs I was always the practical one and you the poet. For sheer beauty, I have never seen anything like Monte Verità. We have climbed many higher peaks, you and I, and far more dangerous ones, too; but this was somehow… sublime.”

After a few moments’ silence he continued talking. “I said to Anna, ‘What shall we do?’ and she answered me without hesitation, ‘We must go on.’ I did not argue, I knew perfectly well that would be her wish. The place had put a spell on both of us.”

They left the valley, and began the ascent.

“It was a wonderful day,” said Victor, “hardly a breath of wind, and not a cloud in the sky. Scorching sun, you know how it can be, cut the air clean and cold. I chaffed Anna about that other climb, up Snowdon, and made her promise not to leave me behind this time. She was wearing an open shirt, and a brief kilted skirt, and her hair was loose. She looked… quite beautiful.”

As he talked, slowly, quietly, I had the impression that it must surely be an accident that had happened, but that his mind, unhinged by tragedy, balked at Anna’s death. It must be so. Anna had fallen. He had seen her fall and had been powerless to help her. He had then returned, broken in mind and spirit, telling himself she still lived on Monte Verità.

“We came to a village an hour before sundown,” said Victor.

“The climb had taken us all day. We were still about three hours from the peak itself, or so I judged. The village consisted of some dozen dwellings or so, huddled together. And as we walked towards the first one, a curious thing happened.”

He paused and stared in front of him.

“Anna was a little ahead of me,” he said, “moving swiftly with those long strides of hers, you know how she does. I saw two or three men, with some children and goats, come onto the track from a piece of pastureland to the right of us. Anna raised her hand in salute, and at sight of her the men started, as if terrified, and snatching up the children ran to the nearest group of hovels, as if all the fiends in hell were after them. I heard them bolt the doors and shutter the windows. It was the most extraordinary thing. The goats went scattering down the track, equally scared.”

Victor said he had made some joke to Anna about a charming welcome, and that she seemed upset; she did not know what she could have done to frighten them. Victor went to the first hut and knocked upon the door.

Nothing happened at all, but he could hear whispers inside and a child crying. Then he lost patience and began to shout. This had effect, and after a moment one of the shutters was removed and a man’s face appeared at the gap and stared at him. Victor, by way of encouragement, nodded and smiled. Slowly the man withdrew the whole of the shutter and Victor spoke to him. At first the man shook his head, then he seemed to change his mind and came and unbolted the door. He stood in the entrance, peering nervously about him, and, ignoring Victor, looked at Anna. He shook his head violently and, speaking very quickly and quite unintelligibly, pointed towards the summit of Monte Verità. Then from the shadows of the small room came an elderly man, leaning on two sticks, who motioned aside the terrified children and moved past them to the door. He, at least, spoke a language that was not entirely patois.

“Who is that woman?” he asked. “What does she want with us?”

Victor explained that Anna was his wife, that they had come from the valley to climb the mountain, that they were tourists on holiday, and they would be glad of shelter for the night. He said the old man stared away from him to Anna.

“She is your wife?” he said. “She is not from Monte Verità?”

“She is my wife,” repeated Victor. “We come from England. We are in this country on holiday. We have never been here before.”

The old man turned to the younger and they muttered together for a few moments. Then the younger man went back inside the house, and there was further talk from the interior. A woman appeared, even more frightened than the younger man. She was literally trembling, Victor said, as she looked out of the doorway towards Anna. It was Anna who disturbed them.

“She is my wife,” said Victor again, “we come from the valley.”

Finally the old man made a gesture of consent, of understanding.

“I believe you,” he said. “You are welcome to come inside. If you are from the valley, that is all right. We have to be careful.”

Victor beckoned to Anna, and slowly she came up the track and stood beside Victor, on the threshold of the house. Even now the woman looked at her with timidity, and she and the children backed away.

The old man motioned his visitors inside. The living room was bare but clean, and there was a fire burning.

“We have food,” said Victor, unshouldering his pack, “and mattresses too. We don’t want to be a nuisance. But if we could eat here, and sleep on the floor, it will do very well indeed.”

The old man nodded. “I am satisfied,” he said, “I believe you.”

Then he withdrew with his family.

Victor said he and Anna were both puzzled at their reception, and could not understand why the fact of their being married, and coming from the valley, should have gained them admittance, after that first odd show of terror. They ate, and unrolled their packs, and then the old man appeared again with milk for them, and cheese. The woman remained behind, but the younger man, out of curiosity, accompanied the elder.

Victor thanked the old fellow for his hospitality, and said that now they would sleep, and in the morning, soon after sunrise, they would climb to the summit of the mountain.

“Is the way easy?” he asked.

“It is not difficult,” came the reply. “I would offer to send someone with you, but no one cares to go.”

His manner was diffident, and Victor said he glanced again at Anna.

“Your wife will be all right in the house here,” he said. “We will take care of her.”

“My wife will climb with me,” said Victor. “She won’t want to stay behind.”

A look of anxiety came into the old man’s face.

“It is better that your wife does not go up Monte Verità,” he said. “It will be dangerous.”

“Why is it dangerous for me to go up to Monte Verità?” asked Anna.

The old man looked at her, his anxiety deepening.

“For girls,” he said, “for women, it is dangerous.”

“But how?” asked Anna. “Why? You told my husband the path is easy.”

“It is not the path that is dangerous,” he answered; “my son can set you on the path. It is because of the…” and Victor said he used a word that neither he nor Anna understood, but that it sounded like sacerdotessa, or sacerdozio.

“That’s priestess, or priesthood,” said Victor. “It can’t be that. I wonder what on earth he means?”

The old man, anxious and distressed, looked from one to the other of them.

“It is safe for you to climb Monte Verità, and to descend again,” he repeated to Victor, “but not for your wife. They have great power, the sacerdotesse. Here in the village we are always in fear for our young girls, for our women.”

Victor said the whole thing sounded like an African travel tale, where a tribe of wild men pounced out of the jungle and carried off the female population into captivity.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” he said to Anna, “but I suppose they are riddled with some sort of superstition, which will appeal to you, with your Welsh blood.”

He laughed, he told me, making light of it, and then, being confoundedly sleepy, arranged their mattresses in front of the fire. Bidding the old man good evening, he and Anna settled themselves for the night.

He slept soundly, in the profound sleep that comes after climbing, and woke suddenly, just before daybreak, to the sound of a cock crowing in the village outside.

He turned over on his side to see if Anna was awake.

The mattress was thrown back, and bare. Anna had gone…

No one was yet astir in the house, Victor said, and the only sound was the cock crowing. He got up and put on his shoes and coat, went to the door and stepped outside.

It was the cold, still moment that comes just before sunrise. The last few stars were paling in the sky. Clouds hid the valley, some thousands of feet below. Only here, near the summit of the mountain, was it clear.

At first Victor felt no misgiving. He knew by this time that Anna was capable of looking after herself, and was as surefooted as he—more so, possibly. She would take no foolish risks, and anyway the old man had told them that the climb was not dangerous. He felt hurt, though, that she had not waited for him. It was breaking the promise that they should always climb together. And he had no idea how much of a start she had in front of him. The only thing he could do was to follow her as swiftly as he could.

He went back into the room to collect their rations for the day—she had not thought of that. Their packs they could fetch later, for the descent, and they would probably have to accept hospitality here for another night.

His movements must have roused his host, for suddenly the old man appeared from the inner room and stood beside him. His eyes fell on Anna’s empty mattress, then he searched Victor’s eyes, almost in accusation.

“My wife has gone on ahead,” Victor said. “I am going to follow her.”

The old man looked very grave. He went to the open door and stood there, staring away from the village, up the mountain.

“It was wrong to let her go,” he said, “you should not have permitted it.” He appeared very distressed, Victor said, and shook his head to and fro, murmuring to himself.

“It’s all right,” said Victor. “I shall soon catch her up, and we shall probably be back again, soon after midday.”

He put his hand on the old fellow’s arm, to reassure him.

“I fear very much that it will be too late,” said the old man. “She will go to them, and once she is with them she will not come back.”

Once again he used the word sacerdotesse, the power of the sacerdotesse, and his manner, his state of apprehension, now communicated itself to Victor, so that he too felt a sense of urgency, and of fear.

“Do you mean that there are living people at the top of Monte Verità?” he said. “People who may attack her, and harm her bodily?”

The old man began to talk rapidly, and it was difficult to make any sense out of the torrent of words that now sprang from him. No, he said, the sacerdotesse would not hurt her, they hurt no one; it was that they would take her to become one of them. Anna would go to them, she could not help herself, the power was so strong. Twenty, thirty years ago, the old man said, his daughter had gone to them: he had never seen her again. Other young women from the village, and from down below, in the valley, were called by the sacerdotesse. Once they were called they had to go, no one could keep them back. No one saw them again. Never, never. It had been so for many years, in his father’s time, his father’s father’s time, before that, even.

It was not known now when the sacerdotesse first came to Monte Verità. No man living had set eyes upon them. They lived there, enclosed, behind their walls, but with power, he kept insisting, with magic. “Some say they have this from God, some from the Devil,” he said, “but we do not know, we cannot tell. It is rumored that the sacerdotesse on Monte Verità never grow old, they stay forever young and beautiful, and that it is from the moon they draw their power. It is the moon they worship, and the sun.”

Victor gathered little from this wild talk. It must all be legend, superstition.

The old man shook his head and looked towards the mountain track. “I saw it in her eyes last night,” he said, “I was afraid of it. She had the eyes they have, when they are called. I have seen it before. With my own daughter, with others.”

By now the rest of the family had woken and had come by turn into the room. They seemed to sense what had happened. The younger man, and the woman, even the children, looked at Victor with anxiety and a strange sort of compassion. He said the atmosphere filled him not so much with alarm as with anger and irritation. It made him think of cats, and broomsticks, and sixteenth-century witchcraft.

The mist was breaking slowly, down in the valley, and the clouds were going. The soft glow in the sky, beyond the range of mountains to the eastward, heralded the rising sun.

The old man said something to the younger, and pointed with his stick.

“My son will put you on the track,” he said, “he will come part of the way only. Further he does not care to go.”

Victor said he set off with all their eyes upon him; and not only from this first hut, but from the other dwellings in the little village, he was aware of faces looking from drawn shutters, and faces peering from half-open doors. The whole village was astir now and intent upon watching him, held by a fearful fascination.

His guide made no attempt to talk to him. He walked ahead, his shoulders bent, his eyes on the ground. Victor felt that he went only on command of the old man, his father.

The track was rough and stony, broken in many places, and was, Victor judged, part of an old watercourse that would be impassable when the rains came. Now, in full summer, it was easy enough to climb. Verdure, thorn, and scrub they left behind them, after climbing steadily for an hour, and the summit of the mountain pierced the sky directly above their heads, split into two like a divided hand. From the depths of the valley, and from the village even, this division could not be seen; the two peaks seemed as one.

The sun had risen with them as they climbed, and now shone in full upon the southeastern face, turning it to coral. Great banks of clouds, soft and rolling, hid the world below. Victor’s guide stopped suddenly and pointed ahead, where a jutting lip of rock wound in a razor’s edge and curved southward out of sight.

“Monte Verità,” he said, and then repeated it again, “Monte Verità.”

Then he turned swiftly and began scrambling back along the way that they had come.

Victor called to him, but the man did not answer; he did not even bother to turn his head. In a moment he was out of sight. There was nothing for it but to go on alone, round the lip of the escarpment, Victor said, and trust that he found Anna waiting for him on the further side.

It took him another half hour to encircle the projecting shoulder of the mountain, and with every step he took his anxiety deepened, because now, on the southward side, there was no gradual incline—the mountain face was sheer. Soon further progress would be impossible.

“Then,” Victor said, “I came out through a sort of gully-way, over a ridge about three hundred feet only from the summit; and I saw it, the monastery, built out of the rock between the two peaks, absolutely bare and naked; a steep rock wall enclosing it, a drop of a thousand feet beneath the wall to the next ridge, and above, nothing but the sky and the twin peaks of Monte Verità.”

It was true, then. Victor had not lost his mind. The place existed. There had been no accident. He sat there, in his chair by the gas fire, in the nursing home; and this had happened, it was not fantasy, born out of tragedy.

He seemed calm, now that he had told me so much. A great part of the strain had gone, his hands no longer trembled. He looked more like the old Victor, and his voice was steady.

“It must have been centuries old,” he said, after a moment or two. “God knows how long it must have taken to build, hewn out of the rock face like that. I have never seen anything more stark and savage, nor, in a strange way, more beautiful. It seemed to hang there, suspended, between the mountain and the sky. There were many long narrow slits, for light and air. No real windows, in the sense we know them. There was a tower, looking west, with a sheer drop below. The great wall encircled the whole place, making it impregnable, like a fortress. I could see no way of entrance. There was no sign of life. No sign of anyone. I stood there staring at the place, and the narrow window slits stared back at me. There was nothing I could do but wait there until Anna showed herself. Because now, you see, I was convinced the old man had been right, and I knew what must have happened. The inhabitants had seen Anna, from behind those slit windows, and had called to her. She was with them now, inside. She must see me, standing outside the wall, and presently would come out to me. So I waited there, all day…”

His words were simple. Just a plain statement of fact. Any husband might have waited thus for a wife who had, during their holiday, ventured forth one morning to call upon friends. He sat down, and later ate his lunch, and watched the rolling banks of cloud that hid the world below move, and disperse, and form again; and the sun, in all its summer strength, beat down upon the unprotected face of Monte Verità, on the tower and the narrow window slits, and the great encircling wall, from whence came no movement and no sound.

“I sat there all the day,” said Victor, “but she did not come. The force of the sun was blinding, scorching, and I had to go back to the gully-way for shelter. There, lying under the shadow of a projecting rock, I could still watch that tower and those window slits. You and I in the past have known silence on the mountains, but nothing like the silence beneath those twin peaks of Monte Verità.

“The hours dragged by and I went on waiting. Gradually it grew cooler, and then, as my anxiety increased, time raced instead. The sun went too fast into the west. The color of the rock face was changing. There was no longer any glare. I began to panic then. I went to the wall and shouted. I felt along the wall with my hands, but there was no entrance, there was nothing. My voice echoed back to me, again and again. I looked up, and all I could see were those blind slits of windows. I began to doubt everything, the old man’s story, all that he had said. This place was uninhabited, no one had lived there for a thousand years. It was something built long ago in time, and now deserted. And Anna had never come to it at all. She had fallen, on that narrow lip-way where the track ended and the man had left me. She must have fallen into the sheer depths where the southern shoulder of the mountain ridge began. And this is what had happened to the other women who had come this way, the old man’s daughter, the girls from the valleys; they had all fallen, none of them had ever reached the ultimate rock face, here between the peaks.”

The suspense would have been easier to bear if the first strain and sign of breakdown had come back into Victor’s voice. As it was, sitting there in the London nursing home, the room impersonal and plain, the routine bottles of medicines and pills on the table by his side, and the sound of traffic coming from Wigmore Street, his voice took on a steady monotonous quality, like a clock ticking; it would have been more natural had he turned suddenly, and screamed.

“Yet I dared not go back,” he said, “unless she came. I was compelled to go on waiting there, beneath the wall. The clouds banked up towards me and turned gray. All the warning evening shadows that I knew too well crept into the sky. One moment the rock face, and the wall, and the slit windows were golden; then, suddenly, the sun was gone. There was no dusk at all. It was cold, and it was night.”

Victor told me that he stayed there against the wall until daybreak. He did not sleep. He paced up and down to keep warm. When dawn came he was chilled and numb, faint, too, from want of food. He had brought with him only the rations for their midday meal.

Sense told him that to wait now, through another day, was madness. He must return to the village for food and drink, and if possible enlist the help of the men there to form a search party. Reluctantly, when the sun rose, he left the rock face. Silence enwrapped it still. He was certain now there was no life behind the walls.

He went back, round the shoulder of the mountain, to the track; and so down into the morning mist, and to the village.

Victor said they were waiting there for him. It was as though he was expected. The old man was standing at the entrance of his home, and gathered about him were neighbors, mostly men and children.

Victor’s first question was, “Has my wife returned?” Somehow, descending from the summit, hope had come to him again—that she had never climbed the mountain track, that she had walked another way, and had come back to the village by a different path. When he saw their faces his hope went.

“She will not come back,” said the old man, “we told you she would not come back. She has gone to them, on Monte Verità.”

Victor had wisdom enough to ask for food and drink before entering into argument. They gave him this. They stood beside him, watching him with compassion. Victor said the greatest agony was the sight of Anna’s pack, her mattress, her drinking bottle, her knife; the little personal possessions she had not taken with her.

When he had eaten they continued to stand there, waiting for him to speak. He told the old man everything. How he had waited all day, and through the night. How there was never a sound, or a sign of life, from those slit windows on the rock face on Monte Verità. Now and again the old man translated what Victor said to the neighbors.

When Victor had finished the old man spoke.

“It is as I said. Your wife is there. She is with them.”

Victor, his nerves to pieces, shouted aloud.

“How can she be there? There is no one alive in that place. It’s dead, it’s empty. It’s been dead for centuries.”

The old man leaned forward and put his hand on Victor’s shoulder. “It is not dead. That is what many have said before. They went and waited, as you waited. Twenty-five years ago I did the same. This man here, my neighbor, waited three months, day after day, night after night, many years ago, when his wife was called. She never came back. No one who is called to Monte Verità returns.”

She had fallen, then. She had died. It was that after all. Victor told them this, he insisted upon it, he begged that they would go now, with him, and search the mountain for her body.

Gently, compassionately, the old man shook his head. “In the past we did that too,” he said. “There are those among us who climb with great skill, who know the mountain, every inch of it, and who have descended the southern side even, to the edge of the great glacier, beyond which no one can live. There are no bodies. Our women never fell. They were not there. They are in Monte Verità, with the sacerdotesse.”

It was hopeless, Victor said. It was no use to try argument. He knew that he must go down to the valley, and if he could not get help there go further yet, back to some part of the country that was familiar to him, where he could find guides who would be willing to return with him.

“My wife’s body is somewhere on this mountain,” he said. “I must find it. If your people won’t help me, I will get others.”

The old man looked over his shoulder and spoke a name. From the little crowd of silent spectators came a child, a small girl of about nine years old. He laid his hand upon her head.

“This child,” he said to Victor, “has seen and spoken with the sacerdotesse. Other children, in the past, have seen them too. Only to children, and then rarely, do they show themselves. She will tell you what she saw.”

The child began her recitation, in a high singsong voice, her eyes fixed upon Victor; and he could tell, he said, that it was a tale she had repeated so many times, to the same listeners, that it was now a chant, a lesson learned by heart. And it was all in patois. Not one word could Victor understand.

When she had finished the old man acted as interpreter; and from force of habit he too declaimed as the child had done, his tone taking that same singsong quality.

“I was with my companions on Monte Verità. A storm came, and my companions ran away. I walked, and lost myself, and came to the place where the wall is, and the windows. I cried; I was afraid. She came out of the wall, the tall and splendid one, and another with her, also young and beautiful. They comforted me and I wanted to go inside the walls with them, when I heard the singing from the tower, but they told me it was forbidden. When I was thirteen years old I could return to live with them. They wore white raiment to the knees, their arms and legs were bare, the hair close to the head. They were more beautiful than the people of this world. They led me back from Monte Verità, down the track where I could find my way. Then they went from me. I have told all I know.”

The old man watched Victor’s face when he had finished his recital. Victor said the faith that must have been put in the child’s statement astounded him. It was obvious, he thought, that the child had fallen asleep, and dreamed, and translated her dream into reality.

“I am sorry,” he told his interpreter, “but I can’t believe the child’s tale. It is imagination.”

Once again the child was called and spoken to, and she at once ran out of the house and disappeared.

“They gave her a circlet of stones on Monte Verità,” said the old man. “Her parents keep it locked up, in case of evil. She has gone to ask for it, to show you.”

In a few moments the child returned, and she put into Victor’s hand a girdle, small enough to encompass a narrow waist, or else to hang about the neck. The stones, which looked like quartz, were cut and shaped by hand, fitting into one another in hollowed grooves. The craftsmanship was fine, even exquisitely done. It was not the rude handiwork of peasants, done of a winter’s evening, to pass the time. In silence Victor handed the circlet back to the child.

“She may have found it on the mountain side,” he said.

“We do not work thus,” answered the old man, “nor the people in the valley, nor even in the cities of this country, where I have been. The child was given the circlet, as she has told us, by those who inhabit Monte Verità.”

Victor knew then that further argument was useless. Their obstinacy was too strong, and their superstition proof against all worldly sense. He asked if he might remain in the house another day and night.

“You are welcome to stay,” said the old man, “until you know the truth.”

One by one the neighbors dispersed, the routine of the quiet day was resumed. It was as though nothing had happened. Victor went out again, this time towards the northern shoulder of the mountain. He had not gone far before he realized that this ridge was unclimbable, at any rate without skilled help and equipment. If Anna had gone that way she had found certain death.

He came back to the village, which, situated as it was on the eastern slopes, had already lost the sun. He went into the living room, and saw that there was a meal there prepared for him, and his mattress lay on the floor before the hearth.

He was too exhausted to eat. He flung himself down on the mattress and slept. Next morning he rose early, and climbed once more to Monte Verità, and sat there all the day. He waited, watching the slit windows, while the hot sun scorched the rock face through the long hours and then sank down into the western sky; and nothing stirred, and no one came.

He thought of that other man from the village who some years ago had waited there three months, day after day, night after night; and Victor wondered what limitation time would put to his endurance, and whether he would equal the other in fortitude.

On the third day, at that moment of midday when the sun was strongest, he could bear the heat no longer and went to lie in the gully-way, in the shadow and blessed coolness of the projecting rock. Worn with the strain of watching, and with the despair that now filled his entire being, Victor slept.

He awoke with a start. The hands of his watch pointed to five o’clock, and it was already cold inside the gully. He climbed out and looked towards the rock face, golden now in the setting sun. Then he saw her. She was standing beneath the wall, but on a ledge only a few feet in circumference, and below her the rock face fell away sheer, a thousand feet or more.

She waited there, looking towards him, and he ran towards her shouting “Anna… Anna…” And he said that he heard himself sobbing, and he thought his heart would burst.

When he drew closer he saw that he could not reach her. The great drop to the depths below divided them. She was a bare twelve feet away from him, and he could not touch her.

“I stood where I was, staring at her,” said Victor. “I did not speak. Something seemed to choke my voice. I felt the tears running down my face. I was crying. I had made up my mind that she was dead, you see, that she had fallen. And she was there, she was alive. Ordinary words wouldn’t come. I tried to say “What has happened? Where have you been?”—but it wasn’t any use. Because as I looked at her I knew in one moment, with terrible blinding certainty, that it was all true, what the old man had said, and the child; it wasn’t imagination, it wasn’t superstition. Though I saw no one but Anna, the whole place suddenly became alive. From behind those window slits above me there were God knows how many eyes, watching, looking down on me. I could feel the nearness of them, beyond those walls. And it was uncanny, and horrible, and real.”

Now the strain had come back into Victor’s voice, now his hands trembled once again. He reached out for a glass of water and drank thirstily.

“She was not wearing her own clothes,” he said. “She had a kind of shirt, like a tunic, to her knees, and round her waist a circlet of stones, like the one the child had shown me. Nothing on her feet, and her arms bare. What frightened me most was that her hair was cut quite short, as short as yours or mine. It altered her strangely, made her look younger, but in some way terribly austere. Then she spoke to me. She said quite naturally, as if nothing had happened, ‘I want you to go back home, Victor darling. You mustn’t worry about me anymore.’ ”

Victor told me he could hardly credit it, at first, that she could stand there and say this to him. It reminded him of those so-called psychic messages that mediums give out to relatives at a spiritualistic séance. He could hardly trust himself to answer. He thought that perhaps she had been hypnotized and was speaking under suggestion.

“Why do you want me to go home?” he said, very gently, not wanting to damage her mind, which these people might have destroyed.

“It’s the only thing to do,” she answered. And then, Victor said, she smiled, normally, happily, as if they were at home discussing plans. “I’m all right, darling,” she said. “This isn’t madness, or hypnotism, or any of the things you imagine it to be. They have frightened you in the village, and it’s understandable. This thing is so much stronger than most people. But I must have always known it existed, somewhere; and I’ve been waiting all these years. When men go into monasteries, and women shut themselves up in convents, their relatives suffer very much, I know, but in time they come to bear it. I want you to do the same, Victor, please. I want you, if you can, to understand.”

She stood there, quite calm, quite peaceful, smiling down at him.

“You mean,” he said, “you want to stay in this place always?”

“Yes,” she said, “there can be no other life for me, anymore, ever. You must believe this. I want you to go home, and live as you have always done, and look after the house and the estate, and if you fall in love with anyone to marry and be happy. Bless you for your love and kindness and devotion, darling, which I shall never forget. If I were dead, you would want to think of me at peace, in paradise. This place, to me, is paradise. And I would rather jump now, to those rocks hundreds of feet below me, than go back to the world from Monte Verità.”

Victor said he went on staring at her as she spoke, and he said there was a radiance about her there had never been before, even in their most contented days.

“You and I,” he said to me, “have both read of transfiguration in the Bible. That is the only word I can use to describe her face. It was not hysteria, it was not emotion; it was just that. Something—out of this world of ours—had put its hand upon her. To plead with her was useless, to attempt force impossible. Anna, rather than go back to the world, would throw herself off the rock face. I should achieve nothing.”

He said the feeling of utter helplessness was overwhelming, the knowledge that there was nothing he could do. It was as if he and she were standing on a dockway, and she was about to set foot in a ship, bound to an unknown destination, and the last few minutes were passing by before the ship’s siren blew, warning him the gangways would be withdrawn and she must go.

He asked her if she had all she needed, if she would be given sufficient food, enough covering, and whether there were any facilities should she fall ill. He wanted to know if there was anything she wanted that he could send to her. And she smiled back at him, saying she had everything, within those walls, that she would ever need.

He said to her, “I shall return every year, at this time, to ask you to come back. I shall never forget.”

She said, “It will be harder for you if you do that. Like putting flowers on a grave. I would rather you stayed away.”

“I can’t stay away,” he said, “with the knowledge you are here, behind these walls.”

“I won’t be able to come to you again,” she said, “this is the last time you will see me. Remember, though, that I shall go on looking like this, always. That is part of the belief. Carry me with you.”

Then, Victor said, she asked him to go. She could not return inside the walls until he had gone. The sun was low in the sky and already the rock face was in shadow.

Victor looked at Anna a long time; then he turned his back on her, standing by the ledge, and walked away from the wall towards the gully, without looking over his shoulder. When he came to the gully he waited there a few minutes, then looked out again towards the rock face. Anna was no longer standing on the ledge. There was nothing there but the wall and the slit windows, and above, not yet in shadow, the twin peaks of Monte Verità.

I managed to spare half an hour or so, every day, to go and visit Victor in the nursing home. Each day he appeared stronger, more himself. I spoke to the doctor attending him, to the matron and the nurses. They told me there was no question of a deranged mind; he came to them suffering from severe shock and nervous collapse. It had already done him immense good to see me and to talk to me. In a fortnight he was well enough to leave the nursing home, and he came to stay with me in Westminster.

During those autumn evenings we went over all that had happened again and again. I questioned him more closely than I had done before. He denied that there had ever been anything abnormal about Anna. Theirs had been a normal, happy marriage. Her dislike of possessions, her spartan way of living, was, he agreed, unusual; but it had not struck him as peculiar—it was Anna. I told him of the night I had seen her standing with bare feet in the garden, on the frosted lawn. Yes, he said, that was the sort of thing she did. But she had a fastidiousness, a certain personal reticence, that he respected. He never intruded upon it.

I asked him how much he knew of her life before he married her. He told me there was very little to know. Her parents had died when she was young, and she had been brought up in Wales by an aunt. There was no peculiar background, no skeletons in the cupboard. Her upbringing had been entirely ordinary in every way.

“It’s no use,” said Victor, “you can’t explain Anna. She is just herself, unique. You can’t explain her any more than you can explain the sudden phenomenon of a musician, born to ordinary parents, or a poet, or a saint. There is no accounting for them. They just appear. It was my great fortune, praise God, to find her, just as it is my own personal hell, now, to have lost her. Somehow I shall continue living, as she expected me to do. And once a year I shall go back to Monte Verità.”

His acquiescence to the total breakup of his life astounded me. I felt that I could not have overcome my own despair, had the tragedy been mine. It seemed to me monstrous that an unknown sect, on a mountainside, could, in the space of a few days, have such power over a woman, a woman of intelligence and personality. It was understandable that ignorant peasant girls could be emotionally misled and their relatives, blinded by superstition, do nothing about it. I told Victor this. I told him that it should be possible, through the ordinary channels of our embassy, to approach the government of that country, to have a nationwide inquiry, to get the Press onto it, the backing of our own government. I told him I was prepared, myself, to set all this in motion. We were living in the twentieth century, not in the Middle Ages. A place like Monte Verità should not be permitted to exist. I would arouse the whole country with the story, create an international situation.

“But why,” said Victor quietly, “to what end?”

“To get Anna back,” I said, “and to free the rest. To prevent the breakup of other people’s lives.”

“We don’t,” said Victor, “go about destroying monasteries or convents. There are hundreds of them, all over the world.”

“That is different,” I argued. “They are organized bodies of religious people. They have existed for centuries.”

“I think, very probably, Monte Verità has too.”

“How do they live, how do they eat, what happens when they fall ill, when they die?”

“I don’t know. I try not to think about it. All I cling to is that Anna said she had found what she was searching for, that she was happy. I’m not going to destroy that happiness.”

Then he looked at me, in a way half puzzled, half wise, and said, “It’s odd, your talking in this way. Because by rights you should understand Anna’s feelings more than I do. You were always the one with mountain fever. You were the one, in old climbing days, to have your head in the clouds and quote to me—

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”

I remember getting up and going over to the window and looking out over the foggy street, down to the embankment. I said nothing. His words had moved me very much. I could not answer them. And I knew, in the depths of my heart, why I hated the story of Monte Verità and wanted the place to be destroyed. It was because Anna had found her Truth, and I had not…

That conversation between Victor and myself made, if not a division in our friendship, at least a turning point. We had reached a halfway mark in both our lives. He went back to his home in Shropshire, and later wrote to me that he intended making over the property to a young nephew, still at school, and during the next few years intended having the lad to stay with him in the holidays, to get him acquainted with the place. After that, he did not know. He would not commit himself to plans. My own future, at this time, was full with change. My work necessitated living in America for a period of two years.

Then, as it turned out, the whole tenor of the world became disrupted. The following year was 1914.

Victor was one of the first to join up. Perhaps he thought this would be his answer. Perhaps he thought he might be killed. I did not follow his example until my period in America was over. It was certainly not my answer, and I disliked every moment of my army years. I saw nothing of Victor during the whole of the war; we fought on different fronts, and did not even meet on leave. I did hear from him, once. And this is what he said:

In spite of everything, I have managed to get to Monte Verità each year, as I promised to do. I stayed a night with the old man in the village, and climbed onto the mountaintop the following day. It looked exactly the same. Quite dead, and silent. I left a letter for Anna beneath the wall and sat there, all the day, looking at the place, feeling her near. I knew she would not come to me. The next day I went again, and was overjoyed to find a letter from her in return. If you can call it a letter. It was cut on flat stone, and I suppose this is the only method they have of communication. She said she was well, and strong, and very happy. She gave me her blessing, and you also. She told me never to be anxious for her. That was all. It was, as I told you at the nursing home, like a spirit message from the dead. With this I have to be content, and am. If I survive this war, I shall probably go out and live somewhere in that country, so that I can be near her, even if I never see her again, or hear nothing of her but a few words scrawled on a stone once a year.

Good luck to yourself, old fellow. I wonder where you are.

Victor

When the armistice came, and I got myself demobilized and set about the restoration of my normal life, one of the first things I did was to inquire for Victor. I wrote to him, in Shropshire. I had a courteous reply from the nephew. He had taken over the house and the estate. Victor had been wounded, but not badly. He had now left England and was somewhere abroad, either in Italy or Spain, the nephew was not sure which. But he believed his uncle had decided to live out there for good. If he had news of him, he would let me know. No further news came. As to myself, I decided I disliked postwar London and the people who lived there. I cut myself loose from home ties too, and went to America.

I did not see Victor again for nearly twenty years.

It was not chance that brought us together again. I am sure of that. These things are predestined. I have a theory that each man’s life is like a pack of cards, and those we meet and sometimes love are shuffled with us. We find ourselves in the same suit, held by the hand of Fate. The game is played, we are discarded, and pass on. What combination of events brought me to Europe again at the age of fifty-five, two or three years before the Second World War, does not matter to this story. It so happened that I came.

I was flying from one capital city to another—the names of both are immaterial—and the airplane in which I traveled made a forced landing, luckily without loss of life, in desolate mountainous country. For two days the crew and passengers, myself among them, held no contact with the outer world. We camped in the partially wrecked machine and waited for rescue. This adventure made headlines in the world Press at the time, even taking precedence, for a few days, over the simmering European situation.

Hardship, for those forty-eight hours, was not acute. Luckily there were no women or children passengers traveling, so we men put the best face on it we could, and waited for rescue. We were confident that help would reach us before long. Our wireless had functioned until the moment of the forced landing, and the operator had given our position. It was all a matter of patience, and of keeping warm.

For my part, with my mission in Europe accomplished and no ties strong enough back in the States to believe myself anxiously awaited, this sudden plunging into the sort of country that years ago I had most passionately loved was a strange experience. I had become so much a man of cities, and a creature of comfort. The high pulse of American living, the pace, the vitality, the whole breathless energy of the New World, had combined to make me forget the ties that still bound me to the Old.

Now, looking about me in the desolation and the splendor, I knew what I had lacked all these years. I forgot my fellow travelers, forgot the gray fuselage of the crippled plane—an anachronism, surely, amid the wilderness of centuries—and forgot too my gray hair, my heavy frame, and all the burden of my five-and-fifty years. I was a boy again, hopeful, eager, seeking an answer to eternity. Surely it was there, waiting, beyond the further peaks. I stood there, incongruous in my city clothes, and the mountain fever raced back into my blood.

I wanted to get away from the wrecked plane and the pinched faces of my companions; I wanted to forget the waste of the years between. What I would have given to be young again, a boy, and, reckless of the consequences, set forth towards those peaks and climb to glory. I knew how it would feel, up there on the higher mountains. The air keener and still more cold, the silence deeper. The strange burning quality of ice, the penetrating strength of the sun, and that moment when the heart misses a beat as the foot, momentarily slipping on the narrow ledge, seeks safety; the hand’s clutch to the rope.

I gazed up at them, the mountains that I loved, and felt a traitor. I had betrayed them for baser things, for comfort, ease, security. When rescue came to me and to my fellow travelers, I would make amends for the time that had been lost. There was no pressing hurry to return to the States. I would take a vacation, here in Europe, and go climbing once again. I would buy proper clothes, equipment, set myself to it. This decision taken, I felt lighthearted, irresponsible. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. I returned to my little party, sheltering beside the plane, and laughed and joked through the remaining hours.

Help reached us on the second day. We had been certain of rescue when we had sighted an airplane, at dawn, hundreds of feet above us. The search party consisted of true mountaineers and guides, rough fellows but likable. They had brought clothing, kit, and food for us, and were astonished, they admitted, that we were all in condition to make use of them. They had thought to find none of us alive.

They helped us down to the valley in easy stages, and it took us until the following day. We spent the night encamped on the north side of the great ridge of mountains that had seemed to us, beside the useless plane, so remote and so inaccessible. At daybreak we set forth again, a splendid clear day, and the whole of the valley below our camp lay plain to the eye. Eastward the mountain range ran sheer, and as far as I could judge impassable, to a snowcapped peak, or possibly two, that pierced the dazzling sky like the knuckles on a closed hand.

I said to the leader of the rescue expedition, just as we were starting out on the descent, “I used to climb much, in old days, when I was young. I don’t know this country at all. Do many expeditions come this way?”

He shook his head. He told me conditions were difficult. He and his companions came from some distance away. The people in the valley to the eastward there were backward and ignorant; there were few facilities for tourists or for strangers. If I cared about climbing he could take me to other places, where I should find good sport. It was already rather late in the year, though, for expeditions.

I went on looking at that eastward ridge, remote and strangely beautiful.

“What do they call them,” I said, “those twin peaks, to the east?”

He answered, “Monte Verità.”

I knew then what had brought me back to Europe…

We parted, my fellow travelers and I, at a little town some twenty miles from the spot where the airplane had crashed. Transport took them onto the nearest railway line, and to civilization. I remained behind. I booked a room at the small hotel and deposited my luggage there. I bought myself strong boots, a pair of breeches, a jerkin, and a couple of shirts. Then I turned my back upon the town and climbed.

It was, as the guide had told me, late in the year for expeditions. Somehow I did not care. I was alone, and on the mountains once again. I had forgotten how healing solitude could be. The old strength came back to my legs and to my lungs, and the cold air bit into the whole of me. I could have shouted with delight, at fifty-five. Gone was the turmoil and the stress, the anxious stir of many millions; gone were the lights, and the vapid city smells. I had been mad to endure it for so long.

In a mood of exaltation I came to the valley that lies at the eastern foot of Monte Verità. It had not changed much, it seemed to me, from the description Victor gave of it, those many years ago before the war. The little town was small and primitive, the people dull and dour. There was a rough sort of inn—one could not grace it by the name of hotel—where I proposed to stay the night.

I was received with indifference, though not discourtesy. After supper I asked if the track was still passable to the summit of Monte Verità. My informant behind his bar—for bar and café were in one, and I ate there, being the only visitor—regarded me without interest as he drank the glass of wine I offered him.

“It is passable, I believe, as far as the village. Beyond that I do not know,” he said.

“Is there much coming and going between your people in the valley here and those in the village on the mountain?” I asked.

“Sometimes. Perhaps. Not at this time of year,” he answered.

“Do you ever have tourists here?”

“Few tourists. They go north. It is better in the north.”

“Is there any place in the village where I could sleep tomorrow night?”

“I do not know.”

I paused a moment, watching his heavy sullen face, then I said to him, “And the sacerdotesse, do they still live on the rock face on the summit of Monte Verità?”

He started. He turned his eyes full upon me, and leaned over the bar. “Who are you, then? What do you know of them?”

“Then they do exist still?” I said.

He watched me, suspicious. Much had happened to his country in the past twenty years, violence, revolution, hostility between father and son, and even this remote corner must have had its share. It may have been this that made reserve.

“There are stories,” he said, slowly. “I prefer not to mix myself up in such matters. It is dangerous. One day there will be trouble.”

“Trouble for whom?”

“For those in the village, for those who may live on Monte Verità—I know nothing of them—for us here in the valley. I do not know. If I do not know, no harm can come to me.”

He finished his wine, and cleaned his glass, and wiped the bar with a cloth. He was anxious to be rid of me.

“At what time do you wish for your breakfast in the morning?” he said.

I told him seven, and went up to my room.

I opened the double windows and stood out on the narrow balcony. The little town was quiet. Few lights winked in the darkness. The night was clear and cold. The moon had risen and would be full tomorrow or the day after. It shone upon the dark mountain mass in front of me. I felt oddly moved, as though I had stepped back into the past. This room, where I should pass the night, might have been the same one where Victor and Anna slept, all those years ago, in the summer of 1913. Anna herself might have stood here, on the balcony, gazing up at Monte Verità, while Victor, unconscious of the tragedy so few hours distant, called to her from within.

And now, in their footsteps, I had come to Monte Verità.

The next morning I took my breakfast in the café-bar, and my landlord of the night before was absent. My coffee and bread were brought to me by a girl, perhaps his daughter. Her manner was quiet and courteous, and she wished me a pleasant day.

“I am going to climb,” I said, “the weather seems set fair. Tell me, have you ever been to Monte Verità?”

Her eyes flickered away from mine instantly.

“No,” she said, “no, I have never been away from the valley.”

My manner was matter-of-fact, and casual. I said something about friends of mine having been here, some while ago—I did not say how long—and that they had climbed to the summit, and had found the rock face there, between the peaks, and had been much interested to learn about the sect who lived enclosed within the walls.

“Are they still there, do you know?” I asked, lighting a cigarette, elaborately at ease.

She glanced over her shoulder nervously, as though conscious that she might be overheard.

“It is said so,” she answered. “My father does not discuss it before me. It is a forbidden subject to young people.”

I went on smoking my cigarette.

“I live in America,” I said, “and I find that there, as in most places, when the young people get together there is nothing they like discussing so well as forbidden subjects.”

She smiled faintly but said nothing.

“I daresay you and your young friends often whisper together about what happens on Monte Verità,” I said.

I felt slightly ashamed of my duplicity, but I felt that this method of attack was the most likely one to produce information.

“Yes,” she said, “that is true. But we say nothing out loud. But just lately…” Once again she glanced over her shoulder, and then resumed, her voice pitched lower, “A girl I knew quite well, she was to marry shortly, she went away one day, she has not come back, and they are saying she has been called to Monte Verità.”

“No one saw her go?”

“No. She went by night. She left no word, nothing.”

“Could she not have gone somewhere quite different, to a large town, to one of the tourist centers?”

“It is believed not. Besides, just before, she had acted strangely. She had been heard talking in her sleep about Monte Verità.”

I waited for a moment, then continued my inquiry, still nonchalant, still casual.

“What is the fascination in Monte Verità?” I asked. “The life there must be unbearably harsh, and even cruel?”

“Not to those who are called,” she said, shaking her head. “They stay young always, they never grow old.”

“If nobody has ever seen them, how can you know?”

“It has always been so. That is the belief. That is why here, in the valley, they are hated and feared, and also envied. They have the secret of life, on Monte Verità.”

She looked out of the window towards the mountain. There was a wistful expression in her eyes.

“And you?” I said. “Do you think you will ever be called?”

“I am not worthy,” she said. “Also, I am afraid.”

She took away my coffee and offered me some fruit.

“And now,” she said, her voice still lower, “since this last disappearance, there is likely to be trouble. The people are angry, here in the valley. Some of the men have climbed to the village and are trying to rouse them there, to get force of numbers, and then they will attack the rock. Our men will go wild. They will try to kill those who live there. Then there will be more trouble, we shall get the army here, there will be inquiries, punishments, shooting; it will all end badly. So it is not pleasant at the moment. Everyone goes about afraid. Everybody is whispering in secret.”

A footstep outside sent her swiftly behind the bar. She busied herself there, her head low, as her father came into the room.

He glanced at both of us, suspiciously. I put out my cigarette and rose from the table.

“So you are still intent to climb?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “I shall be back in a day or two.”

“It would be imprudent to stay there longer,” he said.

“You mean the weather will break?”

“The weather will break, yes. Also, it might not be safe.”

“In what way might it not be safe?”

“There may be disturbance. Things are unsettled just now. Men are out of temper. When they are out of temper, they lose their heads. And strangers, foreigners, can come to harm at such a time.

“It would be better if you gave up your idea of climbing Monte Verità and turned northwards. There is no trouble there.”

“Thank you. But I have set my heart on climbing Monte Verità.”

He shrugged his shoulders. He looked away from me.

“As you will,” he said, “it is not my affair.”

I walked out of the inn, down to the street, and crossing the little bridge above the mountain stream I set my face to the track through the valley that led me to the eastern face of Monte Verità.

At first the sounds from the valley were distinct. The barking of dogs, the tinkle of cow bells, the voices of men calling to one another, all these rose clearly to me in the still air. Then the blue smoke from the houses merged and became one misty haze, and the houses themselves took on a toy-town quality. The track wound above me and away, ever deeper into the heart of the mountain itself, until by midday the valley was lost in the depths and I had no other thought in my mind but to climb upwards, higher, always higher, win my way beyond that first ridge to the left, leave it behind me and gain the second, forget both in turn to achieve the third, steeper yet and overshadowed. My progress was slow, with untuned muscles and imperfect wind, but exhilaration of spirit kept me going and I was in no way tired, rather the reverse. I could have gone on forever.

It was with a shock of surprise that I came finally upon the village, for I had pictured it at least another hour away. I must have climbed at a great pace, for it was barely four o’clock. The village wore a forlorn, almost deserted appearance, and I judged that today there were few remaining inhabitants. Some of the dwellings were boarded up, others fallen in and partly destroyed. Smoke came only from two or three of them, and I saw no one working in the pastureland around. A few cows, lean-looking and unkempt, grazed by the side of the track, the jangling bells around their necks sounding hollow somehow in the still air. The place had a somber, depressing effect, after the stimulation of the climb. If this was where I must spend the night I did not think much of it.

I went to the door of the first dwelling that had a thin wisp of smoke coming from the roof and knocked upon the door. It was opened, after some time, by a lad of about fourteen, who after one look at me called over his shoulder to somebody within. A man of about my own age, stupid-looking and heavy, came to the door. He said something to me in patois, then staring a moment, and realizing his mistake, he broke, even more haltingly than I, into the language of the country.

“You are the doctor from the valley?” he said to me.

“No,” I replied, “I am a stranger on vacation, climbing in the district. I want a bed for the night, if you can give me one.”

His face fell. He did not reply directly to my request.

“We have someone here very sick,” he said, “I do not know what to do. They said a doctor would come from the valley. You met no one?”

“I’m afraid not. No one climbed from the valley except myself. Who is ill? A child?”

The man shook his head. “No, no, we have no children here.”

He went on looking at me, in a dazed, helpless sort of way, and I felt sorry for his trouble, but I did not see what I could do. I had no sort of medicines upon me but a first-aid packet and a small bottle of aspirin. The aspirin might be of use, if there was fever. I undid it from my pack and gave a handful to the man.

“These may help,” I said, “if you care to try them.”

He beckoned me inside. “Please to give them yourself,” he said.

I had some reluctance to step within and be faced with the grim spectacle of a dying relative, but plain humanity told me I could hardly do otherwise. I followed him into the living room. There was a trestle bed against the wall and lying upon it, covered with two blankets, was a man, his eyes closed. He was pale and unshaven, and his features had that sharp pointed look about them that comes upon the face when near to death. I went close to the bed and gazed down upon him. He opened his eyes. For a moment we stared at one another, unbelieving. Then he put out his hand to me, and smiled. It was Victor…

“Thank God,” he said.

I was too much moved to speak. I saw him beckon to the fellow, who stood apart, and speak to him in the patois, and he must have told him we were friends, for some sort of light broke in the man’s face and he withdrew. I went on standing by the trestle bed, with Victor’s hand in mine.

“How long have you been like this?” I asked at length.

“Nearly five days,” he said. “Touch of pleurisy; I’ve had it before. Rather worse this time. I’m getting old.”

Once again he smiled, and although I guessed him to be desperately ill, he was little changed, he was the same Victor still.

“You seem to have prospered,” he said to me, still smiling, “you have all the sleek appearance of success.”

I asked him why he had never written, and what he had been doing with himself for twenty years.

“I cut myself adrift,” he said. “I gather you did the same, but in a different way. I haven’t been back to England since I left. What is it that you’re holding there?”

I showed him the bottle of aspirin.

“I’m afraid that’s no use to you,” I said. “The best thing I can suggest is for me to stay here tonight, and then first thing in the morning get the chap here, and one or two others, to help me carry you down to the valley.”

He shook his head. “Waste of time,” he said. “I’m done for. I know that.”

“Nonsense. You need a doctor, proper nursing. That’s impossible in this place.” I looked around the primitive living room, dark and airless.

“Never mind about me,” he said. “Someone else is more important.”

“Who?”

“Anna,” he said, and then as I answered nothing, at a loss for words, he added, “She’s still here, you know, on Monte Verità.”

“You mean,” I said, “that she’s in that place, enclosed, she’s never left it?”

“That’s why I’m here,” said Victor. “I come every year, and have done, since the beginning. I wrote and told you, surely, after the war? I live in a little fishing port all the year round, very isolated and quiet, and then come here once in twelve months. I left it later this year, because I had been ill.”

It was incredible. What an existence, all these years, without friends, without interests, enduring the long months until the time came for this hopeless annual pilgrimage.

“Have you ever seen her?” I asked.

“Never.”

“Do you write to her?”

“I bring a letter every year. I take it up with me and leave it beneath the wall, and then return the following day.”

“The letter gets taken?”

“Always. And in its place there is a slab of stone, with writing scrawled upon it. Never more than a few words. I take the stones away with me. I have them all down on the coast, where I live.”

It was heart-rending, his faith in her, his fidelity through the years.

“I’ve tried to study it,” he said, “this religion, belief. It’s very ancient, way back before Christianity. There are old books that hint at it. I’ve picked them up from time to time, and I’ve spoken to people, scholars, who have made a study of mysticism and the old rites of ancient Gaul, and the Druids; there’s a strong link between all mountain folk of those times. In every instance that I have read there is this insistence on the power of the moon and the belief that the followers stay young and beautiful.”

“You talk, Victor, as if you believe that too,” I said.

“I do,” he answered. “The children believe it, here in the village, the few that remain.”

Talking to me had tired him. He reached out for a pitcher of water that stood beside the bed.

“Look here,” I said, “these aspirins can’t hurt you, they can only help, if you have fever. And you might get some sleep.”

I made him swallow three, and drew the blankets closer round him.

“Are there any women in the house?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “I’ve been puzzled about that, since I’ve been here this time. The village is pretty much deserted. All the women and children have shifted to the valley. There are about twenty men and boys left, all told.”

“Do you know when the women and children went?”

“I gather they left a few days before I came. This fellow here—he’s the son of the old man who used to live here, who died many years ago—is such a fool that he never knows anything. He just looks vague if you question him. But he’s competent, in his own way. He’ll give you food, and find bedding for you, and the little chap is bright enough.”

Victor closed his eyes, and I hoped that he might sleep. I thought I knew why the women and children had left the village. It was since the girl from the valley had disappeared. They had been warned that trouble might come to Monte Verità. I did not dare tell Victor this. I wished I could persuade him to be carried down into the valley.

By this time it was quite dark, and I was hungry. I went through a sort of recess to the back. There was no one there but the boy. I asked him for something to eat and drink, and he understood. He brought me bread, and meat, and cheese, and I ate it in the living room, with the boy watching me. Victor’s eyes were still closed and I believed he slept.

“Will he get better?” asked the boy. He did not speak in patois.

“I think so,” I answered, “if I can get help to carry him to a doctor in the valley.”

“I will help you,” said the boy, “and two of my companions. We should go tomorrow. After that, it will be difficult.”

“Why?”

“There will be coming and going the day after. Men from the valley, much excitement, and my companions and I will join them.”

“What is going to happen?” He hesitated. He looked at me with quick bright eyes.

“I do not know,” he said. He slipped away, back to the recess.

Victor’s voice came from the trestle bed.

“What did the boy say?” he asked. “Who is coming from the valley?”

“I don’t know,” I said casually, “some expedition, perhaps. But he has offered to help take you down the mountain tomorrow.”

“No expeditions ever come here,” said Victor, “there must be some mistake.” He called to the boy, and when the lad reappeared spoke to him in the patois. The boy was ill at ease, and diffident; he seemed reluctant now to answer questions. Several times I heard the words Monte Verità repeated, both by him and Victor. Presently he went back to the inner room and left us alone.

“Did you understand any of that?” asked Victor.

“No,” I replied.

“I don’t like it,” he said, “there’s something queer. I’ve felt it, since I’ve lain here these last few days. The men look furtive, odd. He tells me there’s been some disturbance in the valley, and the people there are very angry. Did you hear anything about it?”

I did not know what to say. He was watching me closely.

“The fellow in the inn was not very forthcoming,” I said, “but he did advise against coming to Monte Verità.”

“What reason did he give?”

“No particular reason. He just said there might be trouble.”

Victor was silent. I could feel him thinking there beside me.

“Have any of the women disappeared from the valley?” he said.

It was useless to lie. “I heard something about a missing girl,” I told him, “but I don’t know if it’s true.”

“It will be true. That is it, then.”

He said nothing for a long while, and I could not see his face—it was in shadow. The room was lit by a single lamp, giving a pallid glow.

“You must climb tomorrow and warn Anna at Monte Verità,” he said at last.

I think I had expected this. I asked him how it could be done.

“I can sketch the track for you,” he said, “you can’t go wrong. It’s straight up the old watercourse, heading south all the while. The rains haven’t made it impassable yet. If you leave before dawn you’ll have all day before you.”

“What happens when I get there?”

“You must leave a letter, as I do, and then come away. They won’t fetch it while you are there. I will write, also. I shall tell Anna that I am ill here, and that you’ve suddenly appeared, after nearly twenty years. You know, I was thinking, just now, while you were talking to the boy, it’s like a miracle. I have a strange sort of feeling Anna brought you here.”

His eyes were shining with that old boyish faith that I remembered.

“Perhaps,” I said. “Either Anna, or what you used to call my mountain fever.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” he said to me.

We looked at one another in the silence of that small dark room, and then I turned away and called the boy to bring me bedding and a pillow. I would sleep the night on the floor by Victor’s bed.

He was restless in the night, and breathed with difficulty. Several times I got up to him and gave him more aspirin and water. He sweated much, which might be a good thing or a bad, I did not know. The night seemed endless, and for myself, I barely slept at all. We were both awake when the first darkness paled.

“You should start now,” he said, and going to him I saw with apprehension that his skin had gone clammy cold. He was worse, I was certain, and much weaker.

“Tell Anna,” he said, “that if the valley people come she and the others will be in great danger. I am sure of it.”

“I will write all that,” I said.

“She knows how much I love her. I tell her that always in my letters, but you could say so, once again. Wait in the gully. You may have to wait two hours, or even three, or longer still. Then go back to the wall and look for the answer on the slab of stone. It will be there.”

I touched his cold hand and went out into the chill morning air. Then, as I looked about me, I had my first misgiving. There was cloud everywhere. Not only beneath me, masking the track from the valley where I had come the night before, but here in the silent village, wreathing in mist the roofs of the huts, and also above me, where the path wound through scrub and disappeared upon the mountainside.

Softly, silently, the clouds touched my face and drifted past, never dissolving, never clearing. The moisture clung to my hair and to my hands, and I could taste it on my tongue. I looked this way and that, in the half light, wondering what I should do. All the old instinct of self-preservation told me to return. To set forth, in breaking weather, was madness, to my remembered mountain lore. Yet to stay there, in the village, with Victor’s eyes upon me, hopeful, patient, was more than I could stand. He was dying, we both knew it. And I carried in my breast pocket his last letter to his wife.

I turned to the south, and still the clouds came traveling past, slowly, relentlessly, down from the summit of Monte Verità.

I began to climb…

Victor had told me that I should reach the summit in two hours. Less than that, with the rising sun behind me. I had also a guide, the rough sketch map that he had drawn.

In the first hour after leaving the village I realized my error. I should never see the sun that day. The clouds drove past me, vapor in my face, clammy and cold. They hid the winding watercourse up which I had climbed five minutes since, down which already came the mountain springs, loosening the earth and stones.

By the time the contour changed, and I was free of roots and scrub and feeling my way upon bare rock, it was past midday. I was defeated. Worse still, I was lost. I turned back and could not find the watercourse that had brought me so far. I approached another, but it ran northeast and had already broken for the season; a torrent of water washed away down the mountainside. One false move, and the current would have borne me away, tearing my hands to pieces as I sought for a grip among the stones,

Gone was my exultation of the day before. I was no longer in the thrall of mountain fever but held instead by the equally well-remembered sense of fear. It had happened in the past, many a time, the coming of cloud. Nothing renders a man so helpless, unless he can recognize every inch of the way by which he has come, and so descend. But I had been young in those days, trained, and climbing fit. Now I was a middle-aged city dweller, alone on a mountain I had never climbed before, and I was scared.

I sat down under the lee of a great boulder, away from the drifting cloud, and ate my lunch—the remainder of sandwiches packed at the valley inn—and waited. Then, still waiting, I got up and stamped about for warmth. The air was not penetrating yet but seeping cold, the moist chill cold that always comes with cloud.

I had this one hope, that with the coming of darkness, and with a fall in temperature, the cloud would lift. I remembered it would be full moon, a great point to my advantage, for cloud rarely lingers at these times, but tends to break up and dissolve. I welcomed, therefore, the coming of a sharper cold into the atmosphere. The air was perceptibly keener, and looking out towards the south, from which direction the cloud had drifted all the day, I could now see some ten feet ahead. Below me it was still as thick as ever. A wall of impenetrable mist hid the descent. I went on waiting. Above me, always to the south, the distance that I could see increased from a dozen feet to fifteen, from fifteen to twenty. The cloud was cloud no longer, but vapor only, thin, and vanishing; and suddenly the whole contour of the mountain came into view, not the summit as yet, but the great jutting shoulder, leaning south, and beyond it my first glimpse of the sky.

I looked at my watch again. It was a quarter to six. Night had fallen on Monte Verità.

Vapor came again, obscuring that clear patch of sky that I had seen, and then it drifted, and the sky was there once more. I left my place of shelter where I had been all day. For the second time I was faced with a decision. To climb, or to descend. Above me, the way was clear. There was the shoulder of the mountain, described by Victor; I could even see the ridge along it running to the south, which was the way I should have taken twelve hours before. In two or three hours the moon would have risen and would give me all the light I needed to reach the rock face of Monte Verità. I looked east, to the descent. The whole of it was hidden in the same wall of cloud. Until the cloud dissolved I should still be in the same position I had been all day, uncertain of direction, helpless in visibility that was never more than three feet.

I decided to go on, and to climb to the summit of the mountain with my message.

Now the cloud was beneath me my spirits revived. I studied the rough map drawn by Victor, and set out towards the southern shoulder. I was hungry, and would have given much to have back the sandwiches I had eaten at midday. A roll of bread was all that remained to me. That, and a packet of cigarettes. Cigarettes were not helpful to the wind, but at least they staved off the desire for food.

Now I could see the twin peaks themselves, clear and stark against the sky. And a new excitement came to me, as I looked up at them, for I knew that when I had rounded the shoulder and had come to the southern face of the mountain, I should have reached my journey’s end.

I went on climbing; and I saw how the ridge narrowed and how the rock steepened, becoming more sheer as the southern slopes opened up to view, and then, over my shoulder, rose the first tip of the moon’s great face, out of the misty vapor to the east. The sight of it stirred me to a new sense of isolation. It was as though I walked alone on the earth’s rim, the universe below me and above. No one trod this empty discus but myself, and it spun its way through space to ultimate darkness.

As the moon rose, the man that climbed with it shrank to insignificance. I was no longer aware of personal identity. This shell, in which I had my being, moved forward without feeling, drawn to the summit of the mountain by some nameless force which seemed to hold suction from the moon itself. I was impelled, like the flow and ebb of tide upon water. I could not disobey the law that urged me on, any more than I could cease to breathe. This was not mountain fever in my blood, but mountain magic. It was not nervous energy that drove me, but the tug of the full moon.

The rock narrowed and closed above my head, making an arch, a gully, so that I had to stoop and feel my way; then I emerged from darkness into light, and there before me, silver-white, were the twin peaks and the rock face of Monte Verità.

For the first time in my life I looked on beauty bare. My mission was forgotten, my anxiety for Victor, my own fear of cloud that had clamped me through the day. This indeed was journey’s end. This was fulfillment. Time did not matter. I had no thought of it. I stood there staring at the rock face under the moon.

How long I remained motionless I do not know, nor do I remember when the change came to the tower and the walls; but suddenly the figures were there, that had not been before. They stood one behind the other on the walls, silhouetted against the sky, and they might have been stone images, carved from the rock itself, so still they were, so motionless.

I was too distant from them to see their faces or their shape. One stood alone, within the open tower; this one alone was shrouded, in a garment reaching from head to foot. Suddenly there came to my mind old tales of ancient days, of Druids, of slaughter, and of sacrifice. These people worshipped the moon, and the moon was full. Some victim was going to be flung to the depths below, and I would witness the act.

I had known fear in my life before, but never terror. Now it came upon me in full measure. I knelt down, in the shadow of the gully, for surely they must see me standing there, in the moon’s path. I saw them raise their arms above their heads, and slowly a murmur came from them, low and indistinct at first, then swelling louder, breaking upon the silence that hitherto had been profound. The sound echoed from the rock face, rose and fell upon the air, and I saw them one and all turn to the full moon. There was no sacrifice. No act of slaughter. This was their song of praise.

I hid there, in the shadows, with all the ignorance and shame of one who stumbles into a place of worship alien to his knowledge, while the chanting rang in my ears, unearthly, terrifying, yet beautiful in a way impossible to bear. I clasped my hands over my head, I shut my eyes, I bent low until my forehead touched the ground.

Then slowly, very slowly, the great hymn of praise faded in strength. It sank lower to a murmur, to a sigh. It hushed and died away. Silence came back to Monte Verità.

Still I dared not move. My hands covered my head. My face was to the ground. I am not ashamed of my terror. I was lost between two worlds. My own was gone, and I was not of theirs. I longed for the sanctuary of the drifting clouds again.

I waited, still upon my knees. Then furtive, creeping, I lifted up my head and looked towards the rock face. The walls and the tower were bare. The figures had vanished. And a cloud, dark and ragged, hid the moon.

I stood up, but I did not move. I kept my eyes fixed upon the tower and the walls. Nothing stirred, now that the moon was masked. They might never have been, the figures and the chanting. Perhaps my own fear and imagination had created them.

I waited until the cloud that hid the moon’s face passed away. Then I took courage and felt for the letters in my pocket. I do not know what Victor had written, but my own ran thus:

Dear Anna,

Some strange providence brought me to the village on Monte Verità. I found Victor there. He is desperately ill, and I think dying. If you have a message to send him, leave it beneath the wall. I will carry it to him. I must warn you also that I believe your community to be in danger. The people from the valley are frightened and angry because one of their women has disappeared. They are likely to come to Monte Verità, and do damage.

In parting, I want to tell you that Victor has never stopped loving you and thinking about you.

And I signed my name at the bottom of the page.

I started walking towards the wall. As I drew close I could see the slit windows, described to me long ago by Victor, and it came to me that there might be eyes behind them, watching, that beyond each narrow opening there could be a figure, waiting.

I stooped and put the letters on the ground beneath the wall. As I did so, the wall before me swung back suddenly and opened. Arms stretched forth from the yawning gap and seized me, and I was flung to the ground, with hands about my throat.

The last thing I heard, before losing consciousness, was the sound of a boy, laughing.

I awoke with violence, jerked back into reality from some great depth of slumber, and I knew that a moment before I had not been alone. Someone had been beside me, kneeling, peering down into my sleeping face.

I sat up and looked about me, cold and numb. I was in a cell about ten foot long, and the daylight, ghostly pale, filtered through the narrow slit in the stone wall. I glanced at my watch. The hands pointed to a quarter to five. I must have lain unconscious for a little over four hours, and this was the false light that comes before dawn.

My first feeling now, on waking, was one of anger. I had been fooled. The people in the village below Monte Verità had lied to me, and to Victor too. The rough hands that had seized me, and the boy’s laugh that I heard, these had belonged to the villagers themselves. That man, and his son, had preceded me up the mountain track, and had lain in wait for me. They knew a way of entry through the walls. They had fooled Victor through the years, and thought to fool me too. God alone knew their motive. It could not be robbery. We neither of us had anything but the clothes we wore. This cell into which they had thrust me was quite bare. No sign of human habitation, not even a board on which to lie. A strange thing, though—they had not bound me. And there was no door to the cell. The entry was open, a long slit, like the window, but large enough to permit the passage of a single form.

I sat waiting for the light to strengthen and for the feeling, too, to come back to my shoulders, arms and legs. My sense of caution told me this was wise. If I ventured through the opening now, I might in the dim light stumble, and fall, and be lost in some labyrinth of passageway or stair.

My anger grew with the daylight, yet with it also a feeling of despair. I longed more than anything to get hold of the fellow and his son, threaten them both, fight them if necessary—I would not be thrown to the ground a second time unawares. But what if they had gone away and left me in this place, without means of exit? Supposing this, then, was the trick they played on strangers, and had done so through countless years, the old man before them, and others before him, luring the women from the valley too, and once inside these walls leaving the victims to starvation and death? The uneasiness mounting in me would turn to panic if I thought too far ahead, and to calm myself I felt in my pocket for my cigarette case. The first few puffs steadied me, the smell and the taste of the smoke belonged to the world I knew.

Then I saw the frescoes. The growing light betrayed them to me. They covered the walls of the cell, and were drawn upon the ceiling too. Not the rough primitive efforts of uncultured peasants, nor yet the saintly scrawling of religious artists, deeply moved by faith. These frescoes had life and vigor, color and intensity, and whether they told a story or not I did not know, but the motif was clearly worship of the moon. Some figures knelt, others stood; one and all had their arms up, raised to the full moon traced upon the ceiling. Yet in some strange fashion the eyes of the worshippers, drawn with uncanny skill, looked down upon me, not upwards to the moon. I smoked my cigarette and looked away, but all the time I felt their eyes fasten on me, as the daylight grew, and it was like being back outside the walls again, aware of silent watchers from behind the slit windows.

I got up, stamping on my cigarette, and it seemed to me that anything would be better than to remain there in the cell, alone with those figures on the painted walls. I moved to the opening, and as I did so I heard the laughter once again. Softer this time, as though subdued, but mocking and youthful still. That damned boy…

I plunged through the opening, cursing him and shouting. He might have a knife upon him but I didn’t care. And there he was, flattened against the wall, waiting for me. I could see the gleam of his eyes, and I saw his close-cropped hair. I struck at his face, and missed. I heard him laughing as he slipped to one side. Then he wasn’t alone anymore; there was another just behind, and a third. They threw themselves upon me and I was borne to the ground as though I had no strength at all, and the first one knelt with his knee on my chest and his hands about my throat, and he was smiling at me.

I lay fighting for breath, and he relaxed his grip, and the three of them watched me, with that same mocking smile upon their lips. I saw then that none of them was the boy from the village, nor was the father there, and they did not have the faces of village people or of the valley people: their faces were like the painted frescoes on the wall.

Their eyes were heavy-lidded, slanting, without mercy, like the eyes I had seen once long ago on an Egyptian tomb, and on a vase long hidden and forgotten under the dust and rubble of a buried city. Each wore a tunic to his knees, with bare arms, bare legs and hair cropped close to the head, and there was a strange austere beauty about them, and a devilish grace as well. I tried to raise myself from the ground, but the one who had his hand upon my throat pressed me back, and I knew I was no match for him or his companions, and if they wanted to they could throw me from the walls down to the depths below Monte Verità. This was the end, then. It was only a matter of time, and Victor would die alone, back in the hut on the mountainside.

“Go ahead,” I said, “have done with it,” resigned, caring no longer. I expected the laughter again, mocking and youthful, and the sudden seizing of my body with their hands, and the savage thrusting of me through the slit window to darkness and to death. I closed my eyes, and with nerves taut braced myself for horror. Nothing happened. I felt the boy touch my lips. I opened my eyes and he was smiling still, and he had a cup in his hands, with milk in it, and he was urging me to drink, but he did not speak. I shook my head but his companions came and knelt behind me, supporting my shoulders and my back, and I began to drink, foolishly, gratefully, like a child. The fear went as they held me, and the horror too, and it was as though strength passed from their hands to mine, and not only to my hands but to the whole of me.

When I had finished drinking the first one took the cup from me and put it on the ground, then he placed his two hands on my heart, his fingers touching, and the feeling that came to me was something I had never experienced in my life before. It was as if the peace of God came upon me, quiet and strong, and, with the touch of hands, took from me all anxiety and fear, all the fatigue and terror of the preceding night; and my memory of the cloud and mist on the mountain, and Victor dying on his lonely bed, became suddenly things of no importance. They shrank into insignificance beside this feeling of strength and beauty that I knew now. If Victor died it would not matter. His body would be a shell lying there in the peasant hut, but his heart would be beating here, as mine was beating, and his mind would come to us too.

I say “to us” because it seemed to me, sitting there in the narrow cell, that I had been accepted by my companions and made one of them. This, I thought to myself, still wondering but bewildered, happy, this is what I always hoped that death would be. The negation of all pain and all distress, and the center of life flowing, not from the quibbling brain, but from the heart.

The boy took his hands from me, still smiling, but the feeling of strength, of power, was with me still. He rose to his feet and I did the same, and I followed him and the two others through the gap in the cell. There was no honeycomb of twisting corridors, no dark cloisters, but a great open court onto which the cells all gave, and the fourth side of the court led upwards to the twin peaks of Monte Verità, ice-capped, beautiful, caught now in the rose light of the rising sun. Steps cut in the ice led to the summit, and now I knew the reason for the silence within the walls and in the court as well, for there were the other ones, ranged upon the steps, dressed in those same tunics with bare arms and legs, girdles about the waist, and the hair cropped close to the head.

We passed through the court and up the steps beside them. There was no sound: they did not speak to me or to one another, but they smiled as the first three had done; and their smile was neither courteous nor tender, as we know it in the world, but had a strange exulting quality, as if wisdom and triumph and passion were all blended into one. They were ageless, they were sexless, they were neither male nor female, old or young, but the beauty of their faces, and of their bodies too, was more stirring and exciting than anything I had ever seen or known, and with a sudden longing I wanted to be one of them, to be dressed as they were dressed, to love as they must love, to laugh and worship and be silent.

I looked down at my coat and shirt, my climbing breeches, my thick socks and shoes, and suddenly I hated and despised them. They were like grave clothes covering the dead, and I flung them off, in haste to have them gone, throwing them over my shoulder down to the court below; and I stood naked under the sun. I was without embarrassment or shame. I was quite unconscious how I looked and I did not care. All I knew was that I wanted to have done with the trappings of the world, and my clothes seemed to symbolize the self I had once been.

We climbed the steps and reached the summit, and now the whole world lay before us, without mist or cloud, the lesser peaks stretching away into infinity, and far below, concerning us not at all, hazy and green and still, were the valleys and the streams and the little sleeping towns. Then, turning from the world below, I saw that the twin peaks of Monte Verità were divided by a great crevasse, narrow yet impassable, and standing on the summit, gazing downwards, I realized with wonder, and with awe as well, that my eyes could not penetrate the depths. The ice-blue walls of the crevasse descended smooth and hard without a break to some great bottomless chasm, hidden forever in the mountain heart. The sun that rose to bathe the peaks at midday would never touch the depths of that crevasse, nor would the rays of the full moon come to it, but it seemed to me, between the peaks, that the shape of it was like a chalice held between two hands.

Someone was standing there, dressed in white from head to foot, on the very brink of the chasm, and although I could not see her features, for the cowl of the white robe concealed them, the tall upright figure, with head thrown back and arms outstretched, caught at my heart with sudden tense excitement.

I knew it was Anna. I knew that no one else would stand in just that way. I forgot Victor, I forgot my mission, I forgot time and place and all the years between. I remembered only the stillness of her presence, the beauty of her face, and that quiet voice saying to me, “We are both in search of the same thing, after all.” I knew then that I had loved her always, and that though she had met Victor first, and chosen him, and married him, the ties and ceremony of marriage concerned neither of us, and never had. Our minds had met and crossed and understood from the first moment when Victor introduced us in my club, and that queer, inexplicable bond of the heart, breaking through every barrier, every restraint, had kept us close to one another always, in spite of silence, absence, and long years of separation.

The mistake was mine from the beginning in letting her go alone to find her mountain. Had I gone with them, she and Victor, when they asked me that day in the Map House long ago, intuition would have told me what was in her mind and the spell would have come upon me as well. I would not have slept on in the hut, as Victor had slept, but would have woken and gone with her, and the years that I had wasted and thrown away, futile and misspent, would have been our years, Anna’s and mine, shared here on the mountain, cut off from the world.

Once again I looked about me and at the faces of those who stood beside me, and I guessed dimly, with a sort of hunger near to pain, what ecstasy of love they knew, that I had never known. Their silence was not a vow, condemning them to darkness, but a peace that the mountain gave to them, merging their minds in tune. There was no need for speech, when a smile, a glance, conveyed a message and a thought; while laughter, triumphant always, sprang from the heart’s center, never to be suppressed. This was no closed order, gloomy, sepulchral, denying all that instinct gave the heart. Here Life was fulfilled, clamoring, intense, and the great heat of the sun seeped into the veins, becoming part of the bloodstream, part of the living flesh; and the frozen air, merging with the direct rays of the sun, cleansed the body and the lungs, bringing power and strength—the power I had felt when the fingers touched my heart.

In the space of so short a while my values had all changed, and the self who had climbed the mountain through the mist, fearful, anxious and angry too, but a little while ago, seemed to exist no more. I was gray-haired, past middle age, a madman to the world’s eyes if they could see me now, a laughingstock, a fool; and I stood naked with the rest of them on Monte Verità and held up my arms to the sun. It rose now in the sky and shone upon us, and the blistering of my skin was pain and pleasure blended, and the heat drove through my heart and through my lungs.

I kept my eyes fixed on Anna, loving her with such intensity that I heard myself calling aloud, “Anna… Anna…” And she knew that I was there, for she lifted her hand in signal. None of them minded, none of them cared. They laughed with me, they understood.

Then from the midst of us came a girl, walking. She was dressed in a simple village frock, with stockings and shoes, and her hair hung loose on her shoulders. I thought her hands were folded together, as though in prayer, but they were not. She held them to her heart, the fingers touching.

She went to the brink of the crevasse, where Anna stood. Last night, beneath the moon, I should have been gripped by fear, but not now. I had been accepted. I was one of them. For one instant, in its space of time above us in the sky, the sun’s ray touched the lip of the crevasse, and the blue ice shone. We knelt with one accord, our faces to the sun, and I heard the hymn of praise.

“This,” I thought, “was how men worshipped in the beginning, how they will worship in the end. Here is no creed, no savior, and no deity. Only the sun, which gives us light and life. This is how it has always been, from the beginning of time.”

The sun’s ray lifted and passed on, and then the girl, rising to her feet, threw off her stockings and her shoes and her dress also, and Anna, with a knife in her hand, cut off her hair, cropping it close above the ears. The girl stood before her, her hands upon her heart.

“Now she is free,” I thought. “She won’t go back to the valley again. Her parents will mourn her, and her young man too, and they’ll never discover what she has found, here on Monte Verità. In the valley there would have been feasting and celebration, and then dancing at the wedding, and afterwards the turmoil of a brief romance turning to humdrum married life, the cares of her house, the cares of children, anxiety, fret, illness, trouble, the day-by-day routine of growing old. Now she is spared all that. Here, nothing once felt is lost. Love and beauty don’t die or fade away. Living’s hard, because Nature’s hard, and Nature has no mercy; but it was this she wanted in the valley, it was for this she came. She will know everything here that she never knew before and would not have discovered, below there in the world. Passion and joy and laughter, the heat of the sun, the tug of the moon, love without emotion, sleep with no waking dream. And that’s why they hate it, in the valley, that’s why they’re afraid of Monte Verità. Because here on the summit is something they don’t possess and never will, so they are angry and envious and unhappy.”

Then Anna turned, and the girl who had thrown her sex away with her past life and her village clothes followed barefoot, bare armed, cropped-haired like the others; and she was radiant, smiling, and I knew that nothing would ever matter to her again.

They descended to the court, leaving me alone on the summit, and I felt like an outcast before the gates of heaven. My brief moment had come and gone. They belonged here, and I did not. I was a stranger from the world below.

I put on my clothes again, restored to a sanity I did not want, and remembering Victor and my mission I too went down the steps to the court, and looking upwards I saw that Anna was waiting for me in the tower above.

The others flattened themselves against the wall to let me pass, and I saw that Anna alone among them wore the long white robe and the cowl. The tower was lofty, open to the sky, and characteristically, with that same gesture I remembered when she used to sit on the low stool before the fire in the great hall, Anna sat down now, on the topmost step of the tower, one knee raised and elbow on that knee. Today was yesterday, today was six-and-twenty years ago, and we were alone once more in the manor house in Shropshire; and the peace she had brought to me then she brought me now. I wanted to kneel beside her and take her hand. Instead I went and stood beside the wall, my arms folded.

“So you found it at last,” she said. “It took a little time.”

The voice was soft and still and quite unchanged.

“Did you bring me here?” I asked. “Did you call me when the aircraft crashed?”

She laughed, and I had never been away from her. Time stood still on Monte Verità.

“I wanted you to come long before that,” she said, “but you shut your mind away from me. It was like clamping down a receiver. It always took two to make a telephone call. Does it still?”

“It does,” I answered, “and our more modern inventions need valves for contact. Not the mind, though.”

“Your mind has been a box for so many years,” she said. “It was a pity—we could have shared so much. Victor had to tell me his thoughts in letters, which wouldn’t have been necessary with you.”

It was then, I think, that the first hope came to me. I must feel my way towards it, though, with care.

“You’ve read his letter,” I asked, “and mine as well? You know that he’s dying?”

“Yes,” she said, “he’s been ill for many weeks. That’s why I wanted you to be here at this time, so that you could be with him when he died. And it will be all right for him, now, when you go back to him and tell him that you’ve spoken to me. He’ll be happy then.”

“Why not come yourself?”

“Better this way,” she said. “Then he can keep his dream.”

His dream? What did she mean? They were not, then, all-powerful here on Monte Verità? She understood the danger in which they stood.

“Anna,” I said, “I’ll do what you want me to do. I’ll return to Victor and be with him at the last. But time is very short. More important still is the fact that you and the others here are in great danger. Tomorrow, tonight even, the people from the valley are going to climb here to Monte Verità, and they’ll break into this place and kill you. It’s imperative that you get away before they come. If you have no means of saving yourselves, then you must allow me to do something to help you. We are not so far from civilization as to make that impossible. I can get down to the valley, find a telephone, get through to the police, to the army, to some authority in charge…”

My words trailed off, because although my plans were not clear in my own mind I wanted her to have confidence in me, to feel that she could trust me.

“The point is,” I told her, “that life is going to be impossible for you here, from now on. If I can prevent the attack this time, which is doubtful, it will happen next week, next month. Your days of security are numbered. You’ve lived here shut away so long that you don’t understand the state of the world as it is now. Even this country here is torn in two with suspicion, and the people in the valley aren’t superstitious peasants any longer; they’re armed with modern weapons, and they’ve got murder in their hearts. You won’t stand a chance, you and the rest, here on Monte Verità.”

She did not answer. She sat there on the step, listening, a remote and silent figure in her white robe and cowl.

“Anna,” I said, “Victor’s dying. He may be already dead. When you leave here he can’t help you, but I can. I’ve loved you always. No need to tell you that, you must have guessed it. You destroyed two men, you know, when you came to live on Monte Verità six-and-twenty years ago. But that doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve found you again. And there are still places far away, inaccessible to civilization, where we could live, you and I—and the others with you here, if they wished to come with us. I have money enough to arrange all that; you won’t have to worry about anything.”

I saw myself discussing practicalities with consuls, embassies, going into the question of passports, papers, clothing.

I saw too, in my mind’s eye, the map of the world. I ranged in thought from a ridge of mountains in South America to the Himalayas, from the Himalayas to Africa. Or the northern wastes of Canada were still vast and unexplored, and stretches of Greenland. And there were islands, innumerable, countless islands, where no man ever trod, visited only by seabirds, washed by the lonely sea. Mountain or island, scrubby wilderness or desert, impenetrable forest or Arctic waste, I did not care which she chose; but I had been without sight of her for so long, and now all I wanted was to be with her always.

This was now possible, because Victor, who would have claimed her, was going to die. I was blunt. I was truthful. I told her this as well. And then I waited, to hear what she would say.

She laughed, that warm, much loved and well-remembered laugh, and I wanted to go to her and put my arms round her, because the laugh held so much life in it, and so much joy and promise.

“Well?” I said.

Then she got up from the step and came and stood beside me, very still.

“There was once a man,” she said, “who went to the booking office at Waterloo and said to the clerk eagerly, hopefully, ‘I want a ticket to Paradise. A single ticket. No return.’ And when the clerk told him there was no such place the man picked up the inkwell and threw it in the clerk’s face. The police were summoned, and took the man away and put him in prison. Isn’t that what you’re asking of me now, a ticket to Paradise? This is the mountain of truth, which is very different.”

I felt hurt, irritated even. She hadn’t taken a word of my plans seriously and was making fun of me.

“What do you propose, then?” I asked. “To wait here, behind these walls, for the people to come and break them down?”

“Don’t worry about us,” she said. “We know what we shall do.”

She spoke with indifference, as if the matter was of no importance, and in agony I saw the future, that I had begun to plan for us both, slip away from me.

“Then you do possess some secret?” I asked, almost in accusation. “You can work some miracle, and save yourself and the others, too? What about me? Can’t you take me with you?”

“You wouldn’t want to come,” she said. She put her hand on my arm. “It takes time, you know, to build a Monte Verità. It isn’t just doing without clothes and worshipping the sun.”

“I realize that,” I told her. “I’m prepared to begin all over again, to learn new values, to start from the beginning. I know that nothing I’ve done in the world is any use. Talent, hard work, success, all those things are meaningless. But if I could be with you…”

“How? With me?” she said.

And I did not know what to answer, because it would be too sudden and too direct, but I knew in my heart that what I wanted was everything that could be between a woman and a man; not at first, of course, but later, when we had found our other mountain, or our wilderness, or wherever it was we might go to hide ourselves from the world. There was no need to rehearse all that now. The point was that I was prepared to follow her anywhere, if she would let me.

“I love you, and have always loved you. Isn’t that enough?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “not on Monte Verità.”

And she threw back her cowl and I saw her face.

I gazed at her in horror… I could not move, I could not speak. It was as though all feeling had been frozen. My heart was cold… One side of her face was eaten quite away, ravaged, terrible. The disease had come upon her brow, her cheek, her throat, blotching, searing the skin. The eyes that I had loved were blackened, sunk deep into the sockets.

“You see,” she said, “it isn’t Paradise.”

I think I turned away. I don’t remember. I know I leaned against the rock of the tower and stared down into the depths below, and saw nothing but the great bank of cloud that hid the world.

“It happened to others,” Anna said, “but they died. If I survived longer, it was because I was hardier than they. Leprosy can come to anyone, even to the supposed immortals of Monte Verità. It hasn’t really mattered, you know. I regret nothing. Long ago I remember telling you that those who go to the mountain must give everything. That’s all there is to it. I no longer suffer, so there’s no need to suffer for me.”

I said nothing. I felt the tears run down my face. I didn’t bother to wipe them away.

“There are no illusions and no dreams on Monte Verità,” she said. “They belong to the world, and you belong there too. If I’ve destroyed the fantasy you made of me, forgive me. You’ve lost the Anna you knew once, and found another one instead. Which you will remember longer rather depends upon yourself. Now go back to your world of men and women and build yourself a Monte Verità.”

Somewhere there was scrub and grass and stunted trees; somewhere there was earth and stones and the sound of running water. Deep in the valley there were homes, where men lived with their women, reared their children. They had firelight, curling smoke and lighted windows. Somewhere there were roads, there were railways, there were cities. So many cities, so many streets. And all with crowded buildings, lighted windows. They were there, beneath the cloud, beneath Monte Verità.

“Don’t be anxious or afraid,” said Anna, “and as for the valley people, they can’t harm us. One thing only…” She paused, and although I did not look at her I think she smiled. “Let Victor keep his dream,” she said.

Then she took my hand, and we went down the steps of the tower together, and through the court and to the walls of the rock face. They stood there watching us, those others, with their bare arms and legs, their close-cropped hair, and I saw too the little village girl, the proselyte, who had renounced the world and was now one of them. I saw her turn and look at Anna, and I saw the expression in her eyes; there was no horror there, no fear and no revulsion. One and all they looked at Anna with triumph, with exultation, with all knowledge and all understanding. And I knew that what she felt and what she endured they felt also, and shared with her, and accepted. She was not alone.

They turned their eyes to me, and their expression changed; instead of love and knowledge I read compassion.

Anna did not say goodbye. She put her hand an instant on my shoulder. Then the wall opened, and she was gone from me. The sun was no longer overhead. It had started its journey in the western sky. The great white banks of cloud rolled upward from the world below. I turned my back on Monte Verità.

It was evening when I came to the village. The moon had not yet risen. Presently, within two hours or less, it would top the eastern ridge of the further mountains and give light to the whole sky. They were waiting, the people from the valley. There must have been three hundred or more, waiting there in groups beside the huts. All of them were armed, some with rifles, with grenades, others, more primitive, with picks and axes. They had kindled fires, on the village track between the huts, and had brought provisions too. They stood or sat before the fires eating and drinking, smoking and talking. Some of them had dogs, held tightly on a leash.

The owner of the first hut stood by the door with his son. They too were armed. The boy had a pick and a knife thrust in his belt. The man watched me with his sullen, stupid face.

“Your friend is dead,” he said. “He has been dead these many hours.”

I pushed past him and went into the living room of the hut. Candles had been lit. One at the head of the bed, one at the foot. I bent over Victor and took his hand. The man had lied to me. Victor was breathing still. When he felt me touch his hand, he opened his eyes.

“Did you see her?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Something told me you would,” he said. “Lying here, I felt that it would happen. She’s my wife, and I’ve loved her all these years, but you only have been allowed to see her. Too late, isn’t it, to be jealous now?”

The candlelight was dim. He could not see the shadows by the door, nor hear the movement and the whispering without.

“Did you give her my letter?” he said.

“She has it,” I answered. “She told you not to worry, not to be anxious. She is all right. Everything is well with her.”

Victor smiled. He let go my hand.

“So it’s true,” he said, “all the dreams I had of Monte Verità. She is happy and contented and she will never grow old, never lose her beauty. Tell me, her hair, her eyes, her smile—were they still the same?”

“Just the same,” I said. “Anna will always be the most beautiful woman you or I have ever known.”

He did not answer. And as I waited there, beside him, I heard the sudden blowing of a horn, echoed by a second and a third. I heard the restless movement of the men outside in the village, as they shouldered their weapons, kicked out the fires and gathered together for the climb. I heard the dogs barking and the men laughing, ready now, excited. When they had gone I went and stood alone in the deserted village, and I watched the full moon rising from the dark valley.