The beautiful old songs of Switzerland and the pure joys of spring were heard no more.
Instead of that, the sound of hammering could be heard day and night. A jumper was driven into the mountain at the exact spot where Barbarossa’s ring had hung; and then the blasting began.
It would not have been so very difficult (as everybody knew) to make a hole through the mountain, but it was intended to make two holes, one on each side, and the two holes were to meet in the middle; nobody believed that this was possible, for the tunnel was to be nearly nine miles long. Nearly nine miles!
And what would happen if they did not meet? Well, they would have to begin again at the beginning.
But the engineer-in-chief had assured them that they would meet.
Andrea, on the Italian side, had faith in the engineer-in-chief, and since he was himself a very capable fellow, as we know, he applied for work under him and soon was made a foreman.
Andrea liked his work. He no longer saw daylight, the green fields and snow-clad Alps. But he fancied that he was cutting a way for himself through the mountain to Gertrude, the way which he had boasted he would come.
For eight years he stood in darkness, living the life of a dog, stripped to the waist, for he was working in a temperature of a hundred degrees. Now the way was blocked by a spring, and he had to work standing in the water; now by a deposit of loam, and he stood almost knee-deep in the mire; the atmosphere was nearly always foul, and many of his fellow-labourers succumbed to it; but new ones were ever ready to take their place. Finally Andrea, too, succumbed, and was taken into the hospital. He was tortured by the idea that the two tunnels would never meet. Supposing they never met!
There were also men from the other side in the hospital; and at times, when they were not delirious, they would ask one another the all-absorbing question: “Would they meet?”
The people from the South had never before been so anxious to meet the people from the North as they were now, deep down in the heart of the mountain. They knew that if they met, their feud of over a thousand years’ standing would be over, and they would fall into each other’s arms, reconciled.