But I do not know how to describe the change. The silence was crushing or rather sucking my life out of me—up into its own empty gulfs. The horror of the great stillness was growing deathly, when all at once I rose to my feet, with a sense of power and confidence I had never had before. It was as if something divine within me awoke to outface the desolation. I felt that it was time to act, and that I could act. There is no cure for terror like action: in a few moments I could have approached the verge of any precipice—at least without abject fear. The silence—no longer a horrible vacancy—appeared to tremble with unuttered thinkings. The manhood within me was alive and awake. I could not recognize a single landmark, or discover the least vestige of a path. I knew upon which hand the sun was when we started; and took my way with the sun on the other side. But a cloud had already come over him.
I had not gone far before I saw in front of me, on the other side of a little hillock, something like the pale blue grey fog that broods over a mountain lake. I ascended the hillock, and started back with a cry of dismay: I was on the very verge of an awful gulf. When I think of it, I marvel yet that I did not lose my self-possession altogether. I only turned and strode in the other direction—the faster for the fear. But I dared not run, for I was haunted by precipices. Over every height, every mound, one might be lying—a trap for my destruction. I no longer looked out in the hope of recognizing some feature of the country; I could only regard the ground before me, lest at any step I might come upon an abyss.
I had not walked far before the air began to grow dark. I glanced again at the sun. The clouds had gathered thick about him. Suddenly a mountain wind blew cold in my face. I never yet can read that sonnet of Shakspere’s,
Full many a glorious morning I have seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with his disgrace,—
without recalling the gladness when I started from home and the misery that so soon followed. But my new spirits did not yet give way. I trudged on. The wind increased, and in it came by-and-by the trailing skirts of a cloud. In a few moments more I was wrapped in mist. It was as if the gulf from which I had just escaped had sent up its indwelling demon of fog to follow and overtake me. I dared hardly go on even with the greatest circumspection. As I grew colder, my courage declined. The mist wetted my face and sank through my clothes, and I began to feel very wretched, I sat down, not merely from dread of the precipices, but to reserve my walking powers when the mist should withdraw. I began to shiver, and was getting utterly hopeless and miserable when the fog lifted a little, and I saw what seemed a great rock near me. I crept towards it. Almost suddenly it dwindled, and I found but a stone, yet one large enough to afford me some shelter. I went to the leeward side of it, and nestled at its foot. The mist again sank, and the wind blew stronger, but I was in comparative comfort, partly because my imagination was wearied. I fell fast asleep.
I awoke stiff with cold. Rain was falling in torrents, and I was wet to the skin; but the mist was much thinner, and I could see a good way. For awhile I was very heartless, what with the stiffness, and the fear of having to spend the night on the mountains. I was hungry too, not with the appetite of desire but of need. The worst was that I had no idea in what direction I ought to go. Downwards lay precipices—upwards lay the surer loneliness. I knelt, and prayed the God who dwelt in the silence to help me; then strode away I knew not whither—up the hill in the faint hope of discovering some sign to direct me. As I climbed the hill rose. When I surmounted what had seemed the highest point, away beyond rose another. But the slopes were not over-steep, and I was able to get on pretty fast. The wind being behind me, I hoped for some shelter over the highest brow, but that, for anything I knew, might be miles away in the regions of ice and snow.
{Illustration: I FELL FAST ASLEEP.}
I had been walking I should think about an hour, when the mist broke away from around me, and the sun, in the midst of clouds of dull orange and gold, shone out upon the wet hill. It was like a promise of safety, and woke in me courage to climb the steep and crumbling slope which now lay before me. But the fear returned. People had died in the mountains of hunger, and I began to make up my mind to meet the worst. I had not learned that the approach of any fate is just the preparation for that fate. I troubled myself with the care of that which was not impending over me. I tried to contemplate the death-struggle with equanimity, but could not. Had I been wearier and fainter, it would have appeared less dreadful. Then, in the horror of the slow death of hunger, strange as it may appear, that which had been the special horror of my childish dreams returned upon me changed into a thought of comfort: I could, ere my strength failed me utterly, seek the verge of a precipice, lie down there, and when the suffering grew strong enough to give me courage, roll myself over the edge, and cut short the agony.
At length I gained the brow of the height, and at last the ground sank beyond. There was no precipice to terrify, only a somewhat steep descent into a valley large and wide. But what a vision arose on the opposite side of that valley!—an upright wilderness of rocks, slopes, precipices, snow, glaciers, avalanches! Weary and faint as I was, I was filled with a glorious awe, the terror of which was the opposite of fear, for it lifted instead of debasing the soul. Not a pine-tree softened the haggard waste; not a single stray sheep of the wind’s flock drew one trail of its thin-drawn wool behind it; all was hard and bare. The glaciers lay like the skins of cruel beasts, with the green veins yet visible, nailed to the rocks to harden in the sun; and the little streams which ran down from their claws looked like the knife-blades they are, keen and hard and shining, sawing away at the bones of the old mountain. But although the mountain looked so silent, there came from it every now and then a thunderous sound. At first I could not think what it was, but gazing at its surface more steadily, upon the face of a slope I caught sight of what seemed a larger stream than any of the rest; but it soon ceased to flow, and after came the thunder of its fall: it was a stream, but a solid one—an avalanche. Away up in the air the huge snow-summit glittered in the light of the Afternoon sun. I was gazing on the Maiden in one of her most savage moods—or to speak prose—I was regarding one of the wildest aspects of the many-sided Jungfrau.
Half way down the hill, almost right under my feet, rose a slender column of smoke, I could not see whence. I hastened towards it, feeling as strong as when I started in the morning. I zig-zagged down the slope, for it was steep and slippery with grass, and arrived at length at a good-sized cottage, which faced the Jungfrau. It was built of great logs laid horizontally one above the other, all with notches half through near the end, by which notches, lying into each other, the sides of the house were held together at the corners. I soon saw it must be a sort of roadside inn. There was no one about the place, but passing through a dark vestibule, in which were stores of fodder and various utensils, I came to a room in which sat a mother and her daughter, the former spinning, the latter making lace on a pillow. In at the windows looked the great Jungfrau. The room was lined with planks; the floor was boarded; the ceiling, too, was of boards—pine-wood all around.