“Oh, that! Yes, herr. Our people are curious. Years ago we used to go on quietly tending our cows and goats in the valleys, and driving them up to the huts on the mountains when the snow melted. There were the great stocks and horns and spitzes towering up, covered with eternal snow, and we gazed at them with awe. Then you Englishmen came, and wanted to go up and up where the foot of man never before stepped; and even our most daring chamois hunters watched you all with wonder.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Dale, smiling, as he looked in the guide’s frank face.
“You wanted guides to the mountains, and we showed you the way, while you taught us that we could climb too, and could be as cool and daring. We did not know it before, and we had to get over our suspicions. For we said, ‘these strangers must want to find something in the mountains—something that will pay them for the risk they run in climbing up to the places where the demons of the storm dwell, and who wait to hurl down stones and dart lightning at the daring people who would venture up into their homes.’”
“And very dangerous those bad spirits are—eh, Melchior!” said Dale, smiling.
“Terribly, herr,” said the guide. “And you laugh. I don’t wonder. But there are plenty of our simple, uneducated people in the villages who believe all that still. I heard it all as a child, and it took a great deal of quiet thinking, as I grew up, before I could shake off all those follies, and see that there was nothing to fear high up, but the ice and wind and snow, with the dangers of the climbing. Why, fifty years ago, if a man climbed and fell, the people thought he had been thrown down by evil spirits. Many think so now in the out-of-the-way valleys.”
“Then you are not superstitious, Melchior?”
“I hope not, herr,” said the guide reverently; “but there are plenty of my people who are, and suspicious as well. I am only an ignorant man, but I believe in wisdom; and I have lived to see that you Englishmen find pleasure in reading the books of the great God, written with His finger on the mountains and in the valleys; to know how you collect the lowliest flowers, and can show us the wonders of their shape and how they grow. Then I know, too, how you find wonders in the great rocks, and can show me how they are made of different stone, which is always being ground down to come into the valleys to make them rich. I know all this, herr; and so I do not wonder and doubt when you ask me to show you some of the wildest places in the mountains, where you may find crystals and see glaciers and caves scarcely any of us have ventured to search. But if I told some of our people that you spend your money and your time in seeking and examining all this, they would only laugh and call me a fool. They would say, ‘we know better. He has blinded you. He is seeking for gold and diamonds.’ And I could not make them believe it is all in the pursuit of—what do you call that!”
“Science?”
“Yes, science; that is the word. And in their ignorance they will follow and watch us, if we do not take care to avoid them.”
“You think, then, that some one has been following us?”