"Ekkehard thou hast made thyself ridiculous," muttered he to himself; and then he felt, as if he must break his head against the rocks.
A melancholy mind broods long over a wrong it has undergone; quite forgetting that a blameworthy action is only blotted out in the memory of others, by better ones following.
Therefore, Ekkehard was as yet not ripe for the healing delights of solitude. The ever-present recollection of past suffering had a strange effect on him. Whenever he sat all alone in his silent cavern, he fancied he heard voices that mockingly talked to him of foolish hopes, and the deceits of this world. The flight, and calls of the birds in the air, seemed to him the shrieks of demons, and all his praying would avail nothing against these fantastic delusions.
When the terrors of the wilderness have once taken hold of a mind, eye and ear are easily deceived and apt to believe all the old legends and tales, which assert that the air, as well as water and earth, is inhabited by legions of immortal spirits.
It was a soft, fragrant midsummer night. Ekkehard was just about to lay himself down on his simple couch, when the moon-beams fell right into the cavern. Two white clouds were sailing along the sky, one behind the other, and he overheard how they were talking together. One of them was Dame Hadwig, and the other Praxedis.
"I should really like to see, what the asylum of a wandering fool looks like," said the first white cloud, and swiftly hurrying down the steep rocky walls, she stood still on the Kamor, right opposite the cavern, and then floating down to the fir-trees which grew in great numbers in the valley below, she cried out: "It is he! Go and seize the blasphemer."
Then, the fir-trees sprang into life and became monks; thousands and thousands, and chaunting psalms and swinging rods in their hands, they began to climb up the rock towards the Wildkirchlein.
Trembling with terror, Ekkehard jumped up and seized his spear,--but now it was as if a host of will-o'-the-wisps, started out from the recesses of the cavern. "Away with you, out from the Alps!" cried they threateningly. All his pulses throbbed in the heat of fever, and so he ran away over the narrow path, along the frightful precipice, into the dark night, like a madman.
The second cloud was still standing beside the moon: "I cannot help thee," said she with Praxedis's voice, "I do not know the way."
Downhill he ran, as fast as his feet would carry him. Life had become a mere torture to him, and yet he caught hold of projecting parts of the rocks, and used his spear as a staff, not to fall down and thus get into the hands of the approaching spectres.