The nightly descent from the Hohentwiel was mere child's play, compared to this. Unconscious of all danger, he darted past precipices, and at last came down to level ground, beside the lake. The goats often fell down there, when they turned their eyes away from the grass, and gazed into the neck-breaking depth below.
At last he stood still beside the mysteriously beckoning, green Seealpsee, over which the silvery moon-beams danced and trembled. The rotten trunks, lying about on the shores, gave forth a spectral light. Ekkehard's eyes grew dim and filmy.
"Take me into thy arms," cried he, "for my heart is panting for rest."
He ran into the cool, silent flood, but his feet still touched ground, and the cooling waters of the mountain-lake, sent a delicious freshness through his feverish limbs. The water already reached to his breast, when he stopped and looked up confusedly. The white clouds had disappeared; the moon-beams having dissolved them into transparent vapours. Magnificently, and yet sadly withal, the stars were glittering high over his head.
In bold, fantastic lines the Möglisalp stretched out its grass-covered horns towards the moon. On its left, stood calm and serious, the furrowed head of the "old man" and to the right, towering above its double belt of glaciers, the stern, grey pyramid of the Säntis, surrounded by innumerable crags and pinnacles; looking like dark spectres of night.
Then, Ekkehard knelt down on the pebbly ground of the lake, so that the waters closed over his head, and rising again after a while, he stood there immovably with lifted arms, as if he were praying.
The moon now sank down behind the Säntis; a bluish light trembled over the old snow of the glaciers. A rocking pain darted through Ekkehard's brain. The mountains around him, began to rock and dance; a wailing sound streamed through the pine-woods, and the lake rose and stirred, and its waves were alive with thousands and thousands of black tadpoles....
But in soft, dewy beauty, the figure of a woman rose from the waters, and floated up to the top of the Möglisalp. There, she sat on the soft velvety grass, and shook the water from her long streaming tresses, and made herself a wreath of Alpine flowers.
In the depths of the mountains there arose a growling and trembling. The Säntis stretched himself out to his full height, and so did the old man to his right. Like gigantic Titans of old, they stormed at each other. The Säntis seized his rocks, and threw them over, and the old man tore off his head and flung it at the pyramid of the Säntis. Now the Säntis stood on the right side, and the old man was flying before him to the left;--but the lady of the lake, looked on in smiling composure, and from her mountain-peak, she mocked the stone combatants. And she shook her yellow curls, out of which there fell down a pearly waterfall; and it flowed down wilder and wilder, till it whirled the maiden with the liquid eyes, back into the lake.
Upon this, the uproar and strife ceased suddenly. The old man took up his head; put it on again, and singing a sad, mournful strain, he returned to his old place. And the Säntis likewise had resumed his post, and his glaciers were glittering calmly as before.