For the Right

by Karl Emil Franzos

CHAPTER X.

[TO THE MOUNTAINS.]

There is a strange legend concerning the origin of the Carpathians, which, now towering abruptly, now rising in gentler lines, form a mighty wall of separation between the rich lowlands where the Theiss flows and that vast plain, of heath-country diversified with fertile tracts, stretching away southward beyond the Pruth into Roumania. To those blue-green domes cling the gathering clouds, and sailing away thence they burst in storms of rain upon the Magyar or upon the Ruthen, as the capricious winds may list; and in those forest-haunts the rivers rise which come down from the heights, headlong at first and wondrously clear, but flowing wearily as they reach the plain. The dwellers round about differ in race and tongue; but they look to the mountains as to a common centre, where the weather is born, and whence the water is given for the lowlands; and common to all is that quaintest of legends, whether Slav, or Magyar, or Roumanian--a legend crudely imagined, but not without a meaning of its own, however fancifully expressed.

There was a good old time, the people will tell you, at the beginning of things, when the earth was a fair garden, a fertile plain, with pleasant groves here and there, and gentle hills. There were no mountains, no ravenous beasts, no thunder storms, no bursting waters, and the people were of one race and tongue. Men were happy in those far-off times--tilling the soil, and living on the fruits of this beautiful plain. And God would visit the garden He had made, and bless the children of men. But these foolish people were not content, and, uniting in their pride, they clamoured for golden harvests without previous toil; in punishment whereof the Lord God ceased to visit them, confounding their language so that they could no longer clamour in common, and permitting, moreover, a mighty barrier to be raised between them--the great Carpathians--to separate them into different tribes.

For the enemy of men was sent to raise the mountains, and to make them terrible withal. The heaving earth burst upward, and there were peaks and crags to frown at the discontented race. The evil one took seven days to shape the Carpathians, beginning on a Sunday, on which he heaped up the most towering parts, and finishing off with the lesser Carpathians on the seventh day when his power was nearly spent; that was Saturday, for which reason no doubt this part has always been a dwelling-place of Jews.

The mountain range of seven divisions, as is plainly to be seen, was of awful aspect, since the evil had the making of them: not a tree or green thing would grow to clothe the riven rocks and the peaks he had raised to spread terror upon the once smiling plain. For the Lord God had been wroth with men.

But there was One in heaven, the good Saviour, who prayed His Father not to be angry for ever, but to let Him add beauty to the mountains which the evil one had made for the punishment of men.

He went, and at His touch the whole range was changed, not losing its dread gloominess, yet gaining a wondrous beauty over and above. For the Saviour with His pitiful hand covered the bare mountains with the grandest forests ever seen, surrounding the rocks with spreading verdure, and planting flowers at their feet. He made waters to spring in every glen, and cascades leap from the crags; and though wolves and bears went prowling, He created sheep and the dappled deer to browse in the sylvan haunts. And ever since, the people will tell you, the Carpathians have had a beauty of their own, but with terror combined.

It is hardly to be imagined how a man would feel who, by some magic, were to find himself suddenly transplanted into the heart of these mountains. For unmoved he could not be, were his perceptions never so blunted; a sensation of awe would steal upon him with something of wonder and dismay. Nay, such a feeling must come upon any wanderer ascending step by step from the lowlands, though the gradual rise would prepare him in a measure for the weird grandeur and stern beauty unrolling before his eyes.

To such a one the range at first would appear as a gigantic ridge of clouds heaped up on the horizon, but differing in hue according to the time of day; of a bluish black in the morning, they fade into shades of grey, transparently pale in the full daylight, till the sinking sun suffuses them with a crimson blush, and they continue shining through the long twilight like a wall of fire at the far end of the dusky plain. But the following morning those same shapes are black again, and all the darker if the air be clear--a wall of towering density jutting its pinnacles into the ethereal blue.