BLUMENEGG
Blumenegg
AFTERNOON, and warmer than usual. Fön shifts about in irresolute, vagrant puffs of heat; the sky, shortly before sunrise, had been flaring red, copper-colored, from end to end. This is the ardent and wayward but caressing wind under whose touch everything grows brittle and inflammable; when in olden days all cooking had to be suspended and fires extinguished; when whole villages, for some trifling reason, were burnt to the ground; it was during Fön weather that Tiefis and Nüziders, and several in the Rhine valley, were annihilated within the memory of our fathers.[8] The peasants, unfamiliar with real heat, go about gasping....
While crossing our cemetery to revisit the grave of a little brother of my father’s, an infant, and the Catholics were kind enough to make room for him here—it struck me how poetic are the German designations for such sad spots, Friedhof and Gottesacker, when contrasted with our soul-withering “churchyard” or “graveyard” or “burial-ground.” The people hereabouts contrive to invest with a halo of romance even that most unromantic of objects, the common potato, by calling it Erdapfel, or Grundbirne. And the names of the ruined castles that strew this region, Schattenburg, Sonnenberg, Rosenegg, and so forth, were surely invented by a race that had a fine feeling for such things.
Or Blumenegg—which happens to be nothing but a translation of Florimont, the Rhaeto-Roman name of this locality.
If you follow the main road to Ludesch, you will pass through a fir wood and then come to the Lutz bridge. Do not cross the stream; keep on this side, and walk along the water. After a few hundred yards you will arrive at the “Schlosstobel” (the old “Falster”; also called “Storrbach”) which rushes past the foot of Blumenegg castle. Not many years ago it descended in a wild flood, uprooting trees and covering the ground with a hideous irruption of shingle, which will remain for some little time. On the Schlosstobel’s other side you enter a forest called Gstinswald; part of it used to belong to our family. Here, at the entrance of this wood, stood a landmark; a picture attached to a tree, in memory of a man who was drowned at this spot while endeavoring to cross the rivulet during some spate of olden days. It was a realistic work of art, depicting both Heaven and earth. This was the subject: down below, a watery chaos, a black thundercloud out of which buckets of rain descended upon the victim whom you beheld struggling in the whirlpool of waves, while his open umbrella floated disconsolately in the neighborhood; overhead, on the other side of the thundercloud (it had taken on a golden tinge of sunshine half way through) the Mother of God with a saint or two, gazing down upon the scene with an air of detachment which bordered on indifference. The picture is no longer there; and nothing remains of its tree save a moldy stump.
From this point you can climb direct to the castle. We preferred to wander awhile up the Gstinswald which clothes the right flank of the Lutz river, in order to see what has happened to that mysterious and solitary peasant-house which lay on a grassy slope in the forest. It is still there, but those skulls of foxes and badgers and other beasts, nailed by its occupant to a certain wooden door—skulls that held a fascination for us children—are gone. And what of the snowdrops? This, and a little hillock near Ludesch, were the only places where they could be found; tiger-lilies grew elsewhere; primula auricula only at the Hanging Stone; cyclamen only at Feldkirch (where they were discovered in the middle of the sixteenth century by Hieronymus Bock); the cypripedium orchid (calceolus Divæ Virginis), the lady’s slipper, at two other places; stag’s horn moss, vulgo “Fuchsschwanz,” at four or five: we knew them all! but flowers were dropped, when butterflies began. From this farmhouse you have an unexpected view upon the summit of the Scesaplana, and by far the best time to come here is after a summer shower, when a procession of white mists comes trailing out of the narrow valley, one after the other, like a troop of ghosts. Now ascend through the field and the tract of woodland immediately behind this farm, and you will reach a broad meadow which bears the old name of Quadera or Quadern; against the huge barn which used to stand there, all by itself, they have erected a modern house full of people. The castle is not far off; you must look for it, since the little path that once led up is half obliterated. And therein lies a great part of its charm; you must look for it....
When all is said and done, when you have scoured Europe and other regions in search of the picturesque and admired landscapes and ruins innumerable, that shattered old fastness of Blumenegg, up there, still remains one of the fairest places on earth. It is desolation itself, a harmonious desolation, among its dreamy firs and beeches; firs within, firs and beeches without. The roof is gone, and so are nearly all the internal partitions; nothing but the shell survives. This shell, this massive outer wall of blocks partly hewn and partly in the rough—water-worn bowlders, dragged up from the Lutz-bed below—is encrusted with moss wherever moss can grow; out of that moss sprout little firs and little beeches, drawing what nourishment they can from the old stones. They garnish the ruin. So Blumenegg is invaded by nature; and nature, here, has been left untouched. A castle in a tale! Elsewhere you see bare stretches of this wall, that tower up sadly in ever-crumbling pinnacles. All is green within the shell; its firs are so cunningly distributed that you can just see through them from one end to the other of the ruin and realize, with pleasure, that you are within some ancient enclosure. They rise out of an uneven floor whereunder, one suspects, lie buried the roof and interior walls. This floor is thickly carpeted with moss in every part. No brambles or inconvenient shrubs grow here; nothing but firs and moss, and creeping ivy, and hepatica, and daphne and the tender Waldmeister plant, that calls up memories of May. Once inside that green enceinte, a suggestion of remoteness overcomes you; the world and its jargon are left behind. There is silence save for the rushing torrent with its waterfall, three hundred feet below. In former days, this castle must have towered grandly over Ludesch and the whole valley. Viewed from down there, it now resembles an agglomeration of spiky gray crags, peering upward through the firs.
Doubtless they have written about this place and, if one took the trouble, one could learn something of its past either from archives or out of the histories published by local antiquarians. There has never been a want of such people hereabouts; the province is rich in literature of this class. A rather valuable book which has remained in my possession by a miracle and was printed in “dem Gräfflichem Marckt Embs” in 1616[9] gives some account of it; but though I know little enough, I know more than its old author could possibly have recorded, since Blumenegg “flourished” long after he did. Eight different dynasties have ruled here; the last being the Austrian Crown, to whom its rights devolved at the beginning of last century. The castle was probably built in the twelfth; it is known to have stood in 1265 and is described as a “Veste” in 1288; its lords had power over the three neighboring villages and some of the Valentschina (the old name of the Walserthal). They were answerable for their acts to no township, to no civil or religious authority whatever; to none save the Emperor himself. That is the way to live, for it was an undertaking of questionable profit to complain of such people to the Emperor. They claimed the right over life and death of their lieges and exercised it freely, “because”—as one of them observed in 1397—“we possess both stocks and gallows”: an adequate reason. That is the way to talk.[10] They also executed robbers with the sword. Then, together with nearly all our feudal strongholds, this castle was sacked by the Appenzell people of Switzerland in 1405. Its outer wall is down, on the east. From this flank, presumably, the invaders entered for their work of destruction. A spot is still pointed out by the driving road, on the other side of the wild torrent, where, during some siege, the horses of a noble coach took fright at the sound of cannon-shots and threw themselves down the precipice, carriage and all.