CHAPTER XXV
TOM IN WONDERLAND
All through that night, with their compass as a guide, they climbed the hills, keeping in a southerly direction, but verging slightly eastward. In the morning they found themselves on the edge of a high, deeply wooded plateau, which they knew extended with more or less uniformity to the Swiss frontier.
Looking ahead of them, in a southerly direction, they could see dim, solemn aisles of sombre fir trees and the ground was like a brown velvet carpet, yielding gently under their feet. The air was laden with a pungent odor, accentuated by the recent storm, and the damp, resiny fragrance was like a bracing tonic to the fugitives, bidding them welcome to these silent, unfrequented depths.
They were now, indeed, within the precincts of the renowned Schwarzwald, whose wilderness toyland sends forth out of its sequestered hamlets (or did) wooden lions, tigers and rhinoceroses for the whole world, and monkeys on sticks and jumping-jacks and little wooden villages, like the little wooden villages where they are made.
The west slopes of this romantic region were abrupt, almost like the Palisades of the Hudson, running close to the river in some places, and in other places descending several miles back from the shore, so that a panoramic view of southern Alsace was always obtainable from the sharp edge of this forest workshop of Santa Claus. In the east the plateau slopes away and peters out in the lowlands, so that, as one might say, the Black Forest forms a kind of huge natural springboard to afford one a good running jump across the Rhine into Alsace.
Archer's battered and misused geography had not lied about the commissary department of this storied wilderness, for the wild grapes (of which the famous Rhenish wine is made) did indeed grow in "furious what-d'you-call-'ems" or luxurious profusion if you prefer, upon the precipitous western slopes.
All that day they tramped southward, meeting not a soul, and feeling almost as if they were in a church. It seemed altogether grotesque that Germany, grim, fighting, war-crazy Germany, should own such a peaceful region as this.
In the course of the day, they helped the prohibition movement, as Archer said, by eating grapes in such quantities as seriously to reduce the output of Rhenish wine. "But, oh, Ebeneezerr!" he added. "What wouldn't I give for a good russet apple and a dipper of sweet cider."