About a musket-shot below the Bäuden stands the frontier guard-house. The two wool-merchants who had left Warmbrunn for the ordinary three days' excursion in the mountains, having no passports to show, were detained, while I, accredited by seven visas, had free passage and wishes for a pleasant journey. I took a road running immediately to the right, and had not gone far when one of Hübner's men came running after, and offered to show me the way to Schatzlar for twenty kreutzers.
"If you mean the road," I answered, "I don't want you. But if you mean the shortest way, across fields, through bush, anywhere to save distance, come along."
He hesitated a moment, and came. We scrambled anywhere; up and down toilsome slopes of ploughed fields, through scrub and brake. We saw the hamlet of Klein Aupa and the Golden Valley on the right. When, after awhile, Schneekoppe came in sight, it appeared from this side to be the crest of a long, gradually-rising earth-wave. After about an hour and a half of brisk walking, we came to a brow, from which the ground fell steeply to a homely, straggling village, embosomed in trees, beneath. "There, that's Schatzlar," said Hübner's man, and, pointing to a lane that twisted down the slope, "that's the way to it."
Hübner's man plays knavish tricks. On descending into the village I found it to be Kunzendorf: however, it was on the right way, and another two miles brought me to Schatzlar, a village of one street, the houses irregular; high, dark, wooden gables, resting on a low, whitewashed ground story, lit by shabby little windows. Here I took a road on the left, leading to Bernsdorf, from which, as it rises, you can presently look back upon the striped hill behind Schatzlar, the castle, now tenanted by the Bezirksrichter, and the beechen woods where the Bober takes its rise: a stream that flows northwards and falls into the Oder.
Beech woods adorn this part of the country, and relieve the dark slopes of firs which here and there border the landscape; and everywhere you see signs of careful cultivation. After passing Bernsdorf—a village on the high road to Trautenau—I fell in with a weaver, and we walked together to Altendorf. A right talkative fellow did he prove himself; a barefoot philosopher, clad in a loose garment of coarse baize. He lived at Kunzendorf, where he kept his loom going while work was to be had, and, when it wasn't, did the best he could without. Thought a dollar a week tidy wages; a dollar and a half, jolly; and two dollars, wonderfully happy. Never ate meat; never expected it, and so didn't fret about it. Bread, soup, and a glass of beer at the Wirthshaus in the evening, was all he could get, and a weaver who got that had not much to complain of. All this was said in a free, hearty tone, that left me no reason to doubt its sincerity.
The country was no longer what it had been. Twelve years ago the land to the right and left, all the way from Schatzlar, was covered with forest; now it was all fields, and every year the fields spread wider, and up the hills; and though firewood was dearer, potatoes, beetroot, and rye were more plentiful; and that seemed only fair, because every year more mouths opened and wanted food.
For every cottage we passed my philosopher had a joke; something about the bees' humming-tops, or frogs' hams, that sent the inmates into roars of laughter. I invited him to eat bread and cheese with me at Altendorf: he stared, gave a whoop of surprise, and accepted. Of all the large rooms I had yet seen in a public-house the one in the Wirthshaus here was the largest; spacious enough for a town-hall. The groined and vaulted ceiling rests on tall, massive pillars; four chandeliers hang by long strings; in one corner stands a two-wheeled truck; an enormous bread-trough; platter-shaped baskets filled with flour, and a mountain of washing utensils. Trencher-cap brought us two glasses of beer—tall glasses, to match the room, vase-like in form, and fifteen inches high at least. The beer was of the colour of porter, and, as I thought, of a very disagreeable flavour; but the weaver took a hearty pull, smacked his lips, and pronounced it better than Bavarian, or Stohnsdorfer, or any other kind. That was the sort they always drank at Kunzendorf, and wholesome stuff it was; meat and drink too. He emptied my glass after his own—for one taste was enough for me—and then, as he bade me good-bye, and went his way, he expressed a hope that he might meet with an Englishman every time he took the same walk.
From Altendorf a short cut by intricate paths over a wooded hill saves nearly two miles in the distance to Adersbach. It is a pretty walk, up and down slopes gay with loosestrife—Steinrosen, as the country folk call it—and among rocks, of which one of the largest is known as the Gott und Vater Stein. You emerge in a shallow valley, at Upper Adersbach, and follow the road downwards, past low-shingled cottages, the fronts coloured yellow with white stripes, the shutters blue, and all the rearward portion showing white stripes along the joints of the old dark wood, and crossing on the ends of the beams. The eaves are not more than six feet from the ground, so that where the house stands back in a garden, it is half buried by apple-trees and scarlet-runners, and the cabbages and flowers look in at the windows. The people are as rustic as their dwellings. Ask a question, and a blunt "Was?" is the first word in answer; no "Wie meinen sie?" as in other places. Good Papists, nevertheless, for they stop and recite a prayer before one of the gaudy crucifixes, which, surrounded by angels bearing inscribed tablets, or ornamented by pictures of the Virgin and St. Anne, stand within a wooden fence at the roadside here and there along the village.
The valley narrows, and presently you see strange masses of stone peering from the fir-wood on the right, more and more numerous, till at length the rock prevails, and the trees grow only in gaps and clefts. The masses present astonishing varieties of the columnar form, some tall and upright, others broken and leaning; and looking across the intervening breadth of meadow, you can imagine doorways, porticos, colonnades, and grotesque sculptures. Here and there, fronting the rest, stands a semicircular mass, as it were a huge grindstone, one half buried in the earth, or a pile that looks like a weatherbeaten, buttressed wall; and, raised by the slope of the ground, you see the tops of other masses, continuing away to the rear.
The spectacle grows yet more striking, for the height and dimensions of the rocks increase as you advance. About a mile onwards and a short range of similar rocks appears isolated in a wood on the left. Here a whitewashed gateway bestrides the road—the entrance to the Gasthaus zur Felsenstadt (Rock-City Inn), resorted to every year by hundreds of visitors.