Artificial improvement of waterfalls affords me but little pleasure. Here, however, the effect was so surprising that, as the water gleamed and danced in the dusky cavern, and the rushing roar and rapid gurgle at the outlet filled the place with loud reverberations, and the light spray imparted a sense of coolness, I was made to feel there might be an exception.
In our further wanderings we met sundry parties of visitors all led by guides who had the same theatrical trick as mine. You return by the same way to the locked door; but explorations are being made to discover a new route among objects sufficiently striking. Outside the door all is free, and you may roam and make discoveries at pleasure. There are steep gullies which lead into very wild places, where for want of bridges, galleries, and beaten paths, the labour and fatigue of exploration are sensibly multiplied.
In June, 1844, as inscribed on one of the stones, a waterspout burst over Adersbach, and flooded all the tortuous ways among the rocks to a depth of nine feet. Another inscription records the escape of two Englishmen in 1709. They were sheltering from a thunderstorm, when the rock under which they stood was struck by lightning, and the summit shattered without their receiving harm from the falling lumps. Inscriptions of another sort abound—the initials, or entire name and address, of hundreds of visitors, who with chisel or black paint have thought it worth while to let posterity know of their visit to Adersbach. Some ambitious beyond the ordinary, have climbed up thirty or forty feet to carve the capital letters.
CHAPTER XXIII.
The Echo—Wonderful Orchestra—Magical Music—A Feu de joie—The Oration—The Voices—Echo and the Humourist—Satisfying the Guide—Exploring the Labyrinth—Curious Discoveries—Speculations of Geologists—Bohemia an Inland Sea—Marble Labyrinth in Spain—A Twilight View—After a'.
"Will it please you to walk to the echo?" asks the guide, when we come back to the meadow. And if you assent—as every one does—he turns to the left and leads you up the open ground above-mentioned to a small temple—the Echo House. You see a man standing near the house playing a clarionet, pausing now and then to recite; but no answering note or word do you hear. But take your seat on the bench against that perpendicular rock on his right, and immediately you hear a whole orchestra of wind instruments among the rocks. Such delicious music! Soft, wild, warbling, rising and falling, melting one into the other in a way that you fancy could only be accomplished by a band of Kobolds with Rübezahl for a leader. And when the player blows short phrases with pauses between, what mocking sprite is that who imitates the sound, flitting from crevice to crevice repeating the tones over and over again, fainter and fainter, till they seem not to die away, but to float out of hearing?
Then his companion comes forward and fires a gun, a signal, so you might believe, for a great discharge of musketry among the rocks, platoon after platoon firing a feu de joie. One—two—three—four! The two men hold up their hands to signify—Listen yet! then comes the rattle of the fifth round from the short range of rocks which we saw on the left while coming down the valley; and the firing commenced by the troops in camp is ended by the outposts.
Then one of the men makes a short oration about the wonders here grouped by which Nature attracts man from afar and fills him with joy and astonishment; voices repeat the oration among the rocks, and then—he comes to you for his fee. For the gunshot the tax is eight kreutzers; and if you give eight more for the music and oration, the two echo-keepers will not look unhappy.
And now, if still incredulous, you may talk to the echo yourself. My test was perfectly convincing, for it woke up a dozen cuckoos among the rocks. When Schulze, the humourist already mentioned, was here, he questioned the mysterious voice concerning political matters, and got unhesitating answers. For example:
