The Princess PassesWilliamson, C. N. (Charles Norris)
General
The Princess Passes
Williamson, C. N. (Charles Norris)
Automobiles -- Fiction
I think, in coming out of the dark tunnels and windy galleries, I felt
somewhat as Jonah must have felt after he had been discarded in
distaste by the whale. The light dazzled my eyes. I could have shouted
aloud with joy at sight of the sun. I made Bolzano breakfast with me
in the little inn at Iselle, and got upon my way again, at something
past noon. The vast turmoil of the growing railway was left behind. It
was like putting down a volume of Walt Whitman, and taking up
Tennyson.
The Pass had the extraordinary individuality of one face as compared
with another. It had not even a family resemblance to the St. Gothard.
The air was sweet with the good smell of newly cut wood and resinous
pines. There were sudden glimpses of icy peaks, cut diamonds in the
sun, seen for a moment, then swallowed up by stealthily creeping white
clouds, or caressed by them with a benediction in passing. Thin
streaks of cascades on precipitous rocks made silver veinings in
ebony. Side valleys opened unexpectedly, and one knew from hearsay
that gold mines were hidden there. Treading the road built by
Napoleon, I was enveloped in the gloom of the wondrous Gondo Schlucht,
to come out into a broad valley,--a green amphitheatre, above which a
company of white, mountain gods sat grouped to watch a cloud-fight.
If I had not been heart-broken by the cruelty of Helen Blantock, I
should have been almost minded to thank her for sending me here. But
then,--I reminded myself hastily when this thought winked at me over
my shoulder,--I was stunned still, by my heavy disappointment. I was
not conscious to the full of my suffering now, but I should wake up to
it by-and-bye, and then it would be awful--as awful as the desolation
left by a recent great avalanche whose appalling traces I had just
seen.
[Illustration: "TREADING THE ROAD BUILT BY NAPOLÉON".]
I refused to be interested in the old Hospice of St. Bernard, or the
newer Hospice, built by order of Napoleon, because neither seemed to
me the real thing. If I could not see the Hospice of St. Bernard on
the Pass of Great St. Bernard, I would not see any other hospices
called by his name. If possible, I would have gone by them with my
eyes shut; but at the new Hospice the yapping of a dozen adorable
puppies in a kennel opposite lured me, and I paused to talk to them.
They did not understand my language, and this was disappointing; but
if I had not stopped I should have missed a short cut which I half
saw, half suspected, dimly zigzagging down the mountain into an
extraordinarily deep valley, and tending in the direction of Brig. It
would have been a pity to pass it by, for though I often thought
myself lost, I eventually caught sight of a town, lying far below,
which could be no other than the one for which I was bound. After
three hours of fast walking down from the Hospice, I plunged through
an old archway into the main street of Brig.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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