at covered all the
tops of the hills and that made a roof over the valley, began to drop
down a fine rain; and, as they sing in church on Christmas Eve, 'the
heavens sent down their dews upon a just man'. But that was written in
Palestine, where rain is a rare blessing; there and then in the cold
evening they would have done better to have warmed the righteous.
There is no controlling them; they mean well, but they bungle
terribly.

The road stopped being a road, and became like a Californian trail. I
approached enormous gates in the hills, high, precipitous, and narrow.
The mist rolled over them, hiding their summits and making them seem
infinitely lifted up and reaching endlessly into the thick sky; the
straight, tenuous lines of the rain made them seem narrower still.
Just as I neared them, hobbling, I met a man driving two cows, and
said to him the word, 'Guest-house?' to which he said 'Yaw!' and
pointed out a clump of trees to me just under the precipice and right
in the gates I speak of. So I went there over an old bridge, and found
a wooden house and went in.

It was a house which one entered without ceremony. The door was open,
and one walked straight into a great room. There sat three men playing
at cards. I saluted them loudly in French, English, and Latin, but
they did not understand me, and what seemed remarkable in an hotel
(for it was an hotel rather than an inn), no one in the house
understood me--neither the servants nor any one; but the servants did
not laugh at me as had the poor people near Burgdorf, they only stood
round me looking at me patiently in wonder as cows do at trains. Then
they brought me food, and as I did not know the names of the different
kinds of food, I had to eat what they chose; and the angel of that
valley protected me from boiled mutton. I knew, however, the word
Wein, which is the same in all languages, and so drank a quart of it
consciously and of a set purpose. Then I slept, and next morning at
dawn I rose up, put on my thin, wet linen clothes, and went
downstairs. No one was about. I looked around for something to fill my
sack. I picked up a great hunk of bread from the dining-room table,
and went out shivering into the cold drizzle that was still falling
from a shrouded sky. Before me, a great forbidding wall, growing
blacker as it went upwards and ending in a level line of mist, stood
the Brienzer Grat.

To understand what I next had to do it is necessary to look back a