rolled on away, away to the sea. Straggling, haphazard little villages
ledged on the slope, high up, beside their wet, green, hanging meadows,
with pine trees behind and the valley bottom far below, and rocks right
above, on both sides, seemed like little temporary squattings of outcast
people. It seemed impossible that they should persist there, with great
shadows wielded over them, like a menace, and gleams of brief sunshine,
like a window. There was a sense of momentariness and expectation. It
seemed as though some dramatic upheaval must take place, the mountains
fall down into their own shadows. The valley beds were like deep graves,
the sides of the mountains like the collapsing walls of a grave. The
very mountain-tops above, bright with transcendent snow, seemed like
death, eternal death.
There, it seemed, in the glamorous snow, was the source of death, which
fell down in great waves of shadow and rock, rushing to the level earth.
And all the people of the mountains, on the slopes, in the valleys,
seemed to live upon this great, rushing wave of death, of breaking-down,
of destruction.
The very pure source of breaking-down, decomposition, the very quick of
cold death, is the snowy mountain-peak above. There, eternally, goes on
the white foregathering of the crystals, out of the deathly cold of the
heavens; this is the static nucleus where death meets life in its
elementality. And thence, from their white, radiant nucleus of death in
life, flows the great flux downwards, towards life and warmth. And we
below, we cannot think of the flux upwards, that flows from the
needle-point of snow to the unutterable cold and death.
The people under the mountains, they seem to live in the flux of death,
the last, strange, overshadowed units of life. Big shadows wave over
them, there is the eternal noise of water falling icily downwards from
the source of death overhead.
And the people under the shadows, dwelling in the tang of snow and the
noise of icy water, seem dark, almost sordid, brutal. There is no
flowering or coming to flower, only this persistence, in the ice-touched
air, of reproductive life.
But it is difficult to get a sense of a native population. Everywhere
are the hotels and the foreigners, the parasitism. Yet there is, unseen,
this overshadowed, overhung, sordid mountain population, ledged on the
slopes and in the crevices. In the wider valleys there is still a sense
of cowering among the people. But they catch a new tone from their
contact with the foreigners. And in the towns are nothing but
tradespeople.
So I climbed slowly up, for a whole day, first along the highroad,
sometimes above and sometimes below the twisting, serpentine railway,
then afterwards along a path on the side of the hill--a path that went
through the crew-yards of isolated farms and even through the garden of
a village priest. The priest was decorating an archway. He stood on a
chair in the sunshine, reaching up with a garland, whilst the
serving-woman stood below, talking loudly.
The valley here seemed wider, the great flanks of the mountains gave
place, the peaks above were further back. So one was happier. I was
pleased as I sat by the thin track of single flat stones that dropped
swiftly downhill.
At the bottom was a little town with a factory or quarry, or a foundry,
some place with long, smoking chimneys; which made me feel quite at home
among the mountains.
It is the hideous rawness of the world of men, the horrible, desolating
harshness of the advance of the industrial world upon the world of
nature, that is so painful. It looks as though the industrial spread of
mankind were a sort of dry disintegration advancing and advancing, a
process of dry disintegration. If only we could learn to take thought
for the whole world instead of for merely tiny bits of it.
I went through the little, hideous, crude factory-settlement in the high
valley, where the eternal snows gleamed, past the enormous
advertisements for chocolate and hotels, up the last steep slope of the
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