'Why,' said I, 'that is only just and proper, that the Jewish families
from beyond the frontier should have local Christian people to wait on
them and do their bidding. But what I was going to say was that so
very few Jews seem to me an insufficient fuel to fire the
anti-Semites. How does their opinion flourish?'
'In this way,' he answered. 'The Jews, you see, ridicule our young men
for holding such superstitions as the Catholic. Our young men, thus
brought to book and made to feel irrational, admit the justice of the
ridicule, but nourish a hatred secretly for those who have exposed
their folly. Therefore they feel a standing grudge against the Jews.'
When he had given me this singular analysis of that part of the
politics of the mountains, he added, after a short silence, the
following remarkable phrase -
'For my part I am a liberal, and would have each go his own way: the
Catholic to his Mass, the Jew to his Sacrifice.'
I then rose from my meal, saluted him, and went musing up the valley
road, pondering upon what it could be that the Jews sacrificed in this
remote borough, but I could not for the life of me imagine what it
was, though I have had a great many Jews among my friends.
I was now arrived at the head of this lovely vale, at the sources of
the river Moselle and the base of the great mountain the Ballon
d'Alsace, which closes it in like a wall at the end of a lane. For
some miles past the hills had grown higher and higher upon either
side, the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now
stood up before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine
that forbid a passage south. Up through these the main road has been
pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very
top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is
impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of
Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a mountain
with spurs like a star, and where mountains of this kind block the end
of main valleys it becomes necessary for the road leading up and out
of the valley to go over their highest point, since any other road
over the passes or shoulders would involve a second climb to reach the
country beyond. The reason of this, my little map here, where the dark
stands for the valley and the light for the high places, will show
better than a long description. Not that this map is of the Ballon
d'Alsace in particular, but only of the type of hill I mean.
Since, in crossing a range, it is usually possible to find a low point
suitable for surmounting it, such summit roads are rare, but when one
does get them they are the finest travel in the world, for they
furnish at one point (that is, at the summit) what ordinary roads
going through passes can never give you: a moment of domination. From
their climax you look over the whole world, and you feel your journey
to be adventurous and your advance to have taken some great definite
step from one province and people to another.
I would not be bound by the exaggerated zig-zags of the road, which
had been built for artillery, and rose at an easy slope. I went along
the bed of the dell before me and took the forest by a little path
that led straight upward, and when the path failed, my way was marked
by the wire of the telegraph that crosses to Belfort. As I rose I saw
the forest before me grow grander. The pine branches came down from
the trunks with a greater burden and majesty in their sway, the trees
took on an appearance of solemnity, and the whole rank that faced
me - for here the woods come to an even line and stand like an army
arrested upon a downward march - seemed something unusual and
gigantic. Nothing more helped this impression of awe than the extreme
darkness beneath those aged growths, and the change in the sky that
introduced my entry into the silence and perfume of so vast a temple.
Great clouds, so charged with rain that you would have thought them
lower than the hills (and yet just missing their tops), came covering
me like a tumbled roof and gathered all around; the heat of the day
waned suddenly in their shade: it seemed suddenly as though summer was
over or as though the mountains demanded an uncertain summer of their
own, and shot the sunshine with the chill of their heights. A little
wind ran along the grass and died again. As I gained the darkness of
the first trees, rain was falling.
The silence of the interior wood was enhanced by a bare drip of water
from the boughs that stood out straight and tangled I know not how far
above me. Its gloom was rendered more tremendous by the half-light
and lowering of the sky which the ceiling of branches concealed.
Height, stillness, and a sort of expectancy controlled the memories of
the place, and I passed silently and lightly between the high columns
of the trees from night (as it seemed) through a kind of twilight
forward to a near night beyond. On every side the perspective of these
bare innumerable shafts, each standing apart in order, purple and
fragrant, merged into recesses of distance where all light
disappeared, yet as I advanced the slight gloaming still surrounded
me, as did the stillness framed in the drip of water, and beneath my
feet was the level carpet of the pine needles deadening and making
distant every tiny noise.
