But we stopped all that here in England by the statute
of Uses, and I must be getting back to the road before the dark
catches me.
As I was saying, I came to a gap in the hills, and there was there a
house or two called Gansbrunnen, and one of the houses was an inn.
Just by the inn the road turned away sharply up the valley; the very
last slope of the Jura, the last parallel ridge, lay straight before
me all solemn, dark, and wooded, and making a high feathery line
against the noon. To cross this there was but a vague path rather
misleading, and the name of the mountain was Weissenstein.
So before that last effort which should lead me over those thousands
of feet, and to nourish Instinct (which would be of use to me when I
got into that impenetrable wood), I turned into the inn for wine.
A very old woman having the appearance of a witch sat at a dark table
by the little criss-cross window of the dark room. She was crooning to
herself, and I made the sign of the evil eye and asked her in French
for wine; but French she did not understand. Catching, however, two
words which sounded like the English 'White' and 'Red', I said 'Yaw'
after the last and nodded, and she brought up a glass of exceedingly
good red wine which I drank in silence, she watching me uncannily.
Then I paid her with a five-franc piece, and she gave me a quantity of
small change rapidly, which, as I counted it, I found to contain one
Greek piece of fifty lepta very manifestly of lead. This I held up
angrily before her, and (not without courage, for it is hard to deal
with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse
which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his
now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian
twaddle of accents I intoned to her - and so left her astounded to
repentance or to shame.
Then I went out into the sunlight, and crossing over running water put
myself out of her power.
The wood went up darkly and the path branched here and there so that I
was soon uncertain of my way, but I followed generally what seemed to
me the most southerly course, and so came at last up steeply through a
dip or ravine that ended high on the crest of the ridge.
