Away with me.
The clouds grow thicker--there--now lean on me.
Place your foot here--here, take this staff, and cling
A moment to that shrub--now, give me your hand.
* * * * *
The chalet will be gained within an hour.
_Manfred._
After surveying the desolate scene as accurately as the stormy state
of the atmosphere would permit, the younger of the travellers
observed, "In any other country, I should say the tempest begins to
abate; but what to expect in this land of desolation, it were rash to
decide. If the apostate spirit of Pilate be actually on the blast,
these lingering and more distant howls seem to intimate that he is
returning to his place of punishment. The pathway has sunk with the
ground on which it was traced--I can see part of it lying down in the
abyss, marking, as with a streak of clay, yonder mass of earth and
stone. But I think it possible, with your permission, my father, that
I could still scramble forward along the edge of the precipice, till I
come in sight of the habitation which the lad tells us of. If there be
actually such a one, there must be an access to it somewhere; and if I
cannot find the path out, I can at least make a signal to those who
dwell near the Vulture's Nest yonder, and obtain some friendly
guidance."
"I cannot consent to your incurring such a risk," said his father;
"let the lad go forward, if he can and will. He is mountain-bred, and
I will reward him richly."
But Antonio declined the proposal absolutely and decidedly. "I am
mountain-bred," he said, "but I am no chamois-hunter; and I have no
wings to transport me from cliff to cliff, like a raven--gold is not
worth life."
"And God forbid," said Seignor Philipson, "that I should tempt thee to
weigh them against each other!--Go on, then, my son--I follow thee."
"Under your favour, dearest sir, no," replied the young man; "it is
enough to endanger the life of one--and mine, far the most worthless,
should, by all the rules of wisdom as well as nature, be put first in
hazard."
"No, Arthur," replied his father, in a determined voice; "no, my
son--I have survived much, but I will not survive thee."
"I fear not for the issue, father, if you permit me to go alone; but I
cannot--dare not--undertake a task so perilous, if you persist in
attempting to share it, with no better aid than mine. While I
endeavoured to make a new advance, I should be ever looking back to
see how you might attain the station which I was about to leave--And
bethink you, dearest father, that if I fall, I fall an unregarded
thing, of as little moment as the stone or tree which has toppled
headlong down before me. But you--should your foot slip, or your hand
fail, bethink you what and how much must needs fall with you!"
"Thou art right, my child," said the father. "I still have that which
binds me to life, even though I were to lose in thee all that is dear
to me.--Our Lady and our Lady's Knight bless thee and prosper thee,
my child! Thy foot is young, thy hand is strong--thou hast not climbed
Plynlimmon in vain. Be bold, but be wary--remember there is a man who,
failing thee, has but one act of duty to bind him to the earth, and,
that discharged, will soon follow thee."
The young man accordingly prepared for his journey, and, stripping
himself of his cumbrous cloak, showed his well-proportioned limbs in a
jerkin of grey cloth, which sat close to his person. The father's
resolution gave way when his son turned round to bid him farewell. He
recalled his permission, and in a peremptory tone forbade him to
proceed. But, without listening to the prohibition, Arthur had
commenced his perilous adventure. Descending from the platform on
which he stood, by the boughs of an old ash-tree, which thrust itself
out of the cleft of a rock, the youth was enabled to gain, though at
great risk, a narrow ledge, the very brink of the precipice, by
creeping along which he hoped to pass on till he made himself heard or
seen from the habitation, of whose existence the guide had informed
him. His situation, as he pursued this bold purpose, appeared so
precarious, that even the hired attendant hardly dared to draw breath
as he gazed on him. The ledge which supported him seemed to grow so
narrow, as he passed along it, as to become altogether invisible,
while sometimes with his face to the precipice, sometimes looking
forward, sometimes glancing his eyes upward, but never venturing to
cast a look below, lest his brain should grow giddy at a sight so
appalling, he wound his way onward. To his father and the attendant,
who beheld his progress, it was less that of a man advancing in the
ordinary manner, and resting by aught connected with the firm earth,
than that of an insect crawling along the face of a perpendicular
wall, of whose progressive movement we are indeed sensible, but cannot
perceive the means of its support. And bitterly, most bitterly, did
the miserable parent now lament, that he had not persisted in his
purpose to encounter the baffling and even perilous measure of
retracing his steps to the habitation of the preceding night. He
should then, at least, have partaken the fate of the son of his love.
Meanwhile, the young man's spirits were strongly braced for the
performance of his perilous task. He laid a powerful restraint on his
imagination, which in general was sufficiently active, and refused to
listen, even for an instant, to any of the horrible insinuations by
which fancy augments actual danger. He endeavoured manfully to reduce
all around him to the scale of right reason, as the best support of
true courage. "This ledge of rock," he urged to himself, "is but
narrow, yet it has breadth enough to support me; these cliffs and
crevices in the surface are small and distant, but the one affords as
secure a resting-place to my feet, the other as available a grasp to
my hands, as if I stood on a platform of a cubit broad, and rested my
arm on a balustrade of marble. My safety, therefore, depends on
myself. If I move with decision, step firmly, and hold fast, what
signifies how near I am to the mouth of an abyss?"
Thus estimating the extent of his danger by the measure of sound sense
and reality, and supported by some degree of practice in such
exercise, the brave youth went forward on his awful journey, step by
step, winning his way with a caution and fortitude and presence of
mind which alone could have saved him from instant destruction. At
length he gained a point where a projecting rock formed the angle of
the precipice, so far as it had been visible to him from the platform.
This, therefore, was the critical point of his undertaking; but it was
also the most perilous part of it. The rock projected more than six
feet forward over the torrent, which he heard raging at the depth of a
hundred yards beneath, with a noise like subterranean thunder. He
examined the spot with the utmost care, and was led, by the existence
of shrubs, grass, and even stunted trees, to believe that this rock
marked the farthest extent of the slip or slide of earth, and that,
could he but turn round the angle of which it was the termination, he
might hope to attain the continuation of the path which had been so
strangely interrupted by this convulsion of nature. But the crag
jutted out so much as to afford no possibility of passing either under
or around it; and as it rose several feet above the position which
Arthur had attained, it was no easy matter to climb over it. This was,
however, the course which he chose, as the only mode of surmounting
what he hoped might prove the last obstacle to his voyage of
discovery. A projecting tree afforded him the means of raising and
swinging himself up to the top of the crag. But he had scarcely
planted himself on it, had scarcely a moment to congratulate himself,
on seeing, amid a wild chaos of cliffs and wood, the gloomy ruins of
Geierstein, with smoke arising, and indicating something like a human
habitation beside them, when, to his extreme terror, he felt the huge
cliff on which he stood tremble, stoop slowly forward, and gradually
sink from its position. Projecting as it was, and shaken as its
equilibrium had been by the recent earthquake, it lay now so
insecurely poised, that its balance was entirely destroyed, even by
the addition of the young man's weight.
Aroused by the imminence of the danger, Arthur, by an instinctive
attempt at self-preservation, drew cautiously back from the falling
crag into the tree by which he had ascended, and turned his head back
as if spell-bound, to watch the descent of the fatal rock from which
he had just retreated. It tottered for two or three seconds, as if
uncertain which way to fall, and, had it taken a sidelong direction,
must have dashed the adventurer from his place of refuge, or borne
both the tree and him headlong down into the river. After a moment of
horrible uncertainty, the power of gravitation determined a direct and
forward descent. Down went the huge fragment, which must have weighed
at least twenty tons, rending and splintering in its precipitate
course the trees and bushes which it encountered, and settling at
length in the channel of the torrent, with a din equal to the
discharge of a hundred pieces of artillery. The sound was re-echoed
from bank to bank, from precipice to precipice, with emulative
thunders; nor was the tumult silent till it rose into the region of
eternal snows, which, equally insensible to terrestrial sounds and
unfavourable to animal life, heard the roar in their majestic
solitude, but suffered it to die away without a responsive voice.
What, in the meanwhile, were the thoughts of the distracted father,
who saw the ponderous rock descend, but could not mark whether his
only son had borne it company in its dreadful fall! His first impulse
was to rush forward along the face of the precipice, which he had seen
Arthur so lately traverse; and when the lad Antonio withheld him, by
throwing his arms around him, he turned on the guide with the fury of
a bear which had been robbed of her cubs.
"Unhand me, base peasant," he exclaimed, "or thou diest on the spot!"
"Alas!" said the poor boy, dropping on his knees before him, "I too
have a father!"
The appeal went to the heart of the traveller, who instantly let the
lad go, and holding up his hands, and lifting his eyes towards heaven,
said, in accents of the deepest agony, mingled with devout
resignation, "_Fiat voluntas tua!_--he was my last, and loveliest, and
best beloved, and most worthy of my love; and yonder," he added,
"yonder over the glen soar the birds of prey, who are to feast on his
young blood.--But I will see him once more," exclaimed the miserable
parent, as the huge carrion vulture floated past him on the thick
air,--"I will see my Arthur once more, ere the wolf and the eagle
mangle him--I will see all of him that earth still holds. Detain me
not--but abide here, and watch me as I advance. If I fall, as is most
likely, I charge you to take the sealed papers, which you will find in
the valise, and carry them to the person to whom they are addressed,
with the least possible delay. There is money enough in the purse to
bury me with my poor boy, and to cause masses be said for our souls,
and yet leave you a rich recompense for your journey."
The honest Swiss lad, obtuse in his understanding, but kind and
faithful in his disposition, blubbered as his employer spoke, and,
afraid to offer further remonstrance or opposition, saw his temporary
master prepare himself to traverse the same fatal precipice over the
verge of which his ill-fated son had seemed to pass to the fate which,
with all the wildness of a parent's anguish, his father was hastening
to share.
Suddenly there was heard, from beyond the fatal angle from which the
mass of stone had been displaced by Arthur's rash ascent, the loud
hoarse sound of one of those huge horns made out of the spoils of the
urus, or wild bull, of Switzerland, which in ancient times announced
the terrors of the charge of these mountaineers, and, indeed, served
them in war instead of all musical instruments.
"Hold, sir, hold!" exclaimed the Grison. "Yonder is a signal from
Geierstein. Some one will presently come to our assistance, and show
us the safer way to seek for your son.--And look you--at yon green
bush that is glimmering through the mist, St. Antonio preserve me, as
I see a white cloth displayed there! it is just beyond the point where
the rock fell."
The father endeavoured to fix his eyes on the spot, but they filled so
fast with tears that they could not discern the object which the guide
pointed out.--"It is all in vain," he said, dashing the tears from his
eyes--"I shall never see more of him than his lifeless remains!"
"You will--you will see him in life!" said the Grison. "St. Antonio
wills it so--See, the white cloth waves again!"
"Some remnant of his garments," said the despairing father,--"some
wretched memorial of his fate.--No, my eyes see it not--I have beheld
the fall of my house--would that the vultures of these crags had
rather torn them from their sockets!"
"Yet look again," said the Swiss; "the cloth hangs not loose upon a
bough--I can see that it is raised on the end of a staff, and is
distinctly waved to and fro. Your son makes a signal that he is safe."
"And if it be so," said the traveller, clasping his hands together,
"blessed be the eyes that see it, and the tongue that tells it! If we
find my son, and find him alive, this day shall be a lucky one for
thee too."
"Nay," answered the lad, "I only ask that you will abide still, and
act by counsel, and I will hold myself quit for my services. Only, it
is not creditable to an honest lad to have people lose themselves by
their own wilfulness; for the blame, after all, is sure to fall upon
the guide, as if he could prevent old Pontius from shaking the mist
from his brow, or banks of earth from slipping down into the valley at
a time, or young harebrained gallants from walking upon precipices as
narrow as the edge of a knife, or madmen, whose grey hairs might make
them wiser, from drawing daggers like bravos in Lombardy."
Thus the guide ran on, and in that vein he might have long continued,
for Seignor Philipson heard him not. Each throb of his pulse, each
thought of his heart, was directed towards the object which the lad
referred to as a signal of his son's safety. He became at length
satisfied that the signal was actually waved by a human hand; and, as
eager in the glow of reviving hope as he had of late been under the
influence of desperate grief, he again prepared for the attempt of
advancing towards his son, and assisting him, if possible, in
regaining a place of safety. But the entreaties and reiterated
assurances of his guide induced him to pause.
"Are you fit," he said, "to go on the crag? Can you repeat your Credo
and Ave without missing or misplacing a word? for, without that, our
old men say your neck, had you a score of them, would be in
danger.--Is your eye clear, and your feet firm?--I trow the one
streams like a fountain, and the other shakes like the aspen which
overhangs it! Rest here till those arrive who are far more able to
give your son help than either you or I are. I judge, by the fashion
of his blowing, that yonder is the horn of the Goodman of Geierstein,
Arnold Biederman. He hath seen your son's danger, and is even now
providing for his safety and ours. There are cases in which the aid of
one stranger, well acquainted with the country, is worth that of three
brothers who know not the crags."
"But if yonder horn really sounded a signal," said the traveller, "how
chanced it that my son replied not?"
"And if he did so, as is most likely he did," rejoined the Grison,
"how should we have heard him? The bugle of Uri itself sounded amid
these horrible dins of water and tempest like the reed of a shepherd
boy; and how think you we should hear the holloa of a man?"
"Yet, methinks," said Seignor Philipson, "I do hear something amid
this roar of elements which is like a human voice--but it is not
Arthur's."
"I wot well, no," answered the Grison; "that is a woman's voice. The
maidens will converse with each other in that manner, from cliff to
cliff, through storm and tempest, were there a mile between."
"Now, Heaven be praised for this providential relief!" said Seignor
Philipson; "I trust we shall yet see this dreadful day safely ended. I
will holloa in answer."
He attempted to do so, but, inexperienced in the art of making himself
heard in such a country, he pitched his voice in the same key with
that of the roar of wave and wind; so that, even at twenty yards from
the place where he was speaking, it must have been totally
indistinguishable from that of the elemental war around them. The lad
smiled at his patron's ineffectual attempts, and then raised his voice
himself in a high, wild, and prolonged scream, which, while produced
with apparently much less effort than that of the Englishman, was
nevertheless a distinct sound, separated from others by the key to
which it was pitched, and was probably audible to a very considerable
distance. It was presently answered by distant cries of the same
nature, which gradually approached the platform, bringing renovated
hope to the anxious traveller.
If the distress of the father rendered his condition an object of deep
compassion, that of the son, at the same moment, was sufficiently
perilous. We have already stated, that Arthur Philipson had commenced
his precarious journey along the precipice with all the coolness,
resolution, and unshaken determination of mind which was most
essential to a task where all must depend upon firmness of nerve. But
the formidable accident which checked his onward progress was of a
character so dreadful as made him feel all the bitterness of a death
instant, horrible, and, as it seemed, inevitable. The solid rock had
trembled and rent beneath his footsteps, and although, by an effort
rather mechanical than voluntary, he had withdrawn himself from the
instant ruin attending its descent, he felt as if the better part of
him, his firmness of mind and strength of body, had been rent away
with the descending rock, as it fell thundering, with clouds of dust
and smoke, into the torrents and whirlpools of the vexed gulf beneath.
In fact, the seaman swept from the deck of a wrecked vessel, drenched
in the waves, and battered against the rocks on the shore, does not
differ more from the same mariner, when, at the commencement of the
gale, he stood upon the deck of his favourite ship, proud of her
strength and his own dexterity, than Arthur, when commencing his
journey, from the same Arthur, while clinging to the decayed trunk of
an old tree, from which, suspended between heaven and earth, he saw
the fall of the crag which he had so nearly accompanied. The effects
of his terror, indeed, were physical as well as moral, for a thousand
colours played before his eyes; he was attacked by a sick dizziness,
and deprived at once of the obedience of those limbs which had
hitherto served him so admirably; his arms and hands, as if no longer
at his own command, now clung to the branches of the tree, with a
cramp-like tenacity over which he seemed to possess no power, and now
trembled in a state of such complete nervous relaxation as led him to
fear that they were becoming unable to support him longer in his
position.
An incident, in itself trifling, added to the distress occasioned by
this alienation of his powers. All living things in the neighbourhood
had, as might be supposed, been startled by the tremendous fall to
which his progress had given occasion. Flights of owls, bats, and
other birds of darkness, compelled to betake themselves to the air,
had lost no time in returning into their bowers of ivy, or the harbour
afforded them by the rifts and holes of the neighbouring rocks. One of
this ill-omened flight chanced to be a lammer-geier, or Alpine
vulture, a bird larger and more voracious than the eagle himself, and
which Arthur had not been accustomed to see, or at least to look upon
closely. With the instinct of most birds of prey, it is the custom of
this creature, when gorged with food, to assume some station of
inaccessible security, and there remain stationary and motionless for
days together, till the work of digestion has been accomplished, and
activity returns with the pressure of appetite. Disturbed from such a
state of repose, one of these terrific birds had risen from the ravine
to which the species gives its name, and having circled unwillingly
round, with a ghastly scream and a flagging wing, it had sunk down
upon the pinnacle of a crag, not four yards from the tree in which
Arthur held his precarious station. Although still in some degree
stupefied by torpor, it seemed encouraged by the motionless state of
the young man to suppose him dead, or dying, and sat there and gazed
at him, without displaying any of that apprehension which the fiercest
animals usually entertain from the vicinity of man.
As Arthur, endeavouring to shake off the incapacitating effects of his
panic fear, raised his eyes to look gradually and cautiously around,
he encountered those of the voracious and obscene bird, whose head and
neck denuded of feathers, her eyes surrounded by an iris of an
orange-tawny colour, and a position more horizontal than erect,
distinguished her as much from the noble carriage and graceful
proportions of the eagle, as those of the lion place him in the ranks
of creation above the gaunt, ravenous, grisly, yet dastard wolf.
As if arrested by a charm, the eyes of young Philipson remained bent
on this ill-omened and ill-favoured bird, without his having the power
to remove them. The apprehension of dangers, ideal as well as real,
weighed upon his weakened mind, disabled as it was by the
circumstances of his situation. The near approach of a creature, not
more loathsome to the human race than averse to come within their
reach, seemed as ominous as it was unusual. Why did it gaze on him
with such glaring earnestness, projecting its disgusting form, as if
presently to alight upon his person? The foul bird, was she the demon
of the place to which her name referred? and did she come to exult
that an intruder on her haunts seemed involved amid their perils, with
little hope or chance of deliverance? Or was it a native vulture of
the rocks, whose sagacity foresaw that the rash traveller was soon
destined to become its victim? Could the creature, whose senses are
said to be so acute, argue from circumstances the stranger's
approaching death, and wait, like a raven or hooded crow by a dying
sheep, for the earliest opportunity to commence her ravenous banquet?
Was he doomed to feel its beak and talons before his heart's blood
should cease to beat? Had he already lost the dignity of humanity,
the awe which the being formed in the image of his Maker inspires into
all inferior creatures?
Apprehensions so painful served more than all that reason could
suggest to renew in some degree the elasticity of the young man's
mind. By waving his handkerchief, using, however, the greatest
precaution in his movements, he succeeded in scaring the vulture from
his vicinity. It rose from its resting-place, screaming harshly and
dolefully, and sailed on its expanded pinions to seek a place of more
undisturbed repose, while the adventurous traveller felt a sensible
pleasure at being relieved of its disgusting presence.
With more collected ideas, the young man, who could obtain, from his
position, a partial view of the platform he had left, endeavoured to
testify his safety to his father, by displaying, as high as he could,
the banner by which he had chased off the vulture. Like them, too, he
heard, but at a less distance, the burst of the great Swiss horn,
which seemed to announce some near succour. He replied by shouting and
waving his flag, to direct assistance to the spot where it was so much
required; and, recalling his faculties, which had almost deserted him,
he laboured mentally to recover hope, and with hope the means and
motive for exertion.
A faithful Catholic, he eagerly recommended himself in prayer to Our
Lady of Einsiedlen, and, making vows of propitiation, besought her
intercession, that he might be delivered from his dreadful condition.
"Or, gracious Lady!" he concluded his orison, "if it is my doom to
lose my life like a hunted fox amidst this savage wilderness of
tottering crags, restore at least my natural sense of patience and
courage, and let not one who has lived like a man, though a sinful
one, meet death like a timid hare!"
Having devoutly recommended himself to that Protectress, of whom the
legends of the Catholic Church form a picture so amiable, Arthur,
though every nerve still shook with his late agitation, and his heart
throbbed with a violence that threatened to suffocate him, turned his
thoughts and observation to the means of effecting his escape. But, as
he looked around him, he became more and more sensible how much he was
enervated by the bodily injuries and the mental agony which he had
sustained during his late peril. He could not, by any effort of which
he was capable, fix his giddy and bewildered eyes on the scene around
him;--they seemed to reel till the landscape danced along with them,
and a motley chaos of thickets and tall cliffs, which interposed
between him and the ruinous Castle of Geierstein, mixed and whirled
round in such confusion, that nothing, save the consciousness that
such an idea was the suggestion of partial insanity, prevented him
from throwing himself from the tree, as if to join the wild dance to
which his disturbed brain had given motion.
"Heaven be my protection!" said the unfortunate young man, closing his
eyes, in hopes, by abstracting himself from the terrors of his
situation, to compose his too active imagination, "my senses are
abandoning me!"
He became still more convinced that this was the case, when a female
voice, in a high-pitched but eminently musical accent, was heard at
no great distance, as if calling to him. He opened his eyes once
more, raised his head, and looked towards the place whence the sounds
seemed to come, though far from being certain that they existed saving
in his own disordered imagination. The vision which appeared had
almost confirmed him in the opinion that his mind was unsettled, and
his senses in no state to serve him accurately.
Upon the very summit of a pyramidical rock, that rose out of the depth
of the valley, was seen a female figure, so obscured by mist that only
the outline could be traced. The form, reflected against the sky,
appeared rather the undefined lineaments of a spirit than of a mortal
maiden; for her person seemed as light, and scarcely more opaque, than
the thin cloud that surrounded her pedestal. Arthur's first belief
was, that the Virgin had heard his vows, and had descended in person
to his rescue; and he was about to recite his Ave Maria, when the
voice again called to him with the singular shrill modulation of the
mountain halloo, by which the natives of the Alps can hold conference
with each other from one mountain ridge to another, across ravines of
great depth and width.
While he debated how to address this unexpected apparition, it
disappeared from the point which it at first occupied, and presently
after became again visible, perched on the cliff out of which
projected the tree in which Arthur had taken refuge. Her personal
appearance, as well as her dress, made it then apparent that she was a
maiden of these mountains, familiar with their dangerous paths. He saw
that a beautiful young woman stood before him, who regarded him with
a mixture of pity and wonder.
"Stranger," she at length said, "who are you, and whence come you?"
"I am a stranger, maiden, as you justly term me," answered the young
man, raising himself as well as he could. "I left Lucerne this
morning, with my father, and a guide. I parted with them not three
furlongs from hence. May it please you, gentle maiden, to warn them of
my safety, for I know my father will be in despair upon my account?"
"Willingly," said the maiden; "but I think my uncle, or some one of my
kinsmen, must have already found them, and will prove faithful guides.
Can I not aid you? Are you wounded? Are you hurt? We were alarmed by
the fall of a rock--ay, and yonder it lies, a mass of no ordinary
size."
As the Swiss maiden spoke thus, she approached so close to the verge
of the precipice, and looked with such indifference into the gulf,
that the sympathy which connects the actor and spectator upon such
occasions brought back the sickness and vertigo from which Arthur had
just recovered, and he sank back into his former more recumbent
posture, with something like a faint groan.
"You are then ill?" said the maiden, who observed him turn pale.
"Where and what is the harm you have received?"
"None, gentle maiden, saving some bruises of little import; but my
head turns, and my heart grows sick, when I see you so near the verge
of the cliff."
"Is that all?" replied the Swiss maiden. "Know, stranger, that I do
not stand on my uncle's hearth with more security than I have stood
upon precipices compared to which this is a child's leap. You too,
stranger, if, as I judge from the traces, you have come along the edge
of the precipice which the earth-slide hath laid bare, ought to be far
beyond such weakness, since surely you must be well entitled to call
yourself a cragsman."
"I might have called myself so half an hour since," answered Arthur;
"but I think I shall hardly venture to assume the name in future."
"Be not downcast," said his kind adviser, "for a passing qualm, which
will at times cloud the spirit and dazzle the eyesight of the bravest
and most experienced. Raise yourself upon the trunk of the tree, and
advance closer to the rock out of which it grows. Observe the place
well. It is easy for you, when you have attained the lower part of the
projecting stem, to gain by one bold step the solid rock upon which I
stand, after which there is no danger or difficulty worthy of mention
to a young man, whose limbs are whole, and whose courage is active."
"My limbs are indeed sound," replied the youth; "but I am ashamed to
think how much my courage is broken. Yet I will not disgrace the
interest you have taken in an unhappy wanderer, by listening longer to
the dastardly suggestions of a feeling which till to-day has been a
stranger to my bosom."
The maiden looked on him anxiously, and with much interest, as,
raising himself cautiously, and moving along the trunk of the tree,
which lay nearly horizontal from the rock, and seemed to bend as he
changed his posture, the youth at length stood upright, within what,
on level ground, had been but an extended stride to the cliff on which
the Swiss maiden stood. But instead of being a step to be taken on the
level and firm earth, it was one which must cross a dark abyss, at the
bottom of which a torrent surged and boiled with incredible fury.
Arthur's knees knocked against each other, his feet became of lead,
and seemed no longer at his command; and he experienced, in a stronger
degree than ever, that unnerving influence, which those who have been
overwhelmed by it in a situation of like peril never can forget, and
which others, happily strangers to its power, may have difficulty even
in comprehending.
The young woman discerned his emotion, and foresaw its probable
consequences. As the only mode in her power to restore his confidence,
she sprang lightly from the rock to the stem of the tree, on which she
alighted with the ease and security of a bird, and in the same instant
back to the cliff; and extending her hand to the stranger, "My arm,"
she said, "is but a slight balustrade; yet do but step forward with
resolution, and you will find it as secure as the battlement of
Berne." But shame now overcame terror so much, that Arthur, declining
assistance which he could not have accepted without feeling lowered in
his own eyes, took heart of grace, and successfully achieved the
formidable step which placed him upon the same cliff with his kind
assistant.
To seize her hand and raise it to his lips, in affectionate token of
gratitude and respect, was naturally the youth's first action; nor was
it possible for the maiden to have prevented him from doing so,
without assuming a degree of prudery foreign to her character, and
occasioning a ceremonious debate upon a matter of no great
consequence, where the scene of action was a rock scarce five feet
long by three in width, and which looked down upon a torrent roaring
some three hundred feet below.