Some nights, even in Davos, are spent, even by an invalid, in bed.
A leaflet, therefore, of 'Sleep-chasings' may not inappropriately
be flung, as envoy to so many wanderings on foot and sledge upon the
winter snows.
The first is a confused medley of things familiar and things strange.
I have been dreaming of far-away old German towns, with gabled houses
deep in snow; dreaming of châlets in forgotten Alpine glens, where
wood-cutters come plunging into sleepy light from gloom, and sinking
down beside the stove to shake the drift from their rough shoulders;
dreaming of vast veils of icicles upon the gaunt black rocks in places
where no foot of man will pass, and where the snow is weaving eyebrows
over the ledges of grey whirlwind-beaten precipices; dreaming
of Venice, forlorn beneath the windy drip of rain, the gas lamps
flickering on the swimming piazzetta, the barche idle, the gondolier
wrapped in his thread-bare cloak, alone; dreaming of Apennines, with
world-old cities, brown, above the brown sea of dead chestnut boughs;
dreaming of stormy tides, and watchers aloft in lighthouses when day
is finished; dreaming of dead men and women and dead children in the
earth, far down beneath the snow-drifts, six feet deep. And then
I lift my face, awaking, from my pillow; the pallid moon is on the
valley, and the room is filled with spectral light.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is a hospice in an unfrequented
pass, between sad peaks, beside a little black lake, overdrifted with
soft snow. I pass into the house-room, gliding silently. An old man
and an old woman are nodding, bowed in deepest slumber, by the stove.
A young man plays the zither on a table. He lifts his head, still
modulating with his fingers on the strings. He looks right through me
with wide anxious eyes. He does not see me, but sees Italy, I know,
and some one wandering on a sandy shore.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is S. Stephen's Church in Wien.
Inside, the lamps are burning dimly in the choir. There is fog in the
aisles; but through the sleepy air and over the red candles flies a
wild soprano's voice, a boy's soul in its singing sent to heaven.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. From the mufflers in which his
father, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across
the heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half
asleep. His father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt,
kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the
glasses on the table.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. I am on the parapet of a huge
circular tower, hollow like a well, and pierced with windows at
irregular intervals. The parapet is broad, and slabbed with red
Verona marble. Around me are athletic men, all naked, in the strangest
attitudes of studied rest, down-gazing, as I do, into the depths
below. There comes a confused murmur of voices, and the tower is
threaded and rethreaded with great cables. Up these there climb to us
a crowd of young men, clinging to the ropes and flinging their bodies
sideways on aërial trapezes. My heart trembles with keen joy and
terror. For nowhere else could plastic forms be seen more beautiful,
and nowhere else is peril more apparent. Leaning my chin upon the
utmost verge, I wait. I watch one youth, who smiles and soars to me;
and when his face is almost touching mine, he speaks, but what he says
I know not.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. The whole world rocks to its
foundations. The mountain summits that I know are shaken. They bow
their bristling crests. They are falling, falling on us, and the earth
is riven. I wake in terror, shouting: INSOLITIS TREMUERUNT MOTIBUS
ALPES! An earthquake, slight but real, has stirred the ever-wakeful
Vesta of the brain to this Virgilian quotation.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. Once more at night I sledge alone
upon the Klosters road. It is the point where the woods close over it
and moonlight may not pierce the boughs. There come shrill cries of
many voices from behind, and rushings that pass by and vanish. Then
on their sledges I behold the phantoms of the dead who died in Davos,
longing for their homes; and each flies past me, shrieking in the
still cold air; and phosphorescent like long meteors, the pageant
turns the windings of the road below and disappears.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is the top of some high
mountain, where the crags are cruelly tortured and cast in enormous
splinters on the ledges of cliffs grey with old-world ice. A ravine,
opening at my feet, plunges down immeasurably to a dim and distant
sea. Above me soars a precipice embossed with a gigantic ice-bound
shape. As I gaze thereon, I find the lineaments and limbs of a Titanic
man chained and nailed to the rock. His beard has grown for centuries,
and flowed this way and that, adown his breast and over to the stone
on either side; and the whole of him is covered with a greenish ice,
ancient beyond the memory of man. 'This is Prometheus,' I whisper to
myself, 'and I am alone on Caucasus.'
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