A great deal of the pleasure of life lies in bringing together things
which have no connection. That is the secret of humour—at least so we
are told by the philosophers who explain the jests that other men have
made—and in regard to travel, I am quite sure that it must be illogical
in order to be entertaining. The more contrasts it contains, the better.
Perhaps it was some philosophical reflection of this kind that brought
me to the resolution, on a certain summer day, to make a little journey,
as straight as possible, from the sea-level streets of Venice to the
lonely, lofty summit of a Tyrolese mountain, called, for no earthly
reason that I can discover, the Gross-Venediger.
But apart from the philosophy of the matter, which I must confess to
passing over very superficially at the time, there were other and more
cogent reasons for wanting to go from Venice to the Big Venetian. It was
the first of July, and the city on the sea was becoming tepid. A
slumbrous haze brooded over canals and palaces and churches. It was
difficult to keep one’s conscience awake to Baedeker and a sense of
moral obligation; Ruskin was impossible, and a picture-gallery was a
penance. We floated lazily from one place to another, and decided that,
after all, it was too warm to go in. The cries of the gondoliers, at the
canal corners, grew more and more monotonous and dreamy. There was
danger of our falling fast asleep and having to pay by the hour for a
day’s repose in a gondola. If it grew much warmer, we might be compelled
to stay until the following winter in order to recover energy enough to
get away. All the signs of the times pointed northward, to the
mountains, where we should see glaciers and snow-fields, and pick
Alpenrosen, and drink goat’s milk fresh from the real goat.