Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/79

Rh rock began. To this point, which lay on our left, we came very close. Presently we again reached a light foot-bridge over a little mountain-stream, which flowed through a barren, trough-shaped valley to join the Rhone. After passing the glacier, neither on the right, nor on the left, nor before you, was there a tree to be seen: all was one desolate waste,—no rugged and prominent rocks, nothing but long smooth valleys, slightly inclining eminences, which now, in the snow,, which levelled all inequalities, presented to us their simple, unbroken surfaces. Turning now to the left, we ascended a mountain, sinking at every step deep in the snow. One of our guides had to go first, and, boldly treading down the snow, break the way by which we were to follow.

It was a strange sight, when, turning for a moment your attention from the road, you directed it to yourself and your fellow travellers. In the most desolate region of the world, in a boundless, monotonous wilderness of mountains enveloped in snow, where, for three leagues before and behind, you would not expect to meet a living soul, while on both sides you had the deep hollows of a web of mountains, you might see a line of men wending their way, treading each in the deep footsteps of the one before him, and where, in the whole of the wide expanse thus smoothed over, the eye could discern nothing but the track they left behind them. The hollows as we left them lay behind us gray and boundless in the mist. The changing clouds continually passed over the pale disk of the sun, and spread over the whole scene a perpetually moving veil. I am convinced that any one, who, while pursuing this route, allowed his imagination to gain the mastery, would, even in the absence of all immediate danger, fall a victim to his own apprehensions and fears. In reality, there is little or no risk of a fall here. The great danger is from the avalanches, when the snow