Fairy Tales

fortifying mountain air. The drink that only God can make, though people can read the recipe. It says: the fresh scent of mountain herbs and the valley’s mint and thyme. The hanging clouds absorb everything that’s heavy and then the winds card them in the spruce forests. The fragrances’ spirits become air, light and fresh, always fresher. This was Rudy’s morning drink.

The sunbeams—her daughters bringing blessings—kissed his cheeks and Vertigo lurked nearby, but didn’t dare approach. The swallows from grandfather’s house, where there were never less than seven nests, flew up to him and the goats, singing: “We and you, and you and we.” They brought greetings from home, even from the two hens, the only birds in the place, but Rudy never had anything to do with them.

As young as he was, he had traveled pretty far for such a little fellow. He had been born in the upper part of the canton of Valais² and carried here from over the mountains. Recently he had walked to the near-by Staubbach3 that waves in the air like a silver ribbon in front of the snow-covered blinding white mountain, The Jungfrau.4 And he had been on the big glacier at Grindelwald, but that was a sad story. His mother had died there, and there, said his grandfather, “little Rudy’s childhood joy had been blown away.” His mother had written that when the boy was less than a year old, he laughed more than he cried, “but after he came out of the ice crevice his disposition had entirely changed.” Grandfather didn’t talk much about it, but everyone on the mountain knew about it.

Rudy’s father had been a postman, and the big dog in the living room had always followed him on the trip over the Simplon pass, down to Lake Geneva.⁵ Rudy’s relatives on his father’s side still lived in the canton of Valais in the Rhone valley. Rudy’s uncle was an excellent goat-antelope hunter and a well-known guide. Rudy was only a year old when he lost his father, and his mother wanted to return then with her little child to her family in Berner-Oberland. Her father lived a few hours from Grindelwald. He was a wood carver and earned enough from that to support himself. So in the month of June she walked, carrying her little child, homewards over the Gemmi pass towards Grindelwald in the company of two antelope hunters. They had almost finished their journey and had already gone through the high pass and reached the snow fields above her home town. They could see the familiar wooden houses spread out in the valley below, but they still had to cross the difficult upper part of one of the big glaciers. The snow had freshly fallen and hid a cleft that was deeper than a person’s height, although it did not reach all the way to the bottom, where the water roared. All at once the young woman, carrying her child, slipped, sank, and disappeared without a cry or a sigh. But they heard the little child crying. It took over an hour for the two guides to get a rope and poles from the closest house to try to help. After tremendous difficulty, two apparent corpses were brought out from the ice cleft. They used all the means they could to resuscitate them and succeeded in saving the child, but not the mother. And so the old grandfather ended up with a grandson in the house instead of a daughter, the little one, who laughed more than he cried. But now he had been broken of that habit. The change had most likely happened while he was in the cleft, in that cold strange world of ice, where the souls of the condemned are locked until the day of judgment, as the dwellers in the Swiss mountains believe.

The glacier lies not unlike roaring water, frozen to ice and pressed into green blocks of glass, one huge piece of ice toppled on the other. In the depths below roars the furious stream of melted snow and ice. Deep caves and mighty clefts rise in there, making a wonderful ice palace, which the Ice Maiden, the queen of the glacier, has made her dwelling. Half child of the air and half mistress of the mighty rivers, she kills and crushes, and can rise with the spring of a goat-antelope to the highest peak of the mountains where the most daring mountain climbers have to chop footholds for themselves in the ice. She sails on the thinnest spruce twig down the rushing river and leaps from cliff to cliff surrounded by her long, snow-white hair, wearing her blue-green dress that glimmers like the water of the deep Swiss lakes.

“To crush, hold tight! Mine is the power!” she says. “They stole a lovely boy from me, a boy I had kissed, but not to death. He’s amongst people again. He guards the goats on the mountain and climbs higher, always higher, away from the others, but not from me! He is mine and I shall fetch him.”

And she asked Vertigo to tend to her errands. It was too muggy in the summertime for the Ice Maiden in the greenery where the mint thrives. And Vertigo rose and bowed. Here came one and then three more. Vertigo has many sisters, a whole flock of them, and the Ice Maiden chose the strongest of the many who ruled both indoors and out. They sit on stair banisters and on tower railings. They run like squirrels along the mountain edge, leap out treading air like swimmers treading water, and lure their victims out and down into the abyss. Vertigo and the Ice Maiden both grasp after people like the octopus grasps anything that moves around it. Vertigo was to seize Rudy.

“Seize him who can!” said Vertigo. “I’m not able to do it! The cat, that wretch, has taught him her tricks. The child has a power that pushes me away. I can’t reach the little fellow when he hangs on the branches over the chasm where I’d like to tickle the soles of his feet, or give him a ducking in the air. I can’t do it.”

“We could do it!” said the Ice Maiden. “You or me! Me!”

“No, no!” A response came to them like a mountain echo of church bells, but it was a song and words in a fused chorus from other spirits of nature: the gentle, good and loving daughters of the sunbeams. They pitch camp each evening in a wreath around the mountain tops. They spread out their rosy wings that blush redder and redder as the sun sinks. The high Alps glow and people call it the Alpenglow. When the sun has set, they pull into the mountain tops, in the white snow and sleep there until the sun rises. Then they come out again. They especially love flowers, butterflies, and human beings, and among the human beings, they were particularly fond of Rudy.

“You won’t catch him! You won’t catch him!” they cried.

“I have caught and kept bigger and stronger people than him!” said the Ice Maiden.

Then the sun’s daughters sang a song about the wanderer whom the whirlwind tore the cloak from and carried away in a mad rush. The wind took his covering, but not the man. “You children of nature’s force can seize but not hold him. He is stronger. He is more spiritual even than we are. He can rise higher even than the sun, our mother. He knows the magic words to bind wind and water so that they must serve and obey him. You release the heavy oppressive weight, and he lifts himself higher!”

Such was the lovely song of the bell-like choir.

And every morning the rays of the sun shone through the only small window in Grandfather’s house and fell on the quiet child. The sunshine’s daughters kissed him. They wanted to thaw out, warm up, and destroy the ice kisses that the glacier’s royal maiden had given him when he lay in the deep ice cleft in his dead mother’s lap and was saved as if by a miracle.

2. JOURNEY TO A NEW HOME

When Rudy was eight years old, his uncle in the Rhone valley, on the other side of the mountains, wanted to take the boy to live with him. He could be more easily educated there and would have more opportunities. Grandfather realized this too, and let him go.