Naturally the money equivalent to the Hamburg deposit, promised on Saturday night, was not ready, and there was a delay while it was fetched. During this we talked to one of the German guards. He said that he had been in prison for three-and-a-half years at Dorchester. It was a source of tremendous pleasure to him to talk about it. He had had to work; the English were good fighters in the trenches; it was all over now, and must never happen again. He spoke not a word of English. The Austrian sentries wear khaki, the Germans bottle-green.
We passed at first through gigantic mountains. The road wound up their pine-covered declivities, until it was impossible to look over the side of the car without feeling dizzy. The colours were attractive, though not beautiful; very rich green grass fields, usually perpendicular, on which could be seen men hanging by one hand and reaping with the other; then the pinewoods, a deeper, blacker green; and at the top, great white faces of rock stretching up into the blue sky, very little of which was visible. Some of the summits were snow-covered.
The fact that this was the Tyrol was emphasised by a special local customs barrier, which charged a pound to let Diana enter the province. The delay enabled us to have a drink of soda water.
We reached Innsbruck as it was growing misty. The town lies at the foot of enormous mountains. It is uninteresting and almost squalid, catering for native as much as foreign tourists. It has the same atmosphere of bustling trippers as Keswick, the centre of the English mountain district.
The hotel, the Tyrolerhof, smelt strongly of rice pudding, and was adorned with clocks under glass shades. After a long, late dinner, we were sitting half asleep in the reading-room, when it was invaded by some forty American women, each one with a voice like a surgical knife, accompanied by two men and a boy. While I was reaching for my spectacles which were on the table, a member of the party neatly slipped herself in between my upraised knees and the seat of my armchair. She was middle-aged with a strong, efficient face, and had had, I hope, an unhappy married life. She wore a toque adorned with flattened pansies. The men proceeded to make speeches, setting forth the course of action for the morrow, like Roman generals ‘exhorting’ their troops. As the ceremony continued, we laughed so much that we had to retire. A woman had sat next to us at dinner in a dress of cheap, brown tussore, printed with green and yellow boxes in perspective, so that she might have been covered with angular warts. These danced before my eyes long into the night.
THE DAY OF OUR DEPARTURE from Innsbruck was to prove the most harassing twelve hours of the whole tour. It was only the persistence of David, who argued without ceasing in French and German from twelve o’clock midday until eight at night, that prevented the complete collapse of all our plans.
An hour’s driving brought us to the Italian frontier. The road ascended the mountains in a series of alarming bends, each of which disclosed a drop of five hundred to a thousand feet as we skidded round the outside edge. However, we reached the Brenner Pass, four thousand feet up, without changing gear. Here it was as pleasantly cool as Innsbruck had been hot and dusty. Earlier in the morning I had visited the cathedral and purchased a belt. Unfortunately this was incapable of refined adjustment, and it threatened either to cut me in half or let my trousers drop to the knee.
The Austrian barrier was passed with little difficulty. We drove brightly across the 100 yards of no-man’s land and stopped before the Italian. Here was a great to-do.
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