Often, indeed, they are obliged to keep their dead with them over the winter till they can bring them to the valley for burial after the snow has melted. The great man of the village is the priest. The villagers regard him with veneration and he, after a protracted stay in the valley, usually becomes used to isolation, stays on not unwillingly, and then just goes on living there. At least since time immemorial no priest in the village has ever craved a change, none has been unworthy of his calling.

There are no highways in the valley, merely cart-roads with double wheel-tracks, along which the crops are brought home on one-horse carts. Accordingly, few strangers come to the valley; among these an occasional wanderer, a nature-lover who lives for a time in the prettily-painted upper room of the inn, enjoying the mountain-view; or possibly an artist who sketches in his portfolio the delicate church-spire and beautiful rocky peaks.

The village people thus constitute a separate world, they know one another by name and are familiar with all the grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ tales. All mourn when anyone dies; all know the name of the new-born; they speak a language which is different from that used in the plain; they have their quarrels and settle them; they help one another, and if anything unusual happens, come flocking together.

They are steadfast, ever adhering to the ancient ways. If a stone is dislodged from a wall, that very stone is put back; the new houses are built like the old ones; damaged roofs are mended with shingles just like those they replace. If the cows on a farm are brindled, the calves on that farm must always be brindled; the color never changes.

South of the village you see a snowy mountain with dazzling horn-shaped peaks, rising, as it seems, from the house-tops themselves, but actually quite far away. All year round, summer and winter, there it is with its jutting crags and white expanses, looking down upon the valley. As the most prominent feature of the landscape and ever before the eyes of the villagers, the mountain has been the inspiration of many a tale. There is not a man, young or old, in the village who has not something to tell about its peaks and crags, its caves and crevasses, its streams and torrents—either something that has happened to himself or that he has heard about from others. This mountain is the pride of the village, as though the people had made it themselves, and with due respect to their honesty we can’t swear to it that once in a while they would not fib for the honor and glory of their mountain. Besides being notable in itself, the mountain is actually profitable, since on the arrival of a party of mountain-climbers to make the ascent from the valley, the villagers serve as guides; and to have been a guide—had this or that experience, known this or that spot—is a distinction which affords anyone great satisfaction. When they sit together in the common room at the inn, they are always talking about their feats and strange adventures, never failing to mention what this or that traveler said and how much he had given for their labors. The mountain also sends down from its snowy flanks streams that feed a lake in the forest, from which a brook emerges and flows merrily through the valley, driving the saw-mill, the grist-mill, and small machinery of various kinds, providing cleanliness for the village and watering the cattle. The forest tracts afford timber and also break the force of the avalanches. Through subterranean channels and loose soil at these altitudes water filters and, coursing veinlike through the valley, comes to the surface in little fountains and springs from which the people drink. And as time and again they offer strangers this unrivalled, much extolled water, they never stop to think how useful it is, accepting it simply as something that has always been there.

With regard to the change of seasons on the mountain, in winter the two pinnacles called “horns” are snow white and on clear days stand out in the dusky atmosphere with blinding brilliance; all the alpine meadows at the base of the summits are white then, as well as their sloping shoulders; even the precipitous rock-faces or walls as the people call them, are coated with a white velvet nap of hoar-frost and glazed with ice-tissue, so the entire mass towers like an enchanted castle above the darkish weight of gray forest mantling the base. In summer as the sun and temperate winds melt the snow on the steep gradients, the horns soar up, as the mountain people say, black into the sky, their surface marked only by exquisite little flecks and snow-veins. These veins, however, are not really white but the delicate milky blue of the distant snow on the darker blue rocks. At higher levels in hot weather, the alpine meadows about the horns never lose their blanket of eternal snow and it shines down on the verdure in the valley; but on the lower levels the recent winter snowfall—a mere down—melts away, and iridescent blue-green tints appear in the glacier that, now bared, greets the people in the valley.

Ascent of the mountain is made from the valley. One follows in the southerly direction a smooth, well-made road that leads by a neck or “col” into another valley. A col is a mountain-range of moderate height, connecting two larger, more considerable, ranges; and following it, one passes between the ranges from one valley into another. The col which links the snow-mountain with the corresponding range opposite, is thickly studded with pines. At about the highest point of the road before it descends into the further valley, stands a little rustic memorial. One time a baker, carrying his basket over the col, was found dead at this spot. A picture of him and his basket with the pines about him, was painted on a tablet, fastened to a scarlet post, and erected to mark the scene of the tragedy. At this marker, one turns off the road and follows along the col instead of making one’s way straight down into the valley beyond. There is here an opening in the pines as if a road led into them and indeed during part of the year there is a path leading to the rustic memorial, by which timber is brought down and which afterwards disappears, overgrown by grass. Proceeding along this path which climbs gently, one comes at length to a clearing quite bare of trees, a barren heath with not so much as a bush, only scant heather, drought-inured mosses and small hardy plant-life.