Passing further away, towards Austria, travelling up the Isar, till the
stream becomes smaller and whiter and the air is colder, the full
glamour of the northern hills, which are so marvellously luminous and
gleaming with flowers, wanes and gives way to a darkness, a sense of
ominousness. Up there I saw another little Christ, who seemed the very
soul of the place. The road went beside the river, that was seething
with snowy ice-bubbles, under the rocks and the high, wolf-like
pine-trees, between the pinkish shoals. The air was cold and hard and
high, everything was cold and separate. And in a little glass case
beside the road sat a small, hewn Christ, the head resting on the hand;
and he meditates, half-wearily, doggedly, the eyebrows lifted in strange
abstraction, the elbow resting on the knee. Detached, he sits and dreams
and broods, wearing his little golden crown of thorns, and his little
cloak of red flannel that some peasant woman has stitched for him.
No doubt he still sits there, the small, blank-faced Christ in the cloak
of red flannel, dreaming, brooding, enduring, persisting.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25