Big shadows wave over
them, there is the eternal noise of water falling icily downwards from
the source of death overhead.
And the people under the shadows, dwelling in the tang of snow and the
noise of icy water, seem dark, almost sordid, brutal. There is no
flowering or coming to flower, only this persistence, in the ice-touched
air, of reproductive life.
But it is difficult to get a sense of a native population. Everywhere
are the hotels and the foreigners, the parasitism. Yet there is, unseen,
this overshadowed, overhung, sordid mountain population, ledged on the
slopes and in the crevices. In the wider valleys there is still a sense
of cowering among the people. But they catch a new tone from their
contact with the foreigners. And in the towns are nothing but
tradespeople.
So I climbed slowly up, for a whole day, first along the highroad,
sometimes above and sometimes below the twisting, serpentine railway,
then afterwards along a path on the side of the hill--a path that went
through the crew-yards of isolated farms and even through the garden of
a village priest. The priest was decorating an archway.
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