He stood on a
chair in the sunshine, reaching up with a garland, whilst the
serving-woman stood below, talking loudly.
The valley here seemed wider, the great flanks of the mountains gave
place, the peaks above were further back. So one was happier. I was
pleased as I sat by the thin track of single flat stones that dropped
swiftly downhill.
At the bottom was a little town with a factory or quarry, or a foundry,
some place with long, smoking chimneys; which made me feel quite at home
among the mountains.
It is the hideous rawness of the world of men, the horrible, desolating
harshness of the advance of the industrial world upon the world of
nature, that is so painful. It looks as though the industrial spread of
mankind were a sort of dry disintegration advancing and advancing, a
process of dry disintegration. If only we could learn to take thought
for the whole world instead of for merely tiny bits of it.
I went through the little, hideous, crude factory-settlement in the high
valley, where the eternal snows gleamed, past the enormous
advertisements for chocolate and hotels, up the last steep slope of the
pass to where the tunnel begins.
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