I laughed, and waited. He came my way.
'Are you going over the Gothard?' I said.
'Yes,' he replied. 'Are you also?'
'Yes' I said. 'We will go together.'
So we set off, climbing a track up the heathy rocks.
He was a pale, freckled town youth from Basel, seventeen years old. He
was a clerk in a baggage-transport firm--Gondrand Freres, I believe. He
had a week's holiday, in which time he was going to make a big circular
walk, something like the Englishman's. But he was accustomed to this
mountain walking: he belonged to a Sportverein. Manfully he marched in
his thick hob-nailed boots, earnestly he scrambled up the rocks.
We were in the crest of the pass. Broad snow-patched slopes came down
from the pure sky; the defile was full of stones, all bare stones,
enormous ones as big as a house, and small ones, pebbles. Through these
the road wound in silence, through this upper, transcendent desolation,
wherein was only the sound of the stream. Sky and snow-patched slopes,
then the stony, rocky bed of the defile, full of morning sunshine: this
was all. We were crossing in silence from the northern world to
the southern.
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