I sleep, and change my dreaming.  I am on the parapet of a huge circular tower, hollow like a well, and pierced with windows at irregular intervals.  The parapet is broad, and slabbed with red Verona marble.  Around me are athletic men, all naked, in the strangest attitudes of studied rest, down-gazing, as I do, into the depths below.  There comes a confused murmur of voices, and the tower is threaded and rethreaded with great cables.  Up these there climb to us a crowd of young men, clinging to the ropes and flinging their bodies sideways on aerial trapezes.  My heart trembles with keen joy and terror.  For nowhere else could plastic forms be seen more beautiful, and nowhere else is peril more apparent.  Leaning my chin upon the utmost verge, I wait.  I watch one youth, who smiles and soars to me; and when his face is almost touching mine, he speaks, but what he says I know not.

I sleep, and change my dreaming.  The whole world rocks to its foundations.  The mountain summits that I know are shaken.  They bow their bristling crests.  They are falling, falling on us, and the earth is riven.  I wake in terror, shouting:  INSOLITIS TREMUERUNT MOTIBUS ALPES!  An earthquake, slight but real, has stirred the ever-wakeful Vesta of the brain to this Virgilian quotation.

I sleep, and change my dreaming.  Once more at night I sledge alone upon the Klosters road.  It is the point where the woods close over it and moonlight may not pierce the boughs.  There come shrill cries of many voices from behind, and rushings that pass by and vanish.  Then on their sledges I behold the phantoms of the dead who died in Davos, longing for their homes; and each flies past me, shrieking in the still cold air; and phosphorescent like long meteors, the pageant turns the windings of the road below and disappears.

I sleep, and change my dreaming.  This is the top of some high mountain, where the crags are cruelly tortured and cast in enormous splinters on the ledges of cliffs grey with old-world ice.  A ravine, opening at my feet, plunges down immeasurably to a dim and distant sea.  Above me soars a precipice embossed with a gigantic ice-bound shape.  As I gaze thereon, I find the lineaments and limbs of a Titanic man chained and nailed to the rock.  His beard has grown for centuries, and flowed this way and that, adown his breast and over to the stone on either side; and the whole of him is covered with a greenish ice, ancient beyond the memory of man.  ‘This is Prometheus,’ I whisper to myself, ‘and I am alone on Caucasus.’

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BACCHUS IN GRAUBUeNDEN

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