THE ICE-MAIDEN.
THE walnuts and chestnut-trees, all hung with the green garlands of spring, spread from the bridge at St. Maurice to the margin of the Lake of Geneva along the Rhone, which with violent speed rushes from its source under the green glacier—the ice palace, where the Ice-Maiden lives, whence she flies on the wind to the highest snow-field, and there, in the strong sunlight, stretches herself on her drifting bed. And as she sits there she looks with far-seeing glance into the deepest valleys, where men, like ants on a sunlit stone, busily move about.
"Powerful Spirits, as the Children of the Sun call you!" said the Ice-Maiden, "you are creeping things! with a rolling snowball both you and your houses and towns are crushed and effaced!" And she raised her proud head higher, and looked about her and deep down with deathly eyes. But from the valley was heard a rumbling, blasting of the rocks; men were at work; roads and tunnels were being made for railways.
"They play like moles!" said she; "they are digging passages, therefore I hear sounds like musket-shots. When I move my castle the sound is louder than the rolling of thunder."
From the valley arose a smoke, which moved onward like a flickering veil; it was the flying plume from a locomotive, which was drawing a train on the recently opened railway, the winding serpent, whose joints are the carriages.
"They play at masters down below, the Powerful Spirits!" said the Ice-Maiden. "Yet the powers of nature are mightier!" and she laughed and sang, and the valleys resounded.
"Now there is an avalanche rolling!" said the men below.
But the Children of the Sun sang yet higher of human ideas, the powerful means which subdue the sea, remove mountains, fill up valleys; human ideas, they are the lords of the powers of nature. At the same moment there came over the snow-field, where the Ice-Maiden sat, a party of mountain climbers; they had bound themselves to one another with cords for greater security on the smooth plain of ice, near the deep precipices.
"Creeping things!" said she. "You the lords of nature!" and she turned herself away from them and looked mockingly down into the deep valley, where the railway train was rushing past.
"There they sit, these thinkers! they sit in their power! I see them all! One sits proud as a king, alone! there they sit in a cluster! there half of them are asleep! and when the steam dragon stops they get out, and go their way. The thinkers go out into the world!" And she laughed.
"There is an avalanche rolling again!" said those down below in the valley.
"It will not reach us!" said two people behind the steam dragon; "two souls with one thought," as they say. It was Rudy and Babette; the miller also was with them.
"As luggage!" said he. "I am with them as something necessary!"
"There sit those two!" said the Ice-Maiden.
"Many chamois have I crushed, millions of Alpine roses have I snapped and broken, not leaving the roots! I will blot them out! Thinkers! Powerful Spirits!" And she laughed.
"There's an avalanche rolling again!" said those down below in the valley.