She’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel cold: suddenly noticing that she was shivering in her thin dress, looking down in surprise at the gooseflesh of her bare arms, she got up to pull a sweater out of her bag. Absorbed in her thoughts, she hadn’t looked out of the window for some time. Now she did so, and, to her astonishment, the mountain, which had always seemed the same distance away, on the horizon, were suddenly quite close. They seemed to have advanced to meet her with giant strides while she wasn’t looking, and were right upon her. She looked with amazement at the great dark wooded slopes, slanting up overhead, and felt a stir of excitement.
Her home country being almost all at sea level, she hadn’t seen snow mountains till she came to the south. At first they were no more than a part of her wonderful dream. But, later, when things began to go wrong, she found herself gazing at them for minutes together, watching them in a particular was. It got so that she never forgot the mountains for long. Not that she had any definite thoughts about them. They just seemed to come into her head suddenly, and then she would have to look. It comforted her, in the confused unhappy welter of her emotions, to see the mountains always tranquil, remote, in their lonely splendor; untouchable, serenely inviolate. It was an obscure comfort to her to know that man’s hectic world wasn’t the only one – that there were others, where her love turned into a chaotic fever-dream, in which she was tossing, hallucinated, frightened and miserable, she had longed to escape to the cold, austere, changeless beauty and peace of the snow.
So far she new nothing of the mountains, having only looked at their exterior from far away: now suddenly she wanted to know them, to see into their inmost heart. She became inpatient with the ghostly cold forest, that seemed to go on and on, interminable, on those lower slopes: sunless, lifeless, only the spectral grey rocks flitting past in the subaqueous gloom. The engine puffed stolidly upward, letting out a screech now and then. Otherwise, silence; no call of bird or animal in the forest; no voice in the train.
Anna Kavan, A scarcity of love
Only from that day on were the children really felt to belong to the village, and not to be outsiders. Thenceforth they were regarded as natives whom the people had brought back to themselves from the mountain.
Their mother Sanna was now a native of Gschaid too.
The children, however, can never forget the mountain, and earnestly fix their gaze upon it when in the garden, when as in times past the sun is out bright and warm, the linden diffuses its fragrance, the bees are humming, and the mountain looks down upon them as serene and blue as the sky above.
From ‘Rock Crystal’ by Adalbert Stifter.