You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Waidbruck (South Tyrol)
April 20, 1905
My dear ones
It works, Alex has cleaned my pen and until the roast and salad arrive I have time to describe the events of the day. The
white Traminer, by the way, is excellent, as R. will find out for himself in a few years.
Well, we went up to Dreikirchen in beautifully warm weather, although the sky was misty so that one couldn't see where the many snow-white mountains ended and the clouds began. You must imagine it like this: from Waidbruck, directly opposite the Trost-burg (one more castle belonging to a Kannitverstan 1 of Wolken-stein), you climb a hill about as high as the Leopoldsberg; 2 the road isn't much better, either; it winds up in steep hairpin bends to a height of about 1350 feet, and is so narrow that only a light little carriage can go up it. According to Herr Vonmetz 3 the drive is more of a task than a pleasure; what's more, the carriage can't hold more than two people, a mother and child, and this expedition costs three florins fifty-which in our case would come to four times seven kronen. This time of course it didn't cost anything because we went up on foot. It was pretty warm, vines grow on lovely terraces on the mountain, which proves that it is a warm climate. The first climb of the season is not easy, but the new shoes proved a great success, I feel so at home in them I might have been born in them. So long as the people in the Führichgasse sell shoes like this, they may so far as I am concerned stick their tongues out at their customers before and after the deal.-So we went on climbing and stopped after about forty-five minutes in the shade of a few particularly beautiful forget-me-nots, until we felt rested. After another forty-five minutes we came to a village, St. Barbian, and here the comparison with the Leopoldsberg comes to an end. Then we continued up a road paved with stones, quite steep and slanting, through a beautiful forest which had the one drawback of never coming to an end. Here we were o