A Tramp Abroad - The Original Classic Edition. Twain Mark

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СКАЧАТЬ the black carpet. In New York these performances would have gathered a mighty crowd of curious and intensely interested spectators; but here it only captured an audience of half a dozen little boys who stood in a row across the pavement, some with their school-knapsacks on their backs and their hands in their pockets, others with arms full of bundles, and all absorbed in the show. Occasionally one of them skipped irreverently over the carpet and took up a position on the other side.

       This always visibly annoyed the PORTIER.

       Now came a waiting interval. The landlord, in plain clothes, and bareheaded, placed himself on the bottom marble step, abreast the PORTIER, who stood on the other end of the same steps; six or eight waiters, gloved, bareheaded, and wearing their whitest linen, their whitest cravats, and their finest swallow-tails, grouped themselves

       about these chiefs, but leaving the carpetway clear. Nobody moved or spoke any more but only waited.

       In a short time the shrill piping of a coming train was heard, and immediately groups of people began to gather in the street. Two or three open carriages arrived, and deposited some maids of honor and some male

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       officials at the hotel. Presently another open carriage brought the

       Grand Duke of Baden, a stately man in uniform, who wore the handsome brass-mounted, steel-spiked helmet of the army on his head. Last came

       the Empress of Germany and the Grand Duchess of Baden in a closed carriage; these passed through the low-bowing groups of servants and disappeared in the hotel, exhibiting to us only the backs of their

       heads, and then the show was over.

       It appears to be as difficult to land a monarch as it is to launch a

       ship.

       But as to Heidelberg. The weather was growing pretty warm,--very warm, in fact. So we left the valley and took quarters at the Schloss Hotel,

       on the hill, above the Castle.

       Heidelberg lies at the mouth of a narrow gorge--a gorge the shape of a shepherd's crook; if one looks up it he perceives that it is about straight, for a mile and a half, then makes a sharp curve to the

       right and disappears. This gorge--along whose bottom pours the swift Neckar--is confined between (or cloven through) a couple of long, steep ridges, a thousand feet high and densely wooded clear to their summits,

       with the exception of one section which has been shaved and put under cultivation. These ridges are chopped off at the mouth of the gorge

       and form two bold and conspicuous headlands, with Heidelberg nestling between them; from their bases spreads away the vast dim expanse of the Rhine valley, and into this expanse the Neckar goes wandering in shining

       curves and is presently lost to view.

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       Now if one turns and looks up the gorge once more, he will see the Schloss Hotel on the right perched on a precipice overlooking the Neckar--a precipice which is so sumptuously cushioned and draped with foliage that no glimpse of the rock appears. The building seems very airily situated. It has the appearance of being on a shelf half-way

       up the wooded mountainside; and as it is remote and isolated, and very white, it makes a strong mark against the lofty leafy rampart at its

       back.

       This hotel had a feature which was a decided novelty, and one which might be adopted with advantage by any house which is perched in a commanding situation. This feature may be described as a series of

       glass-enclosed parlors CLINGING TO THE OUTSIDE OF THE HOUSE, one against each and every bedchamber and drawing-room. They are like long, narrow,

       high-ceiled bird-cages hung against the building. My room was a corner room, and had two of these things, a north one and a west one.

       From the north cage one looks up the Neckar gorge; from the west one he looks down it. This last affords the most extensive view, and it is one

       of the loveliest that can be imagined, too. Out of a billowy upheaval

       of vivid green foliage, a rifle-shot removed, rises the huge ruin

       of Heidelberg Castle, [2. See Appendix B] with empty window arches, ivy-mailed battlements, moldering towers--the Lear of inanimate nature--deserted, discrowned, beaten by the storms, but royal still,

       and beautiful. It is a fine sight to see the evening sunlight suddenly

       strike the leafy declivity at the Castle's base and dash up it and drench it as with a luminous spray, while the adjacent groves are in deep shadow.

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       Behind the Castle swells a great dome-shaped hill, forest-clad, and beyond that a nobler and loftier one. The Castle looks down upon the compact brown-roofed town; and from the town two picturesque old bridges span the river. Now the view broadens; through the gateway of the

       sentinel headlands you gaze out over the wide Rhine plain, which stretches away, softly and richly tinted, grows gradually and dreamily

       indistinct, and finally melts imperceptibly into the remote horizon.

       I have never enjoyed a view which had such a serene and satisfying charm about it as this one gives.

       The first night we were there, we went to bed and to sleep early; but

       I awoke at the end of two or three hours, and lay a comfortable while listening to the soothing patter of the rain against the balcony windows. I took it to be rain, but it turned out to be only the murmur of the restless Neckar, tumbling over her dikes and dams far below, in

       the gorge. I got up and went into the west balcony and saw a wonderful sight. Away down on the level under the black mass of the Castle, the town lay, stretched along the river, its intricate cobweb of streets

       jeweled with twinkling lights; there were rows of lights on the bridges; these flung lances of light upon the water, in the black shadows of the arches; and away at the extremity of all this fairy spectacle blinked

       and glowed a massed multitude of gas-jets which seemed to cover acres of ground; it was as if all the diamonds in the world had been spread

       out there. I did not know before, that a half-mile of sextuple

       railway-tracks could be made such an adornment.

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       One thinks Heidelberg by day--with its surroundings--is the last possibility of the beautiful; but when he sees Heidelberg by night, a fallen Milky Way, with that glittering railway constellation pinned to the border, he requires time to consider upon the verdict.

       One never tires of poking about in the dense woods that clothe all these lofty Neckar hills to their tops. The great deeps of a boundless forest have a beguiling and impressive charm in any country; but German legends and fairy tales have given these an added charm. They have peopled all that region with gnomes, and dwarfs, and all sorts of mysterious and uncanny creatures. At the time I am writing of, I had

       been reading so much of this literature that sometimes I was not sure but I was beginning to believe in the gnomes and fairies as realities.

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