Airs Above the Ground by Mary Stewart

Author:Mary Stewart [Stewart, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2011-02-16T13:00:00+00:00

11

A castle, precipice-encurled . . .

Browning: De Gustibus

Our arrival on the following day at Zechstein had about it the same curious quality of familiarity that we had encountered at Hohenwald: the circus posters, the slow lumbering of the last wagons and caravans into place in the fields on the outskirts of the village, the big top already up against its background of green; and the now familiar faces and vehicles seen everywhere.

The village lay in a wide valley where a river meandered lazily southward. At this point the valley floor was less than a mile wide, the ground rising on each side at first gently, with rounded hills, then more steeply into slopes of mixed forest – oak and chestnut, beech and holly – towards the precipitous fir woods and, finally, towering silver crests of rock. Spurs thrust out here and there from the valley walls, forcing the river to wind in shining detours round their rocky bases. The village, with its pretty church, its bridge, its mill, its wine shop with the bush hanging outside, was cradled in one such curve of the valley, and it was not until the road rounded the bluff beyond the village that we could see the castle.

On the far side of the river another great buttress of the mountain had thrust out to deflect the course of the river sharply back on itself. At the end of this buttress was a crag, itself rugged and crenellated like a castle, its precipitous outer side dropping sheer to the river which here slid dark and deep round the base of the cliff. This high promontory was connected to the mountainside by a narrow hogsback ridge crowded to the top with pines, rank on rank of them, dark and beautiful, contrasting vividly with the sweet green of the meadows below and the blazing blue of the afternoon sky. And, perched on the outermost edge of the crag, like something straight out of the fairy books of one’s childhood, was the Schloss Zechstein, a miniature castle, but a real romantic castle for all that, a place of pinnacles and turrets and curtain walls, of narrow windows and battlements and coloured shields painted on the stone. There was even a bridge; not a drawbridge, but a narrow stone bridge arching out of the forest to the castle gate, where some small torrent broke the rock-ridge and sent a thin rope of white water smoking down below the walls. The castle was approached by a narrow metalled road which, branching at right angles off the main road in the valley below, led between heraldic pillars and over another graceful bridge, thereafter zigzagging steeply up to disappear in the thick mountain woods. For all its rugged approach and its carefully preserved mediaeval fortifications the place was not in the least forbidding. It was charming – not a castle for the guide-books, but a castle to be lived in.

When at length our little car had roared its way up the winding

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