Hans of Iceland by Victor Hugo

Author:Victor Hugo [Hugo, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Klassiker
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2018-02-08T23:00:00+00:00

XXV.

Lion (roaring). Oh [Thisbe runs off.] Demetrius. Well roared, lion!

Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The traveler, who journeys in our day among the snow-covered mountains which surround the lake of Smiasen like a white girdle, will find no vestige of what the Norwegians of the seventeenth century called the ruins of Arbar. No one has ever known to what race of architects or to what style of architecture those ruins, if we may give them that name, should be ascribed.

On emerging from the forest which borders the southern portion of the lake, and after ascending a slope dotted here and there with fragments of wall and remains of ruined towers, the traveler will notice a vaulted opening, in the side of the mountain.

This opening, which is now entirely obstructed by landslides, was formerly the entrance to a sort of gallery hewn in the living rock, and leading directly into the bowels of the mountain. It was dimly lighted by conical air holes cut in the arch at equal intervals, and ended in a large oval-shaped hall, partly carved out of the rock, and surrounded by walls of Cyclopean masonry. Around the sides of this hall were roughly hewn granite figures set in deep niches.

Some of these mystic images had fallen from their pedestals, and were lying about promiscuously on the rocky floor with other shapeless masses, covered with grass and moss, thickly peopled with lizards and beetles and all the hideous creeping things which abound in such spots.

The daylight found its way into the place only through a sort of doorway opposite the end of the gallery. This doorway, when seen from a certain direction, had the ogive shape, but was very roughly cut, and belonged to no particular period; it was evident that the architect had simply happened upon it.

Although the bottom of this opening was on a level with the floor, it might well have been called a window, for it opened upon a sheer precipice of great height; and it was impossible to understand the purpose of the three or four stairs which were suspended over the chasm, outside this strange aperture and immediately below it.

This hall formed the interior of a gigantic turret, which, from the side toward the precipice, looked like one of the peaks of the mountain. The turret stood quite alone, and nobody could say of what manner of structure it had once formed a part. But above it, upon a plateau inaccessible to the boldest and most active hunter, was a huge mass, which might have been taken either for a rounded rock, or for the ruins of a colossal arch, — it was impossible to say which it was because of the distance. This turret, and this crumbling arch were known to the peasants by the name of the ruins of Arbar. The origin of the name was as uncertain as the origin of the monument.

On a rock in the center of this elliptical apartment, sat a little man, clothed in the

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