Peter Camenzind Read Online Free PDF

peak from its steepest side; I took extended trips with the skiff, covering great distances in a short time. Returning burnt out and famished from one of these excursions, it occurred to me to go without food and drink until evening, all for the sake of Rösi Girtanner. I carried her name and praise to out-of-the-way summits and ravines where no human had ever set foot.
    I was also making up for the time my youthful body had spent squatting in stuffy schoolrooms. My shoulders broadened, my face and neck became tanned, and my muscles swelled and became taut.
    On the next to last day of vacation, I went to extreme pains to gather my love a floral sacrifice. I knew of several dangerous slopes covered with edelweiss, but this odorless, colorless, sickly silver flower had always seemed to me lacking in soul and beauty. Instead, I decided on some bushes of rhododendron, the “Alpine rose,” which had been blown by the wind into a secluded cleft on a steep precipice. They had blossomed late and could not be more difficult to reach. But I had to find a way and, since nothing is unattainable to youth and love, I finally did reach my goal—with sore hands and feet. Shouting for joy was out of the question in the position I was in, but my heart yodeled and leaped deliriously as I snipped the tough stems and held the booty in my hand. The descent had to be accomplished by climbing backwards, the flowers between my teeth, and heaven only knows how I reached the foot of the precipice in one piece. Since all other rhododendron on the mountain had withered long before, I held the season’s last in my hand, just budding and breaking into delicate bloom.
    Next day I did not put down the flowers even for a moment throughout the entire five-hour trip. As I approached my sweetheart’s city, my heart at first beat with excitement. Yet the farther the Alps receded, the more my inborn love drew me back to them. The Sennalpstock had long faded from view when the jagged foothills disappeared, sinking away one after another, each one detaching itself with a delicate woe from my heart. Now all the hills of my homeland had vanished and a broad, undulating, light-green lowland-scape thrust itself into view. This sight had not affected me on my first trip away from home. Today uneasiness, fear, and sadness overcame me—as though I were destined to travel into flatter and flatter lands, to lose the mountains and citizenship of my native land forever. Simultaneously I beheld the beautiful face of my Rösi, so delicate, alien, cool, and unconcerned that the bitterness and anguish of it took my breath away. The glad, spotless villages with slender spires and white gables slipped past the window; people mounted and dismounted, jabbered, laughed, smoked, made jokes—all of them cheerful lowlanders, clever, open-minded, smart people—and I, a stolid mountain youth, sat morose and silent among them. I felt not at home here, I felt permanently kidnapped from my mountain region and certain that I would never be as cheerful, smooth, and self-assured as anyone from the lowland. They would always be able to make fun of me, one of them would marry the Girtanner girl, and one of them would always stand in my way, be a step ahead of me.
    Such were the thoughts that were with me on my way into town. There, after a brief look around, I climbed to my room in the attic, opened my foot locker, and took out a large sheet of wrapping paper. When I had wrapped my flowers in it and tied the package together with a string I had brought with me for that purpose, the parcel did not look at all like a gift of love. I solemnly carried it to the street where lawyer Girtanner lived and at the first opportune moment I stepped through the open door, glanced briefly into the dimly lit hallway, and deposited the ill-shaped bundle on the wide staircase.
    No one saw me and I never found out if Rösi received my greeting. But I had the satisfaction of having