If we consider that this mountain owes its origin to a flow of scree into an arm of the delta, might we not speak of its “beginning” and “end”? Thus, I made my way to the end of the mountain, where a flight of stairs, some consisting of old marble, some of new cement (with steps of such varying height that it’s easy to lose one’s footing on the way down), leads to the Mülln quarter and the Salzach. There on the riverbank is the old people’s home, into which I have several times seen men in braided uniforms carrying coffins. Behind it extends the plain, with the new suburbs of Lehen and Liefering; over the football stadium, birds darted to and fro in the glare of the floodlights. Before coming to the stairs, I turned around and, for fear of being late, took a side path leading back to the foot of the mountain.
Already the tightly closed lilac buds showed a bluish shimmer. A big black rag flew into a greening tree: a raven. The rock was traversed by shiny snail tracks, and white downy feathers clung to the clefts where bird food had been strewn. In the midst of bushes and ankle-deep leaves, a rusty garden gate stood solitary; there was no fence to go with it, not even a house behind it; it led to an impassable cliff. Rainwater had gathered in a ring-shaped beech root, as in a cistern. On a root nearby, a gray hare was sitting, barely distinguishable from its resting place; it gave me a friendly look.
Over long, sloping meadows and hollows, the side path loops back to the ridge road. It starts at the bottom with another, almost hidden stairway, beside which, in one of the numerous recesses in the cliff, stands a house which, though built of stone, looks like a makeshift shack. It is the meeting place of the local shooting club. The shooting range is behind the hut, in the wind-sheltered hollow between the stairs and the cliff, where under other circumstances the garden would have been located. Wednesday is crossbow day (as was indicated by the crossbow emblem flown from the flagpole in front of the shack). A number of cars were parked in the driveway, including some from across the border, bearing the insignia of the Berchtesgaden district. At that moment, a man was removing a dragon-shaped bundle from the trunk of his car. A signboard attached to a pole announced a “His-and-Hers Shooting Match,” a “Solstice Shooting Match,” and a “Fruitcake Shooting Match.” All that could be seen of the shooting range from the top of the stairs were the targets; the archers were hidden by a wooden canopy that surrounded the entire range. Each of the targets was lit by a lamp of its own, and the holes in them formed a Braille pattern. Each time a bolt struck home — with a toneless thud — the target and the projectile were carried to the archer on overhead wires and then, minus the bolt, back again. An incessant thudding and whirring could be heard from the brightly lit range, though there was never a human to be seen. On an overhanging cliff behind the hut, there was a doghouse, from which a multiracial mongrel answered the impact of every single bolt with a rather pathetic bark. During a pause in the shooting, conversational voices could be heard. One of the speakers seemed to be a stutterer; when he came to a word beginning with “s,” the conversation shifted to the conditional mood—“would have,” “would be”—and took a long time getting back to its point of departure, the Singer sewing machine, fustian, worsted, and mother-of-pearl buttons.
On the sloping meadows above the stairs — the archers now inaudible — the densely growing dandelions, interlocking like small cogwheels, had closed with the onset of twilight, and their diurnal yellow gave way to the dark enamel-yellow of the buttercups (more thinly spread, because the flowers were so tiny) on their tall, thin, ramified stems, which, though there was hardly any wind, swayed all along the slope, accentuating the “evening” character of the scene. On this part of the mountain, the rock is almost everywhere covered by grass, but the green in every rib, bend, groove, and crevice brings out the rock shapes all the more strikingly. The only tree on the long slope, almost at the top, is an elder (ordinarily a mere bush) with a thick trunk, which, though steeply inclined, is clearly in no danger of falling. Ring after ring of branches sweep upward in ever-new impulsions, and the whole tree stands against the background of the sky as though ready to take off. In passing, I saw here and there in the forks of the branches something resembling eyes (just as trees are improved by having the buds, or “eyes,” of other varieties grafted onto them). These were the light-colored heads of the titmice that spend the night in this elder. As, climbing higher, I looked back over my shoulder, the grounds of the provincial hospital came into view. A white helicopter pattern had been painted on an illuminated circle of concrete, and just then a real helicopter was landing, while at the edge of the circle an ambulance stood ready, with a stretcher protruding from the open rear door. Through the great doorway fronting on the road, a late visitor was stepping out into the open. In the stairwell of one section, as in certain hotels, nets were stretched out, which were supposed to stop patients from jumping over the banisters and into the lobby. “We wouldn’t want to die in there, would we?” I heard a passerby saying; by then, it had grown so dark on the mountain that the speaker was faceless.
From here, the slope descends into a deep bowl, suggesting a doline caused by the collapse of an underground cavern. One side of the bowl is almost vertical, and here the rock, a peculiarity of this bit of meadow, forms a high, naked wall. The bottom of the bowl is sheltered from the wind and the wall is dotted with niches, where the homeless take shelter. In one of these recesses, two figures sat huddled, covered up to their necks with a plastic poncho. A little wood fire lit up their faces. They were a man and a woman, gray-haired and gray-skinned, shoulder to shoulder. There were bottles of liquor on the stone shelf level with their heads, but neither reached for them. They scarcely moved; and when they did move, it was with strange, indecipherable jerks, like creatures out of another geological era. Yet, though they turned not toward each other but toward the fire, they were talking. Noting the observer up at the edge of the bowl, they fell silent and stared at me, motionless, poised for action. They wouldn’t do anything, and yet, just with that glance, something had happened between us. Was it only a joke that when I continued on my way a woman coming toward me in the next circle of light cried out: “Help!”
The circle of light did not belong to a streetlamp; it came from the open door of the dormitory at the edge of the clearing; after the vegetable garden behind it, the forest begins again. This dormitory is several stories high; there, at the brow of that primordial hollow, it almost puts one in mind of a skyscraper. Next to it is a smaller service building, with the kitchen and dining room on the ground floor. The path passes between the two buildings. In the dining room, a boy was sitting alone, waiting for his dinner; in the kitchen, a white-clad kitchen maid was ladling soup into his bowl from an enormous caldron. Nearly all the other students must have gone away for the Easter holidays; only a single room in the building was lit; on top of the clothes cupboard, a suitcase; down in the entrance hall, a bicycle with a soccer ball on its baggage rack. The student did not look up when the maid set the soup down in front of him. After the meal, he brought his dishes back to the kitchen and slowly drank a glass of water.