The mistake was mine from the beginning in letting her go alone to find her mountain. Had I gone with them, she and Victor, when they asked me that day in the Map House long ago, intuition would have told me what was in her mind and the spell would have come upon me as well. I would not have slept on in the hut, as Victor had slept, but would have woken and gone with her, and the years that I had wasted and thrown away, futile and mis-spent, would have been our years, Anna's and mine, shared here on the mountain, cut off from the world.
Once again I looked about me and at the faces of those who stood beside me, and I guessed dimly, with a sort of hunger near to pain, what ecstasy of love they knew, that I had never known. Their silence was not a vow, condemning them to darkness, but a peace that the mountain gave to them, merging their minds in tune. There was no need for speech, when a smile, a glance, conveyed a message and a thought; while laughter, triumphant always, sprang from the heart's centre, never to be suppressed. This was no closed order, gloomy, sepulchral, denying all that instinct gave the heart. Here Life was fulfilled, clamouring, intense, and the great heat of the sun seeped into the veins, becoming part of the blood stream, part of the living flesh; and the frozen air, merging with the direct rays of the sun, cleansed the body and the lungs, bringing power and strength — the power I had felt when the fingers touched my heart.
In the space of so short a while my values had all changed, and the self who had climbed the mountain through the mist, fearful, anxious and angry too, but a little while ago, seemed to exist no more. I was grey-haired, past middle age, a madman to the world's eyes if they could see me now, a laughing-stock, a fool; and I stood naked with the rest of them on Monte Verità and held up my arms to the sun. It rose now in the sky and shone upon us, and the blistering of my skin was pain and pleasure blended, and the heat drove through my heart and through my lungs.
I kept my eyes fixed on Anna, loving her with such intensity that I heard myself calling aloud, "Anna… Anna…" And she knew that I was there, for she lifted her hand in signal. None of them minded, none of them cared. They laughed with me, they understood.
Then from the midst of us came a girl, walking. She was dressed in a simple village frock, with stockings and shoes, and her hair hung loose on her shoulders. I thought her hands were folded together, as though in prayer, but they were not. She held them to her heart, the fingers touching.
She went to the brink of the crevasse, where Anna stood. Last night, beneath the moon, I should have been gripped by fear, but not now. I had been accepted. I was one of them. For one instant, in its space of time above us in the sky, the sun's ray touched the lip of the crevasse, and the blue ice shone. We knelt with one accord, our faces to the sun, and I heard the hymn of praise.
"This," I thought, "was how men worshipped in the beginning, how they will worship in the end. Here is no creed, no saviour, and no deity. Only the sun, which gives us light and life. This is how it has always been, from the beginning of time."
The sun's ray lifted and passed on, and then the girl, rising to her feet, threw off her stockings and her shoes and her dress also, and Anna, with a knife in her hand, cut off her hair, cropping it close above the ears. The girl stood before her, her hands upon her heart.
"Now she is free," I thought. "She won't go back to the valley again. Her parents will mourn her, and her young man too, and they'll never discover what she has found, here on Monte Verità. In the valley there would have been feasting and celebration, and then dancing at the wedding, and afterwards the turmoil of a brief romance turning to humdrum married life, the cares of her house, the cares of children, anxiety, fret, illness, trouble, the day by day routine of growing old. Now she is spared all that. Here, nothing once felt is lost. Love and beauty don't die or fade away. Living's hard, because Nature's hard, and Nature has no mercy; but it was this she wanted in the valley, it was for this she came. She will know everything here that she never knew before and would not have discovered, below there in the world. Passion and joy and laughter, the heat of the sun, the tug of the moon, love without emotion, sleep with no waking dream. And that's why they hate it, in the valley, that's why they're afraid of Monte Verità. Because here on the summit is something they don't possess and never will, so they are angry and envious and unhappy."
Then Anna turned, and the girl who had thrown her sex away with her past life and her village clothes followed barefoot, bare armed, cropped-haired like the others; and she was radiant, smiling, and I knew that nothing would ever matter to her again.
They descended to the court, leaving me alone on the summit, and I felt like an outcast before the gates of heaven. My brief moment had come and gone. They belonged here, and I did not. I was a stranger from the world below.
I put on my clothes again, restored to a sanity I did not want, and remembering Victor and my mission I too went down the steps to the court, and looking upwards I saw that Anna was waiting for me in the tower above.
The others flattened themselves against the wall to let me pass, and I saw that Anna alone amongst them wore the long white robe and the cowl. The tower was lofty, open to the sky, and characteristically, with that same gesture I remembered when she used to sit on the low stool before the fire in the great hall, Anna sat down now, on the topmost step of the tower, one knee raised and elbow on that knee. Today was yesterday, today was six—and-twenty years ago, and we were alone once more in the manor house in Shropshire; and the peace she had brought to me then she brought me now. I wanted to kneel beside her and take her hand. Instead I went and stood beside the wall, my arms folded.
"So you found it at last," she said. "It took a little time."
The voice was soft and still and quite unchanged.
"Did you bring me here?" I asked. "Did you call me when the aircraft crashed?"
She laughed, and I had never been away from her. Time stood still on Monte Verità.
"I wanted you to come long before that," she said, "but you shut your mind away from me. It was like clamping down a receiver. It always took two to make a telephone call. Does it still?"
"It does," I answered, "and our more modern inventions need valves for contact. Not the mind, though."
"Your mind has been a box for so many years," she said. "It was a pity — we could have shared so much. Victor had to tell me his thoughts in letters, which wouldn't have been necessary with you."
It was then, I think, that the first hope came to me. I must feel my way towards it, though, with care.
"You've read his letter," I asked, "and mine as well? You know that he's dying?"
"Yes," she said, "he's been ill for many weeks. That's why I wanted you to be here at this time, so that you could be with him when he died. And it will be all right for him, now, when you go back to him and tell him that you've spoken to me. He'll be happy then."
"Why not come yourself?"
"Better this way," she said. "Then he can keep his dream."
His dream? What did she mean? They were not, then, all-powerful here on Monte Verità? She understood the danger in which they stood.
"Anna," I said, "I'll do what you want me to do. I'll return to Victor and be with him at the last. But time is very short. More important still is the fact that you and the others here are in great danger. Tomorrow, tonight even, the people from the valley are going to climb here to Monte Verità, and they'll break into this place and kill you. It's imperative that you get away before they come. If you have no means of saving yourselves, then you must allow me to do something to help you. We are not so far from civilisation as to make that impossible. I can get down to the valley, find a telephone, get through to the police, to the army, to some authority in charge…"