GoIdmund spent a day of happy impatiening in the hills. If he had owned a horse, he would have ridden to his masters beautiful madonna in the cloister. He felt the urge to see her again and thought that he had dreamed of Master Niklaus that night. Well, hed go see the madonna aime. His bliss with Agnes might be of short duration, might lead to danger perhaps—but today it was in full bloom; he did not want to miss any of it. He did not want to see people, to be distracted; he wao spend the mild autumn day outside, with the trees and clouds. He told Marie that he was thinking of a hike in the tryside and might be back late. He asked her to give him a good k of bread for the road and not wait up for him in the evening. She made no ent, stuffed his pockets full of bread and apples, ran a brush over his old coat, which she had patched the very first day, a him go.
He strolled across the river and climbed the steep-stepped paths through the empty vineyards, lost himself in the forest on the heights, and did not stop climbing until he had reached the last plateau. There the sun shone halfheartedly through bald trees. Blackbirds scurried before his steps; shyly they retreated into the bushes, looking at him with shiny black eyes. Far below, the river seemed a blue curve. The city looked like a toy; not a sound rose from it, except that of the bells ringing for prayers. Near him on the plateau there were small, grass-covered swellings, mounds from a pagan days, perhaps fortifications, perhaps tombs. He sat down in the dry, crag autumn grass on the side of one of them. He could see the whole vast valley, the hills and mountains beyond the river, upon , all the way to the horizon, where mountains and sky merged in bluish uainty and could no longer be told apart. His feet had measured this sweeping distance much farther than the eye could see. All these regions, which were far away now and remembered, had once been close and present. A huimes he had slept in those forests, eaten berries, been hungry and cold, crossed those mountain ridges, and stretches of heath, been happy or sad, fresh or fatigued. Somewhere in that distance, far out of the range of vision, lay the charred bones of good Lene; somewhere there his panion Robert might still be wandering, if the plague had not caught up with him; somewhere out there lay dead Viktor; and somewhere too, far off in the ented distance, was the cloister of his youth and the castle of the knight with the beautiful daughters, and poor, destitute, hounded Rebekka was still roaming there if she had not perished. So many widely scattered places, heaths and forests, towns and villages, castles and cloisters, and people alive and dead existed inside him in his memory, his love, his repentance, his longing. And if death caught him too, tomorrow, then all this would fall apart, would vanish, the whole picture book full of women and love, of summer ms and winter nights. Oh, it was high time that he aplished something, created something, left something behind that would survive him.
Up to now little remained of his life, of his wanderings, of all those years that had passed since he set out in the world. What remained were the few figures he had once made in the workshop, especially his St. John, and this picture book, this unreal world inside his head, this beautiful, ag image world of memories. Would he succeed in saving a few scraps of this inner world and making it visible to others? Or would th