on, to die on. The more remote from you, the higher rises,
terrace-fashion, the titanic grandeur of the Alps. Clear to the south,
the gigantic flight of the Sann Valley Dolomites sweeps on beyond the
Obir, and then the ghostly pale Karawanken stare across at you. In the
middle foreground the mighty plateaus of the Ferlacher and Eisenkappler
Country gradually become quieter, and then comes the shining plain,
crisscrossed into sections by groves and gold-gleaming fields, by
pale-green marsh-meadows and red-blooming buckwheat. And with an abrupt
descent from the road you come to the Drau far below, flowing with deep
roar between steep banks thickly set with towering young spears of
spruce, and tussling with rocky boulders; yet from the road one could
not look down upon its battles there in the cool canyon, so precipitous
are its banks, so densely black rises the legion of spruces. Only when
a brook storms under the road and down to the Drau can one see its
grayish flow and spume through the gap below--the stream that once
halted the German language on its yearning flight toward the blue waves
of that southern sea.

But we on the road, high up in the sunlight, send a whoop shooting like
an arrow across river and plain into the divine vastness of the
distance, toward the glimmering, rocky mountains, and salute as
exultant children the Father of all that is mightiest in us.

Rarely, rarely nowadays does such a "ya-oo" flit from the wind-swept
height across the valley. For the road has grown desolate and no longer
carries weight. For hours at a time one may vainly hearken to the
rustle of the woods, the deep rumble of the River Drau, without ever
detecting the cheerful home-bound rattle of a rustic cart between
pine-woods and the angle of a mountain. This proud, lofty road no
longer serves a purpose on earth, that once was the soul of the
Carinthian land.

Of all histories and human destinies those are the most conducive to
meditation which are closely knitted together with a bit of universal
fate, and so let me narrate here for the woeful diversion of men the
story of Florian Hausbaum, who was once the youth and the song of this
road.

Florian Hausbaum was a Styrian of the woods from Mahrenberg, that
same superb, defiantly German Mahrenberg below which the Drau plunges
over titanic boulders, and over which two churches stand face to face,
tower against tower, like locomotives desirous of ramming each other;
the old Slove