Read Online Horizon by Helen MacInnes - Free Book Online

Eva Mussner.
    Lennox followed him obediently, imitating his short plodding step up the steep incline of hillside. But Lennox said nothing at all. He began to regret his simple questions. The friendly warmth in this boy’s voice beat against the cold wall which imprisonment had built round his emotions. He had learned to live within himself. Miller’s death tonight only proved that affection and human liking brought deeper sorrow. The man who lived alone could laugh at life and tell it to do its damnedest. That way, a man was less vulnerable. What he wouldn’t allow himself to enjoy, he couldn’t be afraid of losing. Lennox stopped listening to Johann; his uneasiness turned to resentment. Hell, he thought irritably, what’s this Hinterwald or Eva Mussner to me? He scarcely noticed when the boy’s mumbling words grew farther spaced, and the sudden burst of confidence became a frozen block of silence.
    Far to the south of them came a sudden burst of rifle fire. Lennox halted instinctively and looked back. It wasn’t an attack on the prison camp, for the machine guns, now firing heavily, were down in the valley.
    Johann pulled his arm impatiently. “It is only the Germans and some angry Italians shooting it out,” he said. “And that will be good for your friends. The Germans have many worries tonight.”
    Lennox watched the distant flashes of light, the suddenflaring of some ammunition or petrol dump. It was not an unpleasant feeling to turn his back on the skirmishing, to walk away into the darkness and leave those who had killed and mutilated so many of his friends now tearing at one another like the traitors in Dante’s hell.

7
    The Schlern is really the highest of a group of mountains in the Dolomite Alps, but its name has come also to mean the high plateau of rolling meadows and forests over which the steep face of this rocky mass rises like some enormous fortress.
    The road up to the Schlern begins in the Eisak valley, which leads southward to Italy and northward through the Brenner Pass to Austria. The road ascends steeply, by sudden twists and sharp turns. It cuts through cliffs of rock by narrow tunnels; it holds precariously to the precipice edge; it arrives at last—much to the relief of the traveller—on what seems to be the top of the world. But relief gives way to amazement, for up here lies still another world: one of villages and scattered farms and churches, of winding roads and streams and green meadows, of forests and mountain peaks challenging to still greater height. This is the Schlernland, an island of Alpine scenery pushed into the sky. It isn’t a naked, jutting kind of island, for the deepvalleys surrounding it have their rugged waves of mountains too. On every side the sea of precipices is unending.
    Perhaps it was because this road up to the Schlern was so treacherous in winter, or because the Germans found they had enough to worry about in keeping open the supply route in the Eisak valley, that the Schlern had had one of its most peaceful winters. The Italian policemen, post-masters, soldiers, schoolteachers, and hotel-owners had gone. The skiers had not come this winter, just as the mountain-climbers had been absent last summer. The larger chalets and villas, which the wealthy Italians from Rome and Milan had built to give their children pleasant holidays, were now as empty as the small cottages abandoned by those Tyrolese who had listened to Hider in 1939, and had moved into Austria. The people of the Schlern who had clung to their heritages, who had refused to put their trust in politicians’ promises, called themselves—with their own grim smile—the survivors.
    The winter had been hard. High on the Schlern a thick frozen blanket of snow had covered the grey peaks and the green slopes. The small villages, the scattered houses of forester and farmer, had fallen into a seeming sleep among the white mountains. Down in the valley below the Schlern, where the gap in the Dolomite