Translated from Ferdinand de Saar.
NE of the most remarkable railways in the world is that which crosses the Sennmerimg—a ridge belonging to the Noric Alps which marks the frontier between Austria and Styria the Green.
The traveller who makes this journey for the first time receives a deep and lasting impression. In truth, what can be more terrible, more striking, than the narrow track running at infinite heights between beetling walls and yawning precipices?—what more impressive than the carriages rolling with a crash like thunder over viaducts elevated to fabulous heights, or burying themselves to the shrill scream of the locomotive in the deep night of the long tunnels?
The air is cold—freezing. The train is swept along as by a whirlwind. The earth below is so far away that it can hardly be distinguished through the half-transparent mists. In the midst of scenes and works of such sublimity man realizes his own insignificance. But little thought is given to the thousands of poor people who amidst the greatest dangers have spent their strength in hauling the enormous rocks and blocks of stone, in spanning the gigantic gulfs with bridges, and in bringing their Titanic task to a successful issue.
It is the story of two of these poor creatures that I propose to tell. Not that my intention is to excite the public pity for their fate, or to idealize their lives. I shall simply strive to shed a little light upon the immense mass of the suffering poor who, after a life of struggle, of privations, and of rude labour, sink, despised and unremembered, into the common tomb. I shall speak of the human heart, of its joys and its sorrows, and of the great tragedy of life which is renewed for ever amongst the humblest as among the most powerful of the earth.
The Semmering railway was almost finished. The hubbub of the labourers, the thunder of the blasting, had ceased. The swarm of workpeople who had come from Bohemia, from Moravia, from sterile Karst and fertile Frioul, had dispersed, and had pushed on farther south in search of work.
Reassured by the tranquillity of the place, the wild animals began to come forth again from the depths of the forest. Only here and there were still seen some of the little wooden huts which the wandering labourers had inhabited; most of which they had pulled down before they left.
These scattered cabins served as a shelter to a small number of workers who still remained to finish the railway; for still, at certain places, rails had to be fixed, telegraph poles to be placed, and the pointsmen's boxes to be completed, under the roofs of which the swallows had already made their nests.
