Chapter 2 - Page 2

of
bundles, and all absorbed in the show. Occasionally one of them skipped
irreverently over the carpet and took up a position on the other side.
This always visibly annoyed the PORTIER.

Now came a waiting interval. The landlord, in plain clothes, and
bareheaded, placed himself on the bottom marble step, abreast the
PORTIER, who stood on the other end of the same steps; six or eight
waiters, gloved, bareheaded, and wearing their whitest linen, their
whitest cravats, and their finest swallow-tails, grouped themselves
about these chiefs, but leaving the carpetway clear. Nobody moved or
spoke any more but only waited.

In a short time the shrill piping of a coming train was heard, and
immediately groups of people began to gather in the street. Two or three
open carriages arrived, and deposited some maids of honor and some male
officials at the hotel. Presently another open carriage brought the
Grand Duke of Baden, a stately man in uniform, who wore the handsome
brass-mounted, steel-spiked helmet of the army on his head. Last came
the Empress of Germany and the Grand Duchess of Baden in a closed
carriage; these passed through the low-bowing groups of servants and
disappeared in the hotel, exhibiting to us only the backs of their
heads, and then the show was over.

It appears to be as difficult to land a monarch as it is to launch a
ship.

But as to Heidelberg. The weather was growing pretty warm,--very warm,
in fact. So we left the valley and took quarters at the Schloss Hotel,
on the hill, above the Castle.

Heidelberg lies at the mouth of a narrow gorge--a gorge the shape of
a shepherd's crook; if one looks up it he perceives that it is about
straight, for a mile and a half, then makes a sharp curve to the right
and disappears. This gorge--along whose bottom pours the swift Neckar
--is confined between (or cloven through) a couple of long, steep
ridges, a thousand feet high and densely wooded clear to their summits,
with the exception of one section which has been shaved and put under
cultivation. These ridges are chopped off at the mouth of the gorge
and form two bold and conspicuous headlands, with Heidelberg nestling
between them; from their bases spreads away the vast dim expanse of the
Rhine valley, and into this expanse the Neckar goes wandering in shining
curves and is presently lost to view.

Now if one turns and looks up the gorge once more, he will see the
Schloss Hotel on the right perched on a precipice overlooking the
Neckar--a precipice which is so sumptuously cushioned and draped with
foliage that no glimpse of the rock appears. The building seems very
airily situated. It has the appearance of being on a shelf half-way
up the wooded mountainside; and as