I sleep, and change my dreaming. I am on the parapet of a huge
circular tower, hollow like a well, and pierced with windows at
irregular intervals. The parapet is broad, and slabbed with red
Verona marble. Around me are athletic men, all naked, in the strangest
attitudes of studied rest, down-gazing, as I do, into the depths
below. There comes a confused murmur of voices, and the tower is
threaded and rethreaded with great cables. Up these there climb to us
a crowd of young men, clinging to the ropes and flinging their bodies
sideways on aërial trapezes. My heart trembles with keen joy and
terror. For nowhere else could plastic forms be seen more beautiful,
and nowhere else is peril more apparent. Leaning my chin upon the
utmost verge, I wait. I watch one youth, who smiles and soars to me;
and when his face is almost touching mine, he speaks, but what he says
I know not.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. The whole world rocks to its
foundations. The mountain summits that I know are shaken. They bow
their bristling crests. They are falling, falling on us, and the earth
is riven. I wake in terror, shouting: INSOLITIS TREMUERUNT MOTIBUS
ALPES! An earthquake, slight but real, has stirred the ever-wakeful
Vesta of the brain to this Virgilian quotation.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. Once more at night I sledge alone
upon the Klosters road. It is the point where the woods close over it
and moonlight may not pierce the boughs. There come shrill cries of
many voices from behind, and rushings that pass by and vanish. Then
on their sledges I behold the phantoms of the dead who died in Davos,
longing for their homes; and each flies past me, shrieking in the
still cold air; and phosphorescent like long meteors, the pageant
turns the windings of the road below and disappears.