Page - 121 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

XIV A Forgotten Land I ALWAYS say that the world is becoming too small. There is no room left for hermits. I frequently receive enquiries, from correspondents abroad, for cool summer resorts,—for nature resorts. Would I please—so runs the request— suggest a corner in the Alps where they will find clean rooms and good food in a farm-house kept by simple, kindly people. Added conditions: no railway, no telegraph, no post, no newspapers. A place where they can feel safe from meeting English people or people from Berlin and—forgive the imputation— Vienna. They want to have nothing but woods and fields around them, and, oblivious of all town luxuries and refinements, at least for a few weeks to bathe body and soul in the dew of a primitive life. This is the wish which—O curious sign of the times!—grows ever louder and louder. Is the return to nature, yearned for by the poets, at last beginning in earnest? If only the company-promoters do not seize upon this need and found a colony for hermits! It is not so easy to recover nature once wantonly deserted. Our alps contain no valley, however secluded, into which artificial wines and brandy and American meat-extracts and cigars have not by this time made their way, in which the fences are bare of railway timetables and mineral- water posters and upon which some News of the Day or other does not force its huge weekly doses of “culture” and information. This is the case by now even in those districts whose “unfavourable” situation has hitherto for the most part spared them the two well-known “blessings” of civilisation. The floodgates are opened; and even those parts cannot be spared the deluge…. My forgotten land! He who would still bathe for a little in “the dew of a primitive life” may do so! I hasten to draw a fleeting picture of the land and its people before the floods of the world come and inundate it. The region is locally and colloquially known as Sanct-Jakobs-Land, or “the Jackelland.” It lies in Styria, between the Mürzthal and the Wechsel