A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

CHAPTER XIX

[The Deadly Jest of Dilsberg]

However, I wander from the raft. We made the port

of Necharsteinach in good season, and went to the hotel

and ordered a trout dinner, the same to be ready

against our return from a two-hour pedestrian excursion

to the village and castle of Dilsberg, a mile distant,

on the other side of the river. I do not mean that we

proposed to be two hours making two miles–no, we meant

to employ most of the time in inspecting Dilsberg.

For Dilsberg is a quaint place. It is most quaintly

and picturesquely situated, too. Imagine the beautiful

river before you; then a few rods of brilliant green sward

on its opposite shore; then a sudden hill–no preparatory

gently rising slopes, but a sort of instantaneous hill–

a hill two hundred and fifty or three hundred feet high,

as round as a bowl, with the same taper upward that an

inverted bowl has, and with about the same relation

of height to diameter that distinguishes a bowl of good

honest depth–a hill which is thickly clothed with

green bushes–a comely, shapely hill, rising abruptly

out of the dead level of the surrounding green plains,

visible from a great distance down the bends of the river,

and with just exactly room on the top of its head

for its steepled and turreted and roof-clustered cap

of architecture, which same is tightly jammed and compacted

within the perfectly round hoop of the ancient village wall.

There is no house outside the wall on the whole hill,

or any vestige of a former house; all the houses are

inside the wall, but there isn’t room for another one.

It is really a finished town, and has been finished

a very long time. There is no space between the wall

and the first circle of buildings; no, the village wall

is itself the rear wall of the first circle of buildings,

a nd the roofs jut a little over the wall a nd thus

furnish it with eaves. The general level of the massed

roofs is gracefully broken and relieved by the dominating

towers of the ruined castle and the tall spires of a

couple of churches; so, from a distance Dilsberg has

rather more the look of a king’s crown than a cap.

That lofty green eminence and its quaint coronet form

quite a striking picture, you may be sure, in the flush

of the evening sun.

We crossed over in a boat and began the ascent by a narrow,

steep path which plunged us at once into the leafy deeps

of the bushes. But they were not cool deeps by any means,

for the sun’s rays were weltering hot and there was

little or no breeze to temper them. As we panted up

the sharp ascent, we met brown, bareheaded and barefooted

boys and girls, occasionally, and sometimes men;

they came upon us without warning, they gave us good day,

flashed out of sight in the bushes, and were gone as

suddenly and mysteriously as they had come. They were

bound for the other side of the river to work. This path

had been traveled by many generations of these people.

They have always gone down to the valley to earn their bread,

but they have always climbed their hill again to eat it,

and to sleep in their snug town.

It is said the the Dilsbergers do not emigrate much;

they find that living up there above the world, in their

peaceful nest, is pleasanter than living down in the

troublous world. The seven hundred inhabitants are all

blood-kin to each other, too; they have always been blood-kin

to each other for fifteen hundred years; they are simply

one large family, and they like the home folks better than

they like strangers, hence they persistently stay at home.

It has been said that for ages Dilsberg has been merely

a thriving and diligent idiot-factory. I saw no idiots there,

but the captain said, “Because of late years the government

has taken to lugging them off to asylums and otherwheres;

and government wants to cripple the factory, too, and is

trying to get these Dilsbergers to marry out of the family,