More organic patriots
Being myself a sort of self-adopted Swiss patriot, I made a pilgrimage once to the lakeside field of Rütli, which is the traditional birthplace of the Swiss nation. On the Sunday I walked down the track from the heights above, thousands of more organic patriots were making their way to or from the hallowed site, most of them evidently people from the mountain country around. I offered a cheerful good morning to everyone I met, and could not help admiring the utter lack of ingratiation, the courtesy tinged with decidedly suspended and unsmiling judgment, with which most of them responded. I was struck too by the proportion of twisted, stooped or withered old people among them—people of a kind that had almost vanished from the rest of western Europe. They were one generation removed from the goitre, that talismanic affliction of mountain peasantries, and the faces of those crooked ancients—hard hewn, bashed about, gaunt—seemed to speak of centuries of earthly hardship, isolation and suspicion. I could not help remembering, too, that in Switzerland the very last European witch was publicly burned.
