Endless Things by John Crowley Page A

of Holland he went to the Hague aboard a local train or trolley; it passed magically from the city into the countryside, past tiny tidy farms damp brown and gray, stopping at crossroads for people dressed in brown and gray to get on and off. He got off where his directions told him, a gray suburb where up a street was a consular office of the People's Republic of Czechoslovakia. An undistinguished building that might have been a small clinic or even a private house. Inside just two young men in open shirts and leather jackets, universal young men, one bearded, who welcomed him without ceremony, and helped him fill out the forms he needed for his visa. Czech flag on the wall with hammer and sickle. They copied the numbers from his passport, they photographed him and asked an array of personal questions that had no relation to one another or to anything else, as though randomly selected to test his memory—or his truthfulness, maybe, he thought with a comic stab of paranoia. And they gave him his visa, with pleasure it seemed. His photograph within it, dark turtleneck, tousled hair, black piratical beard, glower—would it help or hurt? Troublemaker or fellow traveler? Did it matter? It was a sort of handsome fellow, though not himself maybe. The other riders on the tiny train into the city watched him study it.
    In the morning, sore and rattled from a night in a student hostel busy nightlong with comers and goers (no more of those, he vowed), he boarded a long sleek international train bound for Köln, which was Cologne, and the Rhine journey to Heidelberg.
    Absurd, but I am continually surprised that the Europeans celebrate their own historic sites, not only the big ones but the littlest and least, places I've known about only as I got their names and map coordinates from esoteric works. Come to find out that they and their legends are well known, they are advertised, you pay money to enter them, and you get pamphlets that explain them all. At Heidelberg you're told every rooming house Goethe stayed in, what moonlight walks to take up onto the castle ramparts, just where Goethe stood when he famously observed, etc.; stationery, souvenir plates, beer mugs, with the same pictures engraved on them. Why did I think it would all lie neglected, only waiting for me? Because I didn't really believe it existed?
    He hadn't; even as he walked it, it seemed to him that his own presence summoned this Old World into existence in all its solidity and fullness, a fullness at once expressive and as mute as stone, which a lot of it was, stone: churches and pavements and castle walls and apartment buildings where whoever lived: more mute and obdurate than he could have imagined in advance. He put out a hand and touched speechless stone and so caused it to come to be. It was unsettling. He couldn't make it stop. He got used to it.
    Far famed, Schloss Heidelberg is part ruin, part restoration. The restored parts are largely without interest, resembling a combination of a Swiss Stübli and the smoking room of a Dutch ocean liner. Be sure to engage a Führer (official guide) if you wish to go through the maze of passages, rooms, belvederes, towers, and corridors, or you may never find a way out.
    He might have liked to see what the smoking room of a Dutch ocean liner, or something resembling one, looked like; but the interiors were geschlossen for the winter months and there was no Führer . He wandered in the Schlosshof, the castle yard. A silver fog hung over the river Neckar and the toy town far below. Pierce followed the obvious way, down the sloping walks and the famed terraced gardens , beneath a great arch— the Elizabeth-Pforte, built as a birthday surprise (legend has it) in a single night by the besotted Frederick V for his English queen —and into a broad bare terrace. Where were the famed gardens?
    "Here,” said Dame Frances Yates. “The designer was Salomon de Caus, a French Protestant and an extremely brilliant garden architect