The Letterbox of Last Words
letterbox
A brass slot in the wall of the lowest house, facing the road to the gate, into which the refused post letters to those who went up. The box behind the slot has no door. It has never been full and it ...
letterbox
A brass slot in the wall of the lowest house, facing the road to the gate, into which the refused post letters to those who went up. The box behind the slot has no door. It has never been full and it ...
pass
The saddle between two peaks, hidden in cloud from sunrise to the last minutes of the night and visible only in the grey before first light, from the gate, as a notch of sky. Nobody who has stood in i...
customs room
A low stone room built against the gate wall, with one window onto the road and one onto the arch. A long table, a lamp, two chairs on the petitioner's side and one on the officer's, the Gate Book on ...
camp
The Bureau's camp at the limit of measurement, two hundred paces below the saddle: three canvas tents on stone platforms, a theodolite under a tarpaulin, a line of survey stakes that ends at a stake w...
tower
A square tower on the gate wall with an open bell-stage at the top and, in a locked room below it, a slate. At dusk the slate carries the night's number, written in chalk in a hand that is not the cal...
chapel
A small chapel of stone at the first bend above the gate, the only building on the way up, kept by the chaplain. It has no altar. Along every wall run shelves, and on the shelves stand the objects tha...
inn
The largest house in the Lower Town, three storeys of stone around a courtyard, forty rooms and a long common room with a stove, where those sent back from the gate sleep, eat and wait. Some have wait...
tavern
A cellar under the lowest terrace with its own door onto the road, where places at the gate are bought and sold that nobody can sell. The smuggler holds court at the back table with a ledger in which ...
cairn field
Above the hut the path crosses a shoulder of bare rock covered with cairns, thousands of them, one stone for every person who went up in three hundred years, each laid by the one who went up next. The...
gate
A round arch of grey stone, two man-heights high, set into the wall that closes the valley, with two iron-bound doors that open at dusk and close at first light by themselves; nobody has ever had to p...
survey office
The one house in Scharte built of dressed stone, with a brass plate that says nothing and a map room on the first floor in which every attempt to chart the pass is pinned to the wall and every one end...
hut
A stone hut with a bench inside and a bench outside, at the last point on the way up from which the gate and the Lower Town can still be seen. Those who are let through stop here and turn round once; ...