Vertigo
Not far from the margin of the forest stands the Krummenbach chapel, so small that it can surely not have been possible for more than a dozen to attend a service or worship there at the same time. In that walled cell I sat for a while. Outside, snowflakes were drifting past the small window, and presently it seemed to me as if I were in a boat on a voyage, crossing vast waters. The moist smell of lime became sea air; I could feel the spray on my forehead and the boards swaying beneath my feet, and I imagined myself sailing in this ship out of the flooded mountains. But what I remember most about the Krummenbach chapel, apart from this transformation of the stone walls into the hull of a wooden boat, is the Stations of the Cross, painted by some unskilled hand around the mid-eighteenth century, and half already covered and eaten by mould. Even on the somewhat better preserved scenes, little could be made out with any degree of certainty – faces distorted in pain and anger, dislocated li...