CROWNING LIGHT:

All is not darkness and gloom, however, in Stifter's prose. He was, to quote Hannah Arendt, "the greatest landscape painter in literature...someone who possesses the magic wand to transform all visible things into words and all visible movements--into sentences". (Indeed Stifter's calmness -- his willingness to write about anything and everything -- served as an inspiration for Sebald in books such as The Rings of Saturn.)

The story of Rock Crystal is quite sweet, simple, and altogether transfixing. A shoemaker from a small Alpine village called Gschaid marries a dyer's daughter from Millsdorf, which lies on the far side of a mountain pass. This transmountain marriage displeases many in Gschaid and Millsdorf, including the bride's father, who withholds most of his daughter's dowry and refuses to visit her in Gschaid. The bride's mother, however, is not so hard-hearted, especially after the children, Conrad and Susanna, are born:

If mothers love their children and long for them, this is frequently, and to a much higher degree, the case with grandmothers; they occasionally long for their grandchildren with an intensity that borders on morbidness. The dyer's wife very frequently came over to Gschaid now, in order to see the children and to bring them presents. Then she would depart again after giving them kindly advice. But when her age and health did not any longer permit of these frequent journeys and the dyer for this reason objected to them, they bethought themselves of another plan; they changed about, and now the children visited their grandmother.

On the day before Christmas one year, Conrad and Susanna go to have a holiday meal with their grandparents in Millsdorf. They are warned by both their parents and grandparents to "take good care" not to get chilled or overheated, and above all not to go to sleep outdoors. Sure enough, halfway home between Millsdorf and Gschaid, they are surrounded by blinding snow.

Stifter's descriptions of the children's brave journey through the snowstorm are unforgettable:

The footprints they left behind them did not remain visible long, for the extraordinary volume of the descending snow soon covered them up. The snow no longer rustled, in falling upon the needles, but hurriedly and peacefully added itself to the snow already there. The children gathered their garments still more tightly about them, in order to keep the steadily falling snow from coming in on all sides.

Taking shelter beneath rocks "as large as churches", they wait out the storm, which after several bone-chilling hours gives way to an "enormous stillness...in which no snow-crystal seemed to move" and the now-cloudless sky is lit up by "thousands and thousands of simple stars".

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