It seemed as if some heaven-scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy robe over the bare, precipitous flanks of the rocky summit, and it might at any moment slide like a garment flung carelessly on the nearest chance-support, and, so sliding, crush the village out of being, as the Rossberg when it tumbled over on the valley of Goldau.
Persons have been known to remove from the place, after a short residence in it, because they were haunted day and night by the thought of this awful green wall, piled up into the air over their heads.

They would lie awake of nights, thinking they heard the muffed snapping of roots, as if a thousand acres of the mountain-side were tugging to break away, like the snow from a house-roof, and a hundred thousand trees were clinging with all their fibres to hold back the soil just ready to peel away and crash down with all its rocks and forest-growths.

And yet, by one of those strange contradictions we are constantly finding in human nature, there were natives of the town who would come back thirty or forty years after leaving it, just to nestle under this same threatening mountainside, as old men sun themselves against southward-facing walls.
The old dreams and legends of danger added to the attraction.

If the mountain should ever slide, they had a kind of feeling as if they ought to be there.

It was a fascination like that which the rattlesnake is said to exert.
This comparison naturally suggests the recollection of that other source of danger which was an element in the every-day life of the Rockland people.