TRAVELING IN STYLE : LAST STOP : THE DEVIL ON SKIS : In a Tiny Tyrolean Village, a Young Priest Home for the Holidays Introduces Skiing to the Alps.

Best known today for his “Madeline” children’s stories, Ludwig Bemelmans (1898-1962) was also the author and illustrator of more than 20 other books, including novels, collections of short stories and what might be called works of quasi-autobiography. Several of his books are set in his native Tyrolean Alps--among them his initially charming and ultimately quite chilling 1949 novel, “The Eye of God,” which recounts the fortunes of a village called Aspen.

Aspen does not exist in the Tyrol, but it is obviously based on a real place (or on several real places) that Bemelmans knew well--perhaps partly on St-Christoph, for reasons that will be obvious below. In any case, although Innsbruck, site of the 1964 Winter Olympics, is the most famous ski resort in Austria, Alpine skiing itself--an adaptation of the Scandinavian skiing style, designed specifically for the faster, steeper slopes of the Alps--is said to have been invented in and around St-Christoph. (The town remains a small but popular ski station to this day.) Local sportsman Hannes Schneider, who pioneered the skiing style, first gave skiing lessons to tourists in 1907, not far from St-Christoph in St-Anton Am Arlberg. Whether or not his lessons preceded the startling appearance of Aspen’s own Pius Tannegg flying down a mountain, as recounted in this edited excerpt from “The Eye of God,” is for the reader to decide.

In giving the village of Aspen in the Tyrol face, and telling part of its chronicle to Americans, one will first state that it lies atop the Arlberg, at an altitude of 3,460 feet, at the foot of a pinnacle of triangular shape called “the Eye of God”; that its fauna, flora and landscape are like that of its namesake, Aspen, Colorado, and that its people--in character, appearance, and way of life--are a kind of well-to-do Kentucky mountaineers.

The word Tyrol brings to mind a static Christmas card, cute jigsaw houses crowding around a baroque marzipan church with an onion top, a boy in leather pants and a girl in a Lanz kind of dirndl. The picture of the average Tyrolean village is otherwise. In Aspen the houses are isolated from one another, their roofs spread far out over them, the facade divided into two areas that vary somewhat: Part of the building is stone calcimined white and the other is larch or pine wood which the alpine sun has burned to the color of iodine. The only decorations are the holy inscriptions and pictures of saints. The most evident of these is St. Christopher. He appears on the wall of the church as a giant, thrice life size, carrying the little Jesus through the boulder-strewn river Lech.

The village stretches itself along both banks of the Lech. The fields go up and down in gentle slopes. Little in this landscape is horizontal; it rises or it falls. Light green patches of fat grasses are crowded with short-stemmed flowers, all of them in the simple colors of six pastel crayons; most common is the blue gentian, and in spring and autumn the crocus. The emerald green of the fields is relieved by the somber texture of the pine forests in which the trees stand in orderly rows, and higher up are patches of firs and larches. With even the cheapest binoculars you can see deer and chamois on the great heights. All this is set to a pleasant accompaniment, the sound of an old music box winding down--an unending tune that comes from the cows who stand in the fields and on the high pastures and sound their bells as they graze.

At the college of the Jesuits in Innsbruck, where Pius Tannegg was a student, he roomed with a Norwegian acolyte who spent his free hours practicing on the slopes around Innsbruck on skis he had brought along from home. The sport was new, and he always had an audience of open-mouthed, freezing Tyroleans, who stood stupefied by his performances. Soon he had a pupil in Pius Tannegg. The young priest followed his colleague on self-made skis, and in a few months he was steady on them.

When he went home for Christmas he took his skis along, and he decided to surprise his family and give his village a thrill.

There were three meters of snow in Aspen. At dusk the girl that cooked in the Tanneggs’ house went to the barn to get an armful of wood. Coming back, she turned to look up at the Eye of God. Suddenly the cook dropped the wood and let out a scream that hung in the mountains a long time. She stood for a moment frozen to the spot, then crossed herself and ran into the house. She said that she had seen the devil.

“How did he look?”

“Just the way he’s supposed to look, hairy and black as coal.”

“Did he have a tail and horns?” the father asked. “And a fiery tongue?”

“All I know, he was awfully ugly and so quick I couldn’t see, but I know it was him,” said the girl and drew her shawl close.

Just then the door opened, and he walked in and put a pair of boards against the wall; and there was nothing hellish about him any more, because it was Pius Tannegg, who had come home. He gave his priestly blessing to the bewildered cook and his family.

The next day they all stood outside the house, and with them the kitchen maid, the children of the village, and later everybody in Aspen who could walk, and he came down again from the Eye of God, where he was like a black match, and a minute later passed them with his knees bent, suddenly the big man; and as quickly again, like a falcon riding the air, he sank below and out of sight in his cloud of powder snow--and that is how skiing came to Aspen.