Königssee is an alpine lake in southern Germany that no engine has been allowed to disturb since 1909. It lies in a fjord-shaped trough near Berchtesgaden, walled by cliffs that drop straight into water clear enough to drink, and the battery-powered boats out of Schönau are the only way along it. No road follows the shore. What you hear on the crossing is water on the hull, birds, and the guide, while the rock slides past. Halfway down, the crew stops the boat under a sheer face called the Echowand and plays a flugelhorn at it. That was theatre long before the horn. For generations the boatmen fired a small black-powder cannon at the same cliff; trumpets took over in the 1930s, safer beside the forest and no less clear over the water.
The boat lands you at St. Bartholomä, a pilgrimage church with three red onion domes rebuilt in 1697 on a green meadow at the foot of the Watzmann's east face, the tallest rock wall in the Eastern Alps. The jagged skyline above it is a family in local legend: a cruel king turned to stone with his queen and children, and the smaller peaks along the ridge still carry their names. Pilgrims have walked over the passes from Austria to this meadow since 1635, and in 1688 an overloaded boat taking them home capsized and drowned seventy-one people. They still make the walk. Further on, the boat reaches Salet at the far end, and a few minutes on foot bring you to the Obersee, a smaller and stiller lake held between cliffs. Behind it the Röthbachfall drops 470 metres in a single thin thread, the highest fall in Germany, full on the May snowmelt and down to a trickle by August. Almost the whole shoreline is cliff, so the one place you can simply walk into the water is the shallows by the Schönau dock. Everywhere else the lake stays as it was: a horn against the rock, seven returns, each thinner than the last, and then nothing on the water at all.