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From Luz to Gavarnie is eighteen miles. It is enjoined upon every living creature able to mount a horse, a mule, or any quadruped whatever, to visit Gavarnie; in default of other beasts, he should, putting aside all shame, bestride an ass. Ladies and convalescents are taken there in sedan-chairs.
Otherwise, think what a figure you will make on your return.
“You come from the Pyrenees; you’ve seen Gavarnie?”
“No.”
What then did you go to the Pyrenees for?
You hang your head, and your friend triumphs, especially if he was bored at Gavarnie. You undergo a description of Gavarnie after the last edition of the guide-book. Gavarnie is a sublimesight; tourists go sixty miles out of their way to see it; the Duchess d’Angoulême had herself carried to the furthest rocks; Lord Bute, when he saw it for the first time, cried: “If I were now at the extremity of India, and suspected the existence of what I see at this moment, I should immediately leave in order to enjoy and admire it!” You are overwhelmed with quotations and supercilious smiles; you are convicted of laziness, of dulness of mind, and, as certain English travellers say, ofunæsthetic insensibility.
There are but two resources: to learn a description by heart, or to make the journey. I have made the journey, and am going to give the description.
We leave at six o’clock in the morning, by the road to Scia, in the fog, without seeing at first anything beyond great confused forms of trees and rocks. At the end of a quarter of an hour, we hear along the pathway a noise of sharp cries drawing near: it was a funeral procession coming from Scia. Two men bore a small coffin under a white shroud; behind came four herdsmen in long cloaks and brown capuchons, silent, with bent heads; four women followed in black mantles. It was theywho uttered those monotonous and piercing lamentations; one knew not if they were wailing or praying. They walked with long steps through the cold mist, without stopping or looking at any one, and were going to bury the poor body in the cemetery at Luz.
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At Scia the road passes over a small bridge very high up, which commands another bridge, gray and abandoned. The double tier of arches bends gracefully over the blue torrent; meanwhile a pale light already floats in the diaphanous mist; a golden gauze undulates above theGave; the aërial veil grows thin and will soon vanish.
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Nothing can convey the idea of this light, so youthful, timid and smiling, which glitters like the bluish wings of a dragon-fly that is pursued and is taken captive in a net of fog. Beneath, the boiling water is engulfed in a narrow conduit and leaps like a mill-race. The column of foam, thirty feet high, falls with a furious din, and its glaucous waves, heaped together in the deep ravine, dash against each other and are broken upon a line of fallen rocks. Other enormous rocks, debris of the same mountain, hang above the road, their squared heads crowned with brambles for hair; ranged in impregnable line, they seem to watch the torments of the Gave, which their brothers hold beneath themselves crushed and subdued.
We turn a second bridge and enter the plain of Gèdres, verdant and cultivated, where the hay is in cocks; they are harvesting; our horses walk between two hedges of hazel; we go along by orchards; but the mountain is ever near; the guide shows us a rock three times the height of a man, which, two years ago, rolled down and demolished a house.We encounter several singular caravans: a band of young priests in black hats, black gloves, black cassocks tucked up, black stockings, very apparent, novices in horsemanship who bound at every step, like the Gave; a big, jolly round man, in a sedan-chair, his hands crossed over his belly, who looks on us with a paternal air, and reads his newspaper; three ladies of sufficiently ripe age, very slender, very lean, very stiff, who, for dignity’s sake, set their beasts on a trot as we draw near them. The cicisbeo is a bony cartilaginous gentleman, fixed perpendicularly on his saddle like a telegraph-pole. We hear a harsh clucking, as of a choked hen, and we recognize the English tongue.
As for the French nation, it is but poorly represented at Gèdres. First appears a long, mouldy custom-house officer, who indorses the permission to pass of the horses; with his once green coat the poor man had the air of having sojourned a week in the river. No sooner has he let us go, than a blackguard band, boys and girls, pounces upon us; some stretch out their hands, others wish to sell stones to us; they motion to the guide to stop; they claim the travellers; two or three hold the bridle of each horse, and all cry in chorus: “The grotto! the grotto!” There is nothing for it but to resign ourselves and see the grotto.
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A servant opens a door, makes us descend two staircases, throws a lump of earth in passing into a lagune, to awaken the sleeping fish, takes half-a-dozen steps over a couple of planks. “Well, the grotto?”—“Behold it, Monsieur.” We see a streamlet of water between two rocks overhung with ash-trees. “Is that all?” She does not understand, opens her eyes wide and goes away. We ascend again and read this inscription:The charge for seeing the grotto is ten cents.The matter is all explained. The peasants of the Pyrenees are not wanting in brains.
Beyond Gèdres is a wild valley called Chaos, which is well named. After quarter of an hour’s journey there, the trees disappear, then the juniper and the box, and finally the moss; the Gave is no longer seen; all noises are hushed. It is a dead solitude peopled with wrecks. Three avalanches of rocks and crushed flint have come down from the summit to the very bottom. The horrid tide, high and a quarter of a league in length, spreads out like waves its myriads of sterile stones, and the inclined sheet seems still to glide towards inundating the gorge. These stones are shattered and pulverized; their living fractures and thin harsh points wound the eye; they are still bruising and crushingeach other. Not a bush, not a spear of grass; the arid grayish train burns beneath a sun of brass; its débris are scorched to a dull hue, as in a furnace. A ruined mountain is more desolate than any human ruin.
A hundred paces further on, the aspect of the valley becomes formidable. Troops of mammoths and mastodons in stone lie crouching over the eastern declivity, one above another, and heaped up over the whole slope. These colossal ridges shine with a tawny hue like iron rust; the most enormous of them drink the water of the river at their base. They look as if warming their bronzed skin in the sun, and sleep, turned over, stretched out on their side, resting in all attitudes, and always gigantic and frightful. Their deformed paws are curled up; their bodies half buried in the earth; their monstrous backs rest one upon another. When you enter into the midst of the prodigious band, the horizon disappears, the blocks rise fifty feet into the air; the road winds painfully among the overhanging masses; men and horses seem but dwarfs; these rusted edges mount in stages to the very summit, and the dark hanging army seems ready to fall on the human insects which come to trouble its sleep.
Once upon a time, the mountain, in a paroxysm of fever, shook its summits like a cathedral that is falling in.
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A few points resisted, and their embattled turrets are drawn out in line on the crest; but their layers are dislocated, their sides creviced, their points jagged.
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The whole shattered ridge totters. Beneath them the rock fails suddenly in a living and still bleeding wound. The splinters are lower down, strewn over the declivity. The tumbled rocks are sustained one upon another, and man today passes in safety amidst the disaster. But what a day was that of the ruin! It is not very ancient, perhaps of the sixth century, and the year of the terrible earthquake told of by Gregory of Tours. If a man could without perishing have seen thesummits split, totter and fall, the two seas of rock come bounding into the gorge, meet one another and grind each other amidst a shower of sparks, he would have looked upon the grandest spectacle ever seen by human eyes.
On the west, a perpendicular mole, crannied like an old ruin, lifts itself straight up towards the sky. A leprosy of yellowish moss has incrusted its pores, and has clothed it all over with a sinister livery. This livid robe upon this parched stone has a splendid effect. Nothing is uglier than the chalky flints that are drawn from the quarry; just dug up, they seem cold and damp in their whitish shroud; they are not used to the sun; they make a contrast with the rest. But the rock that has lived in the air for ten thousand years, where the light has every day laid on and melted its metallic tints, is the friend of the sun, and carries its mantle upon its shoulders; it has no need of a garment of verdure; if it suffers from parasitic vegetations, it sticks them to its sides and imprints them with its colors. The threatening tones with which it clothes itself suits the free sky, the naked landscape, the powerful heat that environs it; it is alive like a plant; only it is of another age, one more severe and stronger than that in which we vegetate.
Gavarnie is a very ordinary village, commanding a view of the amphitheatre we are come to see. After you have left it, it is still necessary to go three miles through a melancholy plain, half buried in sand by the winter inundations; the waters of the Gave are muddy and dull; a cold wind whistles from the amphitheatre; the glaciers, strewn with mud and stones, are stuck to the declivity like patches of dirty plaster. The mountains are bald and ravined by cascades; black cones of scattered firs climb them like routed soldiers; a meagre and wan turf wretchedly clothes their mutilated heads. The horses ford the Gave stumblingly, chilled by the water coming from the snows. In this wasted solitude you meet, all of a sudden, the most smiling parterre. A throng of the lovely iris crowds itself into the bed of a dried torrent: the sun stripes with rays of gold their velvety petals of tender blue; the harvest of plumes winds with the sinuosities of the bank, and the eye follows over the whole plain the folds of the rivulet of flowers.
We climb a last eminence, sown with iris and with stones. There is a hut where you breakfast and leave the horses. You arm yourself with a stout stick, and descend upon the glaciers of the amphitheatre.
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These glaciers are very ugly, very dirty, very uneven, very slippery; at every step you run the risk of falling, and if you fall it is on sharp stones or into deep holes. They look like heaps of old plaster-work, and those who have admired them have a stock of admiration for sale.
The water has pierced them so that you walk upon bridges of snow. These bridges have the appearance of kitchen air-holes; the water is swallowed up in a very low archway, and, when you look closely, you get a distinct sight of a black hole. An Englishman who wished to enjoy the view, allowed himself to fall, and came out half dead, “with the rapidity of a trout.” We left such experiments to the trout and the English.
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After the glaciers we find a sloping esplanade; we climb for ten minutes bruising our feet upon fragments of sharp rock. Since leaving the hut we have not lifted our eyes, in order to reserve for ourselves an unbroken sensation. Here at last we look.A wall of granite crowned with snow hollows itself before us in a gigantic amphitheatre. This amphitheatre is twelve hundred feet high, nearly three miles in circumference, three tiers of perpendicular walls, and in each tier thousands of steps.
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The valley ends there; the wall is a single block, and impregnable. The other summits might fall, but its massive layers would not be moved. The mind is overwhelmed by the idea of a stability that cannot be shaken and an assured eternity. There is the boundary of two countries and two races; this it is that Roland wanted to break, when with a sword-stroke he opened a breach in the summit. But the immense wound disappeared in the immensity of the conquered wall.
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Three sheets of snow are spread out over the three tiers of layers. The sun falls with all its force upon; this virginal robe without being able to make it shine. It will preserve its dead whiteness. All this grandeur is austere; the air is chilled beneath the noonday rays; great, damp shadows creep along the foot of the walls. It is the everlasting winter and the nakedness of the desert. The sole inhabitants are the cascades assembled to form the Gave.
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The streamlets of water come by thousands from the highest layer, leap from step to step, cross their stripes of foam, wind, unite and fall by a dozen brooks that slide from the last layer in flaky streaks to lose themselves in the glaciers of the bottom. The thirteenth cascade on the left is twelve hundred and sixty-six feethigh. It falls slowly, like a dropping cloud, or the unfolding of a muslin veil; the air softens its fall; the eye follows complacently the graceful undulation of the beautiful airy veil. It glides the length of the rock, and seems to float rather than to fall. The sun shines, through its plume, with the softest and loveliest splendor. It reaches the bottom like a bouquet of slender waving feathers, and springs backward in a silver dust; the fresh and transparent mist swings about the rock it bathes, and its rebounding train mounts lightly along the courses. No stir in the air; no noise, no living creature in this solitude. You hear only the monotonous murmur of the cascades, resembling the rustle of the leaves that the wind stirs in the forest.
On our return, we seated ourselves at the door of the hut. It is a poor, squat little house, heavily supported upon thick walls; the knotty joists of the ceiling retain their bark. It is indeed necessary that it should be able to stand out alone against the snows of winter. You find everywhere the imprint of the terrible months it has gone through. Two dead fir-trees stand erect at the door. The garden, three feet square, is defended by enormous walls of piled-up slates. The low and black stable leaves neither foot-hold nor entry for the winds. A lean colt was seeking a little grass among the stones.
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A small bull, with surly air, looked at us out of the sides of his eyes; the animals, the trees and the site, wore a threatening or melancholy aspect. But in the clefts of a rock were growing some admirable buttercups, lustrous and splendid, which looked as if painted by a ray of sunshine.
At the village we met our companions of the journey who had sat down there.. The good tourists get fatigued, stop ordinarily at the inn, take a substantial dinner, have a chair brought to the door, and digest while looking at the amphitheatre, which from there appears about as high as a house. After this they return, praising the sublime sight, and very glad that they have come to the Pyrenees.
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We ought to be useful to our fellow-mortals; I have climbed the Bergonz in order to have at least one ascent to tell about.
A stony, zigzag pathway excoriates the green mountain with its whitish track. The view changes with every turn. Above and below us are meadows with girls making hay, and little houses stuck to the declivity like swallows’ nests. Lower down, an immense pit of black rock, to which from all sides hasten streams of silver. The higher up we are, the more the valleys are contracted and fade from sight; the more the gray mountainsenlarge and spread themselves in all their hugeness. Suddenly, beneath the burning sun, the perspective becomes confused; we feel the cold and damp touch of some unknown and invisible being. A moment after, the air clears up, and we perceive behind us the white, rounded back of a beautiful cloud fleeing into the distance, and whose shadow glides lightly over the slope. The useful herbage soon disappears; scorched mosses, thousands of rhododendrons clothe the barren escarpments; the road is damaged by the force of the hidden springs; it is encumbered with rolling stones. It turns with every ten paces, in order to conquer the steepness of the slopes. You reach at last a naked ridge, where you dismount from your horse; here begins the top of the mountain. You walk for ten minutes over a carpet of serried heather, and you are upon the highest summit.
What a view! Everything human disappears; villages, enclosures, cultivations, all seem like the work of ants. I have two valleys under my eyes, which seem two little bands of earth lost in a blue funnel. Nothing exists here but the mountains. Our roads and our works have scratched upon them an imperceptible point; we are mites, who lodge, between two awakings, under one of the hairs of an elephant. Our civilization is a pretty, miniature toy, with which nature amuses herself fora moment, and which presently she will break.
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You see nothing but a throng of mountains seated under the burning dome of heaven. They are ranged in an amphitheatre, like a council of immovable and eternal being’s. All considerations are overpowered by the sensation of immensity: monstrous ridges which stretch themselves out, gigantic, bony spines, ploughed flanks that drop down precipitously into indistinguishable depths.
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It is as though you were in a bark in the middle of the sea. The mountain-chains clash like billows. The tops are sharp and jagged like the crests of uplifted waves; they come from all sides, athwart each other, piled one above another, bristling, innumerable, and the flood of granite mounts high into the sky at the four corners of the horizon. On the north, the valleys of Luz and Argelès open up in the plain by a bluish vista, shining with a dead splendor resembling two ewers of burnished pewter. On the west the chain of Bareges stretches like a saw as far as the Pic du Midi, a huge, ragged-edged axe, marked with patches of snow; on the east, lines of leaning fir-trees mount to the assault of the summits. In the south an army of embattled peaks, of ridges cut to the quick, squared towers, spires, perpendicular escarpments, lifts itself beneath a mantle of snow; the glaciers glitter between the dark rocks; the black ledges stand out with an extraordinary relief against the deep blue. These rude forms pain the eye; you are oppressively alive to the rigidness of the masses of granite which have burst through the crust of our planet, and the invincible ruggedness of the rock that is lifted above the clouds. This chaos of violently broken lines tells of the effort of forces of which we have no longer any idea.Since then Nature has grown mild; she rounds and softens the forms she moulds; she embroiders in the valleys her leafy robe, and, as an industrious artist, she shapes the delicate foliage of her plants. Here, in her primitive barbarism, she only knew how to cleave the blocks and heap up the rough masses of her Cyclopean constructions. But her monument is sublime, worthy of the heaven it has for a vault and the sun which is its torch.
Geology is a noble science. Upon this summit theories grow lively; the arguments of the books breathe new life into the story of the mountains, and the past appears grander than the present. This country was in the beginning a solitary and boiling sea, then slowly cooled, finally peopled by living creatures and built up by their debris. Thus were formed the ancient limestones, the slates of transition and several of the secondary rocks. What myriads of ages are accumulated in a single phrase! Time is a solitude in which we set up here and there our boundaries; they reveal its immensity, but do not measure it.
This crust cleaves, and a long wave of molten granite heaves itself up, forming the lofty chain ofthe Gave, of the Nestes, the Garonne, the Mala-detta, Néouvielle.
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From here you see Néouvielle in the north-east. How this wall of fire worked in lifting itself amidst this upturned sea, the imagination of man will never conceive. The liquid mass of granite formed a paste among the rocks; the lower layers were changed into slate beneath the fiery blast; the level grounds rose up, and were overturned. The subterranean stream rose with an effort so abrupt, that they were stuck to its flanks in layers almost perpendicular. “It was congealed in torment, and its agitation is still painted in its petrified waves.”
How much time rolled away between this revolution and the next? Monuments are wanting; the centuries have left no traces. There is a page torn out in the history of the earth. Our ignorance like our knowledge overwhelms us. We see one infinity, and from it we divine another which we do not see.
At last the ocean changed its bed, perhaps from the uplifting of America; from the south-west came a sea to burst upon the chain. The shock fell upon the dark embattled barrier that you see towards Gavarnie. There was a frightful destruction of marine animals: Their corpses have formed the shelly banks that you cross in mounting to la Brèche; several layers of la Brèche, of theTaillon and of Mont Perdu, are fields still fetid with death. The rolling sea, tearing up its bed, drifted it against the wall of rocks, piled it against the sides, heaped it upon the summits, set mountain upon mountain, covered the immense rock, and oscillated in furious currents in its ravaged basin.
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I seemed to see on the horizon the oozy surface coming higher than the summits, lifting its waves against the sky, eddying in the valleys, and howling above the drowned mountains like a tempest.
That sea was bringing half of the Pyrenees; its raging waters overlaid the primitive declivity with calcareous strata, tilted and torn; upon these the quieted waters deposited the high horizontal layers.Yonder, in the south-west, the Vignemale is covered with them. In order to raise up the summits, generations of marine creatures were born and died silent and inert populations which swarmed in the warm ooze, and watched through their green waves the rays of the blue-tinged sun. They have perished along with their sepulchre; the storms have torn open the banks where they had buried themselves, and these shreds of their wreck scarce tell how many myriads of centuries this shrouded world has seen pass away.
One day at last, the great mountains which form the horizon on the south were seen to grow, Troumousse, the Vignemale, Mont Perdu, and all the summits that surround Gèdres. The soil had burst open a second time. A wave of new granite arose, laden with the ancient granite, and with the prodigious mass of the limestones; the alluvia rose to more than ten thousand feet; the ancient summits of pure granite were surpassed; the beds of shells were lifted into the clouds, and the upheaved tops found themselves forever above the seas.
Two seas have dwelt upon these summits; two streams of burning rock have erected these chains. What will be the next revolution? How long time will man yet last? A contraction of the crust which bears him will cause a wave of lava to gush forth or will displace the level of the seas. We livebetween two accidents of the soil; our history occupies, with room to spare, a line in the history of the earth; our life depends upon a variation in the heat; our duration is for a moment, and our force a nothing. We resemble the little blue forget-me-nots which you pluck as you go down the slope; their form is delicate, their structure admirable; nature lavishes them and crushes them; she uses all her industry in shaping them, and all her carelessness in destroying them. There is more art in them than in the whole mountain. Have they any ground for pretending that the mountain was made for them?
Paul has climbed the Pic du Midi of Bigorre: here is his journal of the trip:—
“Set out in the mist at four o’clock in the morning. The pastures of Tau through the mist; the mist is distinctly visible. The lake of Oncet through the mist; same view.
“Howker of the Five Bears. Several whitish or grayish spots on a whitish or grayish ground. To form an idea of it, look at five or six wafers, of a dirty white, stuck behind a leaf of blotting-paper.
“Beginning of the steep rise; ascent at a footpace, head of one to tail of another; this recalls tome Leblanc’s riding-school, and the fifty horses advancing gracefully in the saw-dust, each one with his nose against the tail of the one before him, and his tail against the nose of his follower, as it used to be on Thursdays, the school-day for going out and for the riding lesson. I cradle myself voluptuously in the poetical remembrance.
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“First hour: view of the back of my guide and the hind-quarters of his horse. The guide has a vest of bottle-green velvet, darned in two places, on the right and on the left; the horse is a dirty brown and bears the marks of the whip. Several big pebbles in the pathway. Fog. I meditate on German philosophy."Second hour: the view enlarges; I perceive the left eye of the guide’s horse. That eye is blind; it loses nothing.
“Third hour: the view broadens more. View of the hind-quarters of two horses and two tourists’ vests fifteen feet above us. Gray vests, red girdles, berets. They swear and I swear; that consoles us a little. .
“Fourth hour: joy and transports; the guide promises me for the summit the view of a sea of clouds.
“Arrival: view of the sea of clouds. Unhappily we are in one of the clouds. Appearance that of a vapor bath when one is in the bath.
“Benefits: cold in the head, rheumatism in the feet, lumbago, freezing, such happiness as a man might feel who had danced attendance for eight hours in an ante-chamber without fire.
“And this happens often?
“Twice out of three times. The guides swear it does not.”
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The beeches push high upon the declivities, even beyond three thousand feet. Their huge pillars strike down into the hollows where earth is gathered. Their roots enter into the clefts of the rock, lift it, and come creeping to the surface like a family of snakes. Their skin, white and tender in the plains, is changed into a grayish and solid bark; their tenacious leaves shine with a vigorous green, beneath the sun which cannot penetrate them. They live isolated, because they need space, and range themselves at intervals one above another like lines of towers. From afar, between the dull heather, their mound rises splendid with light, and sounds with its hundred thousand leaves as with so many little bells of horn.
But the real inhabitants of the mountains are the pines, geometrical trees, akin to the ferruginous blocks hewn by the primitive eruptions. The vegetation of the plains unfolds itself in undulating forms with all the graceful caprices of liberty and wealth. The pines, on the other hand, seem scarcely alive; their shaft rises in a perpendicular line along the rocks; their horizontal branches part from the trunk at right angles, equal as the radii of a circle, and the entire tree is a cone terminated by a naked spike. The dull little blades that answer for leaves have a melancholy hue, without transparency or lustre; they seem hostile to the light; they neither reflect it, nor allow it to pass, they extinguish it; hardly does the noonday sun fringe them with a bluish reflection. Ten paces away, beneath such an aureole, the black pyramid cuts the horizon like an opaque mass. They crowd together in files under their funereal mantles. Their forests are silent as solitudes; the whistle of the wind makes there no noise; it glides over the stiff beard of the leaves without stirring or rubbing them together. One hears no sound save the whispering of the tops and the shrivelling of the little yellowish lamels which fall in showers as soon as you touch a branch.
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The turf is dead, the soil naked; you walk in the shade beneath an inanimate verdure, among pale shafts which rise like tapers. A strong odor fills the air, resembling the perfume of aromatics. The impression is that made by a deserted cathedral, while, after a ceremony, the smell of incense still floats under the arches, and the declining day outlines far away in the obscurity the forest of pillars.
They live in families and expel the other trees from their domain. Often, in a wasted gorge, they may be seen like a mourning drapery descending among the white glaciers. They love the cold, and in winter remain clothed in snow. Spring does not renew them; you see only a few green lines run through the foliage; they soon grow dark like the rest. But when the tree springs from a spot of deep earth, and rises to a height of a hundred feet, smooth and straight as the mast of a ship, the mind with buoyancy follows to the very summit the flight of its inflexible form, and the vegetable column seems as grand as the mountain which nurtures it.
Higher up, on the barren steeps, the yellowish box twists its knotty feet beneath the stones. It is a melancholy and tenacious creature, stuntedand thrust back upon itself; overborne amidst the rocks, it dares not shoot upward nor spread. Its small thick leaves follow each other in monotonous rows, clumsily oval and of a formal regularity. Its stem, short and grayish, is rough to the touch; the round fruit encloses black capsules, hard as ebony, that must be broken open for the seed. Everything in the plant is calculated with a view to utility: it thinks only of lasting and resisting; it has neither ornaments, elegance, nor richness; it expends its sap only in solid tissues, in dull colors, in durable fibres. It is an economical and active housewife, the only thing capable of vegetating in the quagmires that it fills.
If you continue to ascend, the trees begin to fail. The brush-fir creeps in a carpet of turf. The rhododendrons grow in tufts and crown the mountain with rosy clusters. The heather crowds its white bunches, small, open, vase-shaped flowers, from which springs a crown of garnet stamens. In the sheltered hollows, the blue campanulas swing their pretty bells; the least wind lays them low; they live for all that, and smile, trembling and graceful.
But, among all these flowers nourished with light and pure air, the most precious is the thornless rose. Never did petals form a frailer and lovelier corolla; never did a vermilion so vivid color a more delicate tissue.