Nathan Haskell Dole

“ But, seen from a distance, the glaciers of the high Alps are most impressive. And to think that a very slight lowering of the average temperature of the year would bring these great cold snaky monsters over the habitations of men again. The ice-age might once more be renewed and wipe out our civilization.
While we were on the Gornergrat I saw and heard an avalanche. A small snow-ball may start one. Roaring louder and louder with thunderous echoes it hurls itself down the steep incline, and, like a colossal, titanic bomb-shell, it bursts into the valley. ”

“ The fresh young grass covers the earth with an emerald-colored carpet. The willows swing their silvery catkins at the edges of the streams, while along the edges of the forests gleams the silvery calix of the wood-anemone. Here, the vines are slower; the walnut-trees have not been hasty in opening their big buds and, as the shores of the Lake of Geneva have very little other vegetation than walnut-trees and vines, this region presents, during the first fine days, an aspect not calculated to seduce the eye or speak to the imagination. ”

“ Such an exploit would be too fatiguing for one of my venerable years, but I have seen photographs of the view from the top of the Dent du Midi, and when one has been on one mountain, even though it be not quite thirty-three hundred meters high, the views are only variants, even when one has Mont Blanc piled up across a marvellous valley filled with glaciers and azure lakes.
It is wonderful how quickly in her slow way this same cruel Mother Nature repairs the damage she does—damage as seen by human eyes. ”

“ I have seen, on August days, lofty mountains of cloud piled up on the horizon, vast pearly cliffs, keenly outlined pinnacles, and I have imagined that they were the Himalayas—Kunchinjunga or Everest—or the Caucasus topped by Elbruz—or the Andes lifting on high Huascarán or Coropuna—or more frequently the Alps crowned by Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau. For a moment the illusion is perfect, but alas! they change before your very eyes—perhaps not more rapidly than our earthly ranges in the eyes of the Deity to whom a thousand years is but a day. They, too, are changing, changing. ”

“ ALPINE HERDSMEN.
“This same lover of mountains finds even the snow different. On the Jura it falls on dark-green firs and pines and, mingling with the dreary foliage, gives forth only a sad and cautious half-smile. But in the Alps the white snow makes the mountains joyous. He compares it to a virginal mantle, embroidered with green and azure. When the morning has, for them, brought on the early day, they seem to sing gaily their reveille and their youth; a hymn of light floats high in the air above their heads and finds an echo of joy and of love in the hearts of mortals. ”

“ Toward the north the view embraces the great Lake Leman, and almost all the mountains of Burgundy and those of Switzerland in the distance distinguished by blue shadows. Nearer are the cities and lands of Geneva and Bern, an infinity of villages, churches, castles, rivers, ponds, forests, meadows, vineyards, hills, roads, and the like in such variety that the eye receives from it a wonderful recreation and nothing in the world can be seen more beautiful. ”

“ You might believe yourself in some Alpine valley, over which towers a solitary peak while around it cluster the mists driven by the wind.’ He grows still more enthusiastic at the beauty of it when the chestnut-trees are in bloom, contrasting with the violet roofs below and surrounded by the azure aureole of the lake and the mountains and he speaks of its ‘graceful energy’ against the golden background. ”

“ Men were evidently hurrying to make the boats safe from the gale, if it should develop into a real storm.
The lake approach to Geneva even under a grey and threatening sky gives as it were the key-note to its extraordinary charm. Its noble waterfront, its lofty buildings, its background of escarped rocks and its general air of prosperity, beckon a friendly welcome. We darted in between the two phares or lighthouses which decorate the long jetties, and turning aside from the surf current, we came alongside the pleasant Quai du Mont Blanc. ”

“ One evening this spectacle, though still fascinating, had something saddening about it. The mountains of Savoy were enveloped in a thick veil, surmounted by a canopy of pale azure illuminated by the dying sun. The veil grew larger toward Lausanne and formed a sort of chain of vapors, heaped up and climbing into space. A few lines of the color of blood streaked these gloomy masses. Such might have been the earth after the deluges of primitive times, when a ray of light began to smile across the darkness on a desolate universe. ”

“ No longer has the wily boatman, as he steers his lateen-sailed lochère, any excuse for telling his occasional passenger (as he used to tell James Fenimore Cooper) that the water is bottomless. Every fish that swims in it is known and every bird that floats on its broad bosom.
A lake is by no means a lazy body of water and Leman, or Lake Geneva, as it is often called, is not so much a lake as it is a swollen river. If the Rhône is an artery, the lake is a sort of aneurism; there is a current from one end to the other which keeps it constantly changing. ”

“ We went near enough to the shore to see the castle of Ripaille, where Duke Victor Amédée of Savoy had his hermitage. No wonder he did not want to leave it for the burdens of a contested papal tiara. I would not object to settle down in such a retreat—provided I had a few friends to share it. In his day probably the Jura was much more beautiful, because their slopes were clad in splendid forests. It is a nature-tragedy that when mountains are once deforested either by the axe of man or by fire, the flesh of the range melts away and can never form again ”

“ An orange light then stained the west at the place where the mountains of Savoy dip down into the lake. These mountains stood out boldly against the blazing horizon. At the right a purple zone crowned the hills and grew feebler toward Vevey; in the midst of the lake flamed a marvellous fire, while the waters were somber under Villeneuve, of a pallid blue under Veytaux, and of a pearly gray color, cut by red bands, along the shores of Savoy. ”

“ For instance, when he first came to the Grimsel pass, between Bern and Valais, it was radiant with fertile beauty; the climate was warm; it supported a happy population; but he passed like a desolating breath, and when, years later, he came again, in that never-ceasing round, all was changed. He wept and his tears formed “The Lake of the Dead”—Der Totensee. In it lie the bones of those who perished in that terrible struggle between the Austrians and the French in 1799. There are all sorts of wonderful legends which one might collect. ”

“ I shall never forget the first expedition that I made to Les Treize Arbres and the Crêt de Grange Tournier, the highest point of the Salève, with their superb view up the lake and far into the valley of the Rhône. Yet the Salève is not a part of Geneva; it is not even Swiss; it belongs to France. If Switzerland and Savoy should at the present time have a war it would be easy enough for big guns to be mounted on those heights and batter down the helpless city; compared with what war is now the most dramatic event in Genevan history seems rather ludicrous ”

“ Year after year appear the great crevasses where the glacier tumbles over a precipice and becomes a cataract of ice, yet remains the same. Verily the mountains themselves, seen by the great eye of the Father of Time are moving; he sees that the whole crest of the Alps is slowly moving northward: this is proved by the fact that one side is steeper than the other.
It is rather amusing to see how many persons have been disgusted with their first view of a glacier. They are covered, in many cases, with mud, and look dirty and unkempt. They plow out the rocks ”

“ The disreputable exploits of the river, before it was thus tamed and disciplined, explain why the region back of Villeneuve, regarded as desolate and uncultivated, is or has been compared to the vineyard-laden and fertile slopes of the Jorat.
But we are really not mountain-climbing; we are circling the lake and, except where some river or torrent forms what is technically called a cone, projecting out into the water, we are able to skirt close to the beine, often under tremendous, beetling cliffs. They become higher and higher, more and more romantic and magnificent. ”

“ There may be a great exhilaration and excitement and delight in climbing to the top of lofty mountains, but, when one has achieved the summit, even if the view be not cut off by clouds, the distances are so enormous that for poor mortal eyes the result is most unsatisfactory. Huddled together, peak with peak, an indistinguishable mass, lie other mountains and ranges of mountains, with bottomless valleys; the effect is as unsatisfactory as the air is rare. One can see nothing clearly; one is out of one’s element, so to speak; one can hardly breathe. ”

“ Even down below in the valley our eyes were still fastened upon the ice-mountains far across. The farthest away, at the left in the Oberland, seemed to be melting in a thin fiery vapor; those nearest still stood with well-marked red sides facing us; gradually [Pg 307] they grew white, green, grey. It looked almost disquieting. As a mighty body dies from without in toward the heart, so all of them slowly grew pale up toward Mont Blanc, whose broad bosom still glowed rosy and seemed to preserve for us a reddish glow. ”

“ The snow has fallen in thick blankets, it has changed by pressure into firn, and then becomes a river of ice, flowing down into the valleys, gouging out deep ruts and, when they come into the influence of the summer sun, melting into torrents and rushing down, heaping up against obstacles, forming lakes, and then again finding a passage down, ever down, until they mingle with the sea. ”

“ The colossal fortifications of prehistoric Greece, the edifices of the stone age, the dizzy escarpments raised by the Incas in their mountain fastnesses, and all the marvels of barbaric architecture in the depths of the Caucasus, to say nothing of the hundreds of castles vanished or still left more or less ruined throughout Europe, are a proof of the industry and the faithfulness of millions of human beings whose names, if they had any designation, are gone for ever. ”

“ To his niece, Madame de Fontaine: “The idlers of Paris think that Switzerland is a savage country; they would be very much astonished if they saw ‘Zaire’ better played at Lausanne than it is played at Paris; they would be still more surprised to see two hundred spectators as good judges as there are in Europe.... I have made tears flow from all the Swiss eyes.” When he moved to Geneva, and especially when he bought the château of Ferney, so that he might be a thorn in the flesh of Genevese sanctimoniousness, he was older, but still played his parts. ”

“ We also, of this younger generation, judge Ferney by comparing it with Coppet, coming down from Coppet. The beauty of its site, the woods which shadow it, the sex of its poet, the air of enthusiasm we breathe there, the elegant company, the glorious names, the walks by the lake, the mornings in the park, the mysteries [Pg 283] and the inevitable storms which we surmise, all contribute to idealize the place for us. Coppet is the Elysium which every disciple of Jean-Jacques would gladly give to the mistress of his dreams.... ”

“ But the view from the rounded summit well repaid us for our pains. Directly across, so that one could almost leap it, is the jagged peak of the Rimpfischhorn, its black dorsal fin sticking out of the dazzling snow as ugly, though not so prominently uprising, as the Matterhorn. Switzerland,” he added, “for a little country has more ups and downs in it than any other in the world.”
At Visp our Moto was waiting for us. Some of the people whom we met did not believe that we had been permitted to ascend the Rhône valley, as it had been at one time closed to motor-cars. ”

“ From La Dent de Morcles to La Dent du Midi what peaks have one after the other been worn down and disappeared! The great glaciers have carried far away all this early détritus, an enormous bulk the secret of which the waters of Lake Leman possibly know more than we do.
“What has taken place since then, from the time when men first appeared in these localities cannot compare with those primal convulsions; still there is enough to overwhelm the imagination of man; it is too much for their feeble dwellings to endure. ”