Day by day, among the heights, I grew to
feel that I wanted some explanation of why the strange panorama of
splintered crag and hanging ice-fall was there at all. It certainly
is not there with any reference to man--at least it is hard to
believe that it is all there that human beings may take a
refreshing holiday in the midst of it. When one penetrates
Switzerland by the green pine-clad valleys, passing through and
beneath those delicious upland villages, each clustering round a
church with a glittering cupola, the wooden houses with their brown
fronts, their big eaves, perched up aloft at such pleasant angles,
one thinks of Switzerland as an inhabited land of valleys, with
screens and backgrounds of peaks and snowfields; but when one goes
up higher still, and gets up to the top of one of the peaks, one
sees that Switzerland is really a region of barren ridges, millions
of acres of cold stones and ice, with a few little green cracks
among the mountain bases, where men have crept to live; and that
man is only tolerated there.
One day I was out with a guide on a peak at sunrise. Behind the
bleak and shadowy ridges there stole a flush of awakening dawn;
then came a line of the purest yellow light, touching the crags and
snowfields with sharp blue shadows; the lemon-coloured radiance
passed into fiery gold, the gold flushed to crimson, and then the
sun leapt into sight, and shed the light of day upon the troubled
sea of mountains.
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