248 TREES IN THE DOLOMITE DISTBICT. [Feb., 



colour, displayed on mountains ranging up to 11,000 ft. above sea- 

 level. Dolomite mountains are made of magnesian limestone, and 

 have colour of their own. When seen at a distance, they appear pink 

 or yellow ochre, but when one studies a perpendicular cliff of dolomite 

 about a mile off, with the sun full on it, it appears of a fiesh-like 

 yellowish pink colour. There is also a running pattern made by the 

 fissures and rectangular cracks like those of a kind of china called 

 'crackling,' and all this is, as it were, frosted over by the weathering 

 white of rocky excrescenses. The effect is similar to that of pink slips 

 under white muslin, that ladies sometimes wear, but the sun makes 

 the pink glow with a soft light that baffles description, and no Eastern 

 monarch ever dressed his bride in robes so gorgeous as those in 

 which the sun has clothed the Dolomites for untold ages. It is scarcely 

 necessary for me to add that morning and evening Alpine glow 

 produce effects on such mountains, that are never forgotten by those 

 who have seen vast cliffs of fantastic mountain fringes of splintered sum- 

 mits turned to golden red and purple. The view of sunset on the Eose- 

 garten Mountains, as seen from Botzen is well known : and this reminds 

 me, that if any one in that neighbourhood wants to get a good idea of 

 Dolomite scenery in little time, he has only to drive from Botzen 

 to Vigo, and spend the following day in scrambling about the 

 mountains. 



No rock can resist the ever-progressing chemical action of air and 

 water on its surface, and all mountains clothe their feet with rubble ; 

 but the magnesian limestone of the Dolomites has a peculiar tendency 

 to break up. The surface of the rock gets covered with cracks at 

 right angles one to the other ; these cracks deepen, and in course 

 of time the little angular blocks detach themselves from the rock. 

 They have done so for countless ages, and have thereby heaped up 

 precipitous slopes of rubble that reach midway up high mountains. 

 For instance, when at top of the huge mass of the Costonzello Pass, 

 Cimon Delia Palla was seen reared about 3,000 ft. above us, and 

 alongside of it rested a slope that only left about 1,500 uncovered, 

 out of all its 10,968 ft. above sea-level. For a long time these 

 more or less precipitous slopes remain unclothed : they look like 

 spent avalanches, and are mistaken for snow. In time they get 

 covered with self-sown Fir trees, and a forest spreads, fan-like, around 

 the mountain, the youngest trees being nearest to it, the others 

 growing larger and larger till the forest's edge is reached. 



Grass takes as kindly to magnesian limestone as it does to the 

 chalk of our Downs, and the Alpine climber is agreeably surprised to 

 find park-like lawns and springy turf to rest on, seven or eight thou- 

 sand feet above sea-level. San Martino is 4,800 ft. high, and there are 

 beautiful downs, of which the turf is spread over the wreck of ages. An 



