A COLLECTING DAY ABOVE AROLLA 69 
of the ‘Turtmann Thal, and Sion, Sierre, Martigny, each 
corresponds with the gap that opens up towards the 
terrific snows above. By false guidance, however, I 
alighted one steaming afternoon at the wrong station, 
and had two hours to wait before a train would take me 
back to Sierre, whence, it appeared, you climb dizzily up 
the rampart of the mountains until you come into the 
Val d’Hermance, and so, past Evolena, to Arolla. 
Few situations of life can possibly be more overpower- 
ing than the valley of the Rhone on a hot afternoon in July. 
It is so very large, so very flat, so very hot—and, above all, 
it is so straitly bounded, in front and behind, by so 
crushing, so annihilating a wall of mountains, which in 
their turn—oh horror!—are divined, even from the depths, 
not to be themselves the pinnacles of the world’s roof that 
they appear, but mere subordinate pedestals to the real 
snow region above, whose awful teeth appear here and 
there as one raises one’s eyes to the distances overhead. 
The first part of the journey from Sierre, however, is 
made luxuriously by carriage, and it is wonderful in what 
serene majesty the mountains open up before one as one 
goes, no longer made terrific by personal fatigue. For, in 
a carriage, somehow, one loses that appalling sense of utter 
personal insignificance, minuteness, nonentity, that always 
paralyses me when first I set my lonely feet on the austere 
territory of the hills. In a carriage—and a carriage for 
which one has to pay—one feels once more in comfortable 
relations with the world into which one has been born 
and bred, the world of amenities, humanities, personal 
importance, where one’s mortal personality has its place, 
and where the gaunt enormous hills are not actors in a 
fearful superhuman drama, but a mere painted mise en 
scene, a pleasing background to the human comedy. 
In long loops, curling and curling upon each other 
like the rings of a vast python, the white road mounts 
