70 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
over pleasant slopes of shelving vineyard, orchard, corn- 
strip, towards the upper valley. Here and there amid 
the golden stubble gleams the profound velvety sapphire 
of Delphinium Ajacis, a rare cornfield weed in England, 
parent of our multicoloured, lovely annual Larkspurs, 
and one of the consecrated plants which have their name 
from sad memories of strength and beauty vanished long 
ago, for whose disappearance the tears of earth are shed 
eternally—for Aias, for Adonis, for Hyacinth. Sheer 
below us, far below, lies the valley of the Rhone—the 
broad river looking ridiculous and undignified in such a 
bird’s-eye view, with its worm-like wanderings, the mapped 
spaces of its meadows, its fringe of toy poplars, its punctua- 
tion of little toy villages, each with a toy church perking 
in the midst. Away to the left and passing out of sight, 
the depths are blocked by the fairy palaces and temples 
of Sion on its crags; and as one mounts higher, so does 
the opposite barrier of mountains grow every minute more 
high and wide and awful, broadening and swelling at each 
step, as the eye, dazed by their prodigious mass, follows 
the line of their development till it ceases in the snowy 
spires away towards the St. Gothard. 
And from this height one feels the double influence of 
the two colour schemes that fill the Alps. Far away 
below, the valley of the Rhone lies dreaming in gold and 
golden green, a soft territory of sleep, with the sleepy 
blue thread of the river running through. Everywhere 
as one looks down, there is green and the kindred tones 
of green, while the depths of the air themselves are swim- 
ming with a dust of infinitesimal gold in the sunlight. 
And then above, abruptly, begins the dominance of blue. 
Long slopes of pale cobalt, soft indigo falls of forest, then 
the high naked sweep of sapphire, fading into distance 
after distance of serrated colour, far up against the gentle 
azure of the sky, across which, in the rosy haze, huge 
