12 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
disposes of the two or three thousand feet they may have 
to descend in about a quarter of a mile. A notable 
instance is the Reichenbach, which foams imperiously 
enough down from Rosenlaui, and then takes its leap to 
join the Aar in the most imposing of Swiss waterfalls. 
(For its rival, the Handegg, offers no such coup dil 
as the Reichenbach, slinking down in all its volume 
through the concealment of a cafion, with an unmanly 
coyness as indecent and grotesque as if Moses were to 
coquet behind a fan.) 
The Rhone and the Aar flow among cultivated lands 
and cornfields, their tributaries from above through the 
dense pine woods. But these tributaries, in turn draining 
the lower mountain-mass, are fed by yet other streamlets 
pouring down at right angles again from the open fell 
above—(and thus, roughly speaking, parallel with the 
big river five thousand feet below). And then again, 
these very streamlets from the upper barrens have carved 
glens for themselves between the topmost ridges, and are 
nourished by little filaments of water, trickling down 
from right and left from innumerable gullies and screes 
in the high snows. ‘Thus, from ever higher and higher, one 
stream is perpetually flowing at right angles into another, 
until you reach the last faint runnels that have been 
washing the feet of Ranunculus glacialis, or carrying 
vigour to the opening gaze of Eritrichium nanum. I hope 
I have sufficiently shown that the water system of the 
Alps is perfectly pinnatifid ? 
The drive up the Val d’Hermance is beautiful but 
without event. ‘There is only the one great thing to see 
at the end of the valley, far up beyond invisible Evolena. 
Now on one side goes the road over open lands and past 
sun-beaten banks aglow with the rare yellow Ononis. 
Then loom into sight a row of portents—enormous, big- 
hatted monsters aligned across the way. ‘These are the 
