84 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
in cultivation. Then, high above, solid rock, reddish, 
granitic, begins to loom overhead. 'The track reaches it. 
Now we are on the territory of <Androsace imbricata. 
Androsace imbricata is within reach—perhaps even within 
sight. But the keenest search fails to discover any of 
those expected silvery cushions nestling into crevices of 
the cliff. 
So our upward way continues. Suddenly there is 
nothing more above us. In another instant we have 
topped that long dark slope, and emerge, dazzled, into 
the full glare of day. Up and down before us lie 
unrolled the lawns of the Plan de Bertol—one golden fire, 
in the sunlight, of Gewm montanum and other little yellow 
glories of the grass. Looking back across the invisible 
deep gulf beneath us, we seem on a level with the mid- 
most snow-patches of Mont Collon itself. Our vast, sun- 
flooded tract of colour is closed on the right by a barren 
wall of mountain. ‘To the left, high above us, stretches 
a huge amphitheatre of granite cliffs, from whose feet a 
wilderness of broken stone flows away down towards the 
grass. A moraine—ice and stone and glacier-mud and 
water—mounts beyond this from the stream’s head to the 
head of the glen, and on the right, above other stone 
slopes, a snow-field, daunting, cold, and azure (for the sun 
has not yet touched it), leads upwards to the Col de Bertol. 
Now I know that my quest is achieved, for, all round 
that amphitheatre is a classical station for Androsace im- 
bricata. Meanwhile my companions are more eager to 
scale the Col de Bertol, whence, from the Hut, the climber 
is rewarded by a view over the Val d’Hérens to the Dent 
Blanche. I, for my part, having no love for snowfields in 
themselves, prefer to spend my day in the more placid 
delights of the Plan de Bertol. Accordingly the others 
depart on their way, and I am left alone. 
To be alone in wide, great places is sometimes too 
