A COLLECTING DAY ABOVE AROLLA 89 
amphitheatre, or rather its last desultory outcrop. There, 
if anywhere, the rock looks rotten and friable. I set 
myself a-climbing. Steep is the rocky slope, in all 
conscience, under the sun. But it is nothing to the space 
beyond. For here, the tension of the hill’s angle relaxing 
for a couple of hundred yards or so, enormous boulders 
are heaped and piled in the loosest and most distracting 
confusion. They are the size of little houses, these blocks, 
and one’s only progress is to climb laboriously up one, 
then drop into dismal depths on its further side, and so 
up the face of another. And so on, and so on, and so on, 
until one feels like an ant ina sugar-basin. At last, how- 
ever, I reach my little jag of rock, and there have the 
Joy of finding my hopes justified. For the cliff is quite 
loose and disintegrated here, slab lifting off slab in the 
easiest and most delightful way. And between these two 
separable slices, Androsace imbricata in abundance makes 
the jam of this ‘satisfying sandwich’ (alas that there is 
no one present to finish the tag ‘and broach the exhila- 
rating marsala’ in honour of the occasion !). Delightedly, 
then, I lay bare the whole ramification of its silky roots, 
and take a fair proportion of plants, blameless in my 
certainty that I am doing them no wrong, but giving 
them as fair a chance of thriving as any collector’s skill 
could offer. And so, at last, as the sun’s majesty goes 
westering and the air glows with a ruddier gold, my com- 
panions are seen far-off, black specks on the snowfields, 
and when they rejoin me on the Plan, we all continue 
our rejoicing homeward way together, almost too deeply 
sated with success to feel more fhiae a passing thrill when, 
not half a mile from the hotel, as we return along the 
path, Aquilegia alpina is seen nodding two of its glorious 
blossoms at us from a bush. 
The ascent on the right from the Arolla Hotel takes 
one on to a different geological formation, which pro- 
