INTRODUCTION. 
all the hills are a sponge of moisture, through which the melting 
snowfields up above are percolating rapidly away towards the 
swelling rivers in the valleys far beneath. At once the flowers 
leap to life, in a serried riot of splendour, springing from the 
unbound earth, now uniformly cool and damp, transpiring eagerly 
in the crystalline rays of the alpine sun. So, as the summer 
proceeds, continues the procession of loveliness; by July and 
August the lower alps are drier, and vegetation, having achieved 
its end, is coming gradually to a pause, reposing on its laurels. 
But now at last awake the highest crests and shingles, the last 
of the winter’s impermanent snow weeps itself away from the - 
stone-banks and ledges, full noontide is come for Ranunculus 
glacialis, and Eritrichium mocks the heaven in its dark precipice. 
Here, as below a month or two before, a state of acute but violently 
drained humidity is set up; yet the high alpines have no such 
period of comparative drought as follows through July and August 
on the always well-watered alp below, for in September the snows 
once more begin to descend, and by October the crags are held 
firm once more in the unchanging bondage of the frost. Through 
that short space, however, the high alpines have made the most 
of their freedom: as the plants of the alp exceed those of the 
plains and woodlands in brilliancy, so are they themselves in 
turn outshone by the population of the upmost rocks, where the 
conditions are so strenuous and yet propitious, that there the 
plants lose thought of growth, and concentrate all their energies 
- on getting as much size and glow as possible, as rapidly as possible, 
into their compacted clumps of almost stemless flowers. They 
are well nourished in their gaunt crests and shingles with rich 
grit and decayed vegetable matter of their own dead selves for 
twenty thousand years; they are well watered all through their 
growing period, not only by the melting snow, but also by frequent 
alpine rains and the transpirations of the soil that wrap them in a 
crystal halo, intensifying and clarifying and filtering the glories 
of the alpine sun, which here descends through the thin diamond 
air with an intensity unknown below, engendering a correspond- 
ingly increased intensity of colour in the flowers that it so 
xlv 
