A COLLECTING DAY ABOVE AROLLA 69 



of the Turtmann Thai, and Sion, Sierre, Martigny, each 

 corresponds with the gap that opens up towards the 

 terrific snows above. By false guidance, however, I 

 alighted one steaming afternoon at the wrong station, 

 and had two hours to wait before a train would take me 

 back to Sierre, whence, it appeared, you climb dizzily up 

 the rampart of the mountains until you come into the 

 Val d'Hermance, and so, past Evolena, to Arolla. 



Few situations of life can possibly be more overpower- 

 ing than the valley of the Rhone on a hot afternoon in July. 

 It is so very large, so very flat, so very hot — and, above all, 

 it is so straitly bounded, in front and behind, by so 

 crushing, so annihilating a wall of mountains, which in 

 their turn — oh horror! — are divined, even from the depths, 

 not to be themselves the pinnacles of the world's roof that 

 they appear, but mere subordinate pedestals to the real 

 snow region above, whose awful teeth appear here and 

 there as one raises one's eyes to the distances overhead. 

 The first part of the journey from Sierre, however, is 

 made luxuriously by carriage, and it is wonderful in what 

 serene majesty the mountains open up before one as one 

 goes, no longer made terrific by personal fatigue. For, in 

 a carriage, somehow, one loses that appalling sense of utter 

 personal insignificance, minuteness, nonentity, that always 

 paralyses me when first I set my lonely feet on the austere 

 territory of the hills. In a carriage — and a carriage for 

 which one has to pay — one feels once more in comfortable 

 relations with the world into which one has been born 

 and bred, the world of amenities, humanities, personal 

 importance, where one's mortal personality has its place, 

 and where the gaunt enormous hills are not actors in a 

 fearful superhuman drama, but a mere painted mise en 

 scene, a pleasing background to the human comedy. 



In long loops, curling and curling upon each other 

 like the rings of a vast python, the white road mounts 



