70 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



over pleasant slopes of shelving vineyard, orchard, corn- 

 strip, towards the upper valley. Here and there amid 

 the golden stubble gleams the profound velvety sapphire 

 of Delphinium Ajacis, a rare cornfield weed in England, 

 parent of our multicoloured, lovely annual Larkspurs, 

 and one of the consecrated plants which have their name 

 from sad memories of strength and beauty vanished long 

 ago, for whose disappearance the tears of earth are shed 

 eternally — for Aias, for Adonis, for Hyacinth. Sheer 

 below us, far below, lies the valley of the Rhone — the 

 broad river looking ridiculous and undignified in such a 

 bird's-eye view, with its worm-like wanderings, the mapped 

 spaces of its meadows, its fringe of toy poplars, its punctua- 

 tion of little toy villages, each with a toy church perking 

 in the midst. Away to the left and passing out of sight, 

 the depths are blocked by the fairy palaces and temples 

 of Sion on its crags ; and as one mounts higher, so does 

 the opposite barrier of mountains grow every minute more 

 high and wide and awful, broadening and swelling at each 

 step, as the eye, dazed by their prodigious mass, follows 

 the line of their development till it ceases in the snowy 

 spires away towards the St. Gothard. 



And from this height one feels the double influence of 

 the two colour schemes that fill the Alps. Far away 

 below, the valley of the Rhone lies dreaming in gold and 

 golden green, a soft territory of sleep, with the sleepy 

 blue thread of the river running through. Everywhere 

 as one looks down, there is green and the kindred tones 

 of green, while the depths of the air themselves are swim- 

 ming with a dust of infinitesimal gold in the sunlight. 

 And then above, abruptly, begins the dominance of blue. 

 Long slopes of pale cobalt, soft indigo falls of forest, then 

 the high naked sweep of sapphire, fading into distance 

 after distance of serrated colour, far up against the gentle 

 azure of the sky, across which, in the rosy haze, huge 



