72 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 



disposes of the two or three thousand feet they may have 

 to descend in about a quarter of a mile. A notable 

 instance is the Reichenbach, which foams imperiously 

 enough down from Rosenlaui, and then takes its leap to 

 join the Aar in the most imposing of Swiss waterfalls. 

 (For its rival, the Handegg, offers no such coup tToeil 

 as the Reichenbach, slinking down in all its volume 

 through the concealment of a canon, with an unmanly 

 coyness as indecent and grotesque as if Moses were to 

 coquet behind a fan.) 



The Rhone and the Aar flow among cultivated lands 

 and cornfields, their tributaries from above through the 

 dense pine woods. But these tributaries, in turn draining 

 the lower mountain-mass, are fed by yet other streamlets 

 pouring down at right angles again from the open fell 

 above — (and thus, roughly speaking, parallel with the 

 big river five thousand feet below). And then again, 

 these very streamlets from the upper barrens have carved 

 glens for themselves between the topmost ridges, and are 

 nourished by little filaments of water, trickling down 

 from right and left from innumerable gullies and screes 

 in the high snows. Thus, from ever higher and higher, one 

 stream is perpetually flowing at right angles into another, 

 until you reach the last faint runnels that have been 

 washing the feet of Ranunculus glacialis, or carrying 

 vigour to the opening gaze of Eritrichium nanum. I hope 

 I have sufficiently shown that the water system of the 

 Alps is perfectly pinnatifid ? 



The drive up the Val d'Hermance is beautiful but 

 without event. There is only the one great thing to see 

 at the end of the valley, far up beyond invisible Evolena. 

 Now on one side goes the road over open lands and past 

 sun-beaten banks aglow with the rare yellow Ononis. 

 Then loom into sight a row of portents — enormous, big- 

 hatted monsters aligned across the way. These are the 



