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-ch"mbing. 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 in a 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 cliif 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 than 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- 



