I.
We ought to be useful to our fellow-mortals; I have climbed the Bergonz in order to have at least one ascent to tell about.
A stony, zigzag pathway excoriates the green mountain with its whitish track. The view changes with every turn. Above and below us are meadows with girls making hay, and little houses stuck to the declivity like swallows’ nests. Lower down, an immense pit of black rock, to which from all sides hasten streams of silver. The higher up we are, the more the valleys are contracted and fade from sight; the more the gray mountains enlarge and spread themselves in all their hugeness. Suddenly, beneath the burning sun, the perspective becomes confused; we feel the cold and damp touch of some unknown and invisible being. A moment after, the air clears up, and we perceive behind us the white, rounded back of a beautiful cloud fleeing into the distance, and whose shadow glides lightly over the slope. The useful herbage soon disappears; scorched mosses, thousands of rhododendrons clothe the barren escarpments; the road is damaged by the force of the hidden springs; it is encumbered with rolling stones. It turns with every ten paces, in order to conquer the steepness of the slopes. You reach at last a naked ridge, where you dismount from your horse; here begins the top of the mountain. You walk for ten minutes over a carpet of serried heather, and you are upon the highest summit.
What a view! Everything human disappears; villages, enclosures, cultivations, all seem like the work of ants. I have two valleys under my eyes, which seem two little bands of earth lost in a blue funnel. Nothing exists here but the mountains. Our roads and our works have scratched upon them an imperceptible point; we are mites, who lodge, between two awakings, under one of the hairs of an elephant. Our civilization is a pretty, miniature toy, with which nature amuses herself for a moment, and which presently she will break.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
You see nothing but a throng of mountains seated under the burning dome of heaven. They are ranged in an amphitheatre, like a council of immovable and eternal being’s. All considerations are overpowered by the sensation of immensity: monstrous ridges which stretch themselves out, gigantic, bony spines, ploughed flanks that drop down precipitously into indistinguishable depths.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
It is as though you were in a bark in the middle of the sea. The mountain-chains clash like billows. The tops are sharp and jagged like the crests of uplifted waves; they come from all sides, athwart each other, piled one above another, bristling, innumerable, and the flood of granite mounts high into the sky at the four corners of the horizon. On the north, the valleys of Luz and Argelès open up in the plain by a bluish vista, shining with a dead splendor resembling two ewers of burnished pewter. On the west the chain of Bareges stretches like a saw as far as the Pic du Midi, a huge, ragged-edged axe, marked with patches of snow; on the east, lines of leaning fir-trees mount to the assault of the summits. In the south an army of embattled peaks, of ridges cut to the quick, squared towers, spires, perpendicular escarpments, lifts itself beneath a mantle of snow; the glaciers glitter between the dark rocks; the black ledges stand out with an extraordinary relief against the deep blue. These rude forms pain the eye; you are oppressively alive to the rigidness of the masses of granite which have burst through the crust of our planet, and the invincible ruggedness of the rock that is lifted above the clouds. This chaos of violently broken lines tells of the effort of forces of which we have no longer any idea. Since then Nature has grown mild; she rounds and softens the forms she moulds; she embroiders in the valleys her leafy robe, and, as an industrious artist, she shapes the delicate foliage of her plants. Here, in her primitive barbarism, she only knew how to cleave the blocks and heap up the rough masses of her Cyclopean constructions. But her monument is sublime, worthy of the heaven it has for a vault and the sun which is its torch.