confined on one side by a steep brow, on the other by the bold buttresses of the Brenta group. Far away to the south, seen through a space of air still aglow and quivering with the late sunbeams, rose the rounded crests of the hills above Riva. Close at hand, to be reached by some well-made zigzags, lay Molveno village on the shore of its lake and beside a little bay of singular beauty, shut in between steep banks and spanned at its mouth by a wooden bridge. The whole picture recalled some imaginative landscape of a great painter rather than any other Alpine scene.
J. Gilbert delt.
MOLVENO.
Looking up Val delle Seghe.
We would willingly have lingered before it. But the sun had already set, and it was necessary to seek food and shelter without delay.
We were led to an irregular open space, which, despite its fountain, did not venture to call itself a piazza, and into a low, broad, dark entry, where among a litter of carts and logs we sat down while the guides sought the people of the inn. They were already half asleep, and came down with bewildered looks to tell us that there was no food in the house, but fish—yes—in the lake. Had not our own supplies fortunately furnished supper we should have fared but poorly. Nor did the accommodation promise well. Orcus itself can scarcely have a blacker portal than that which yawned for us on our way to the upper floor. The walls were coated with layer upon layer of soot and smoke, each so thick that the only reasonable theory seemed to be that in some alteration of the premises the original chimney of the house had been turned into the staircase without any preliminary cleansing. The bedrooms upstairs proved better than such an approach had led us to expect. It was an illustration of the primitive and trustful manners of the place that my bed and the next were separated by a baby's cot, the tenant of which, thus abandoned to our tender mercies by its parents, wisely refrained from expressing any emotion, and was not even discovered until morning.
The access from Molveno into the heart of the Brenta chain is by the Val delle Seghe—the valley of the saw-mills, the torrent of which discharges itself through a considerable delta into the lake a quarter of a mile south of the village. This glen is narrow and shut in by magnificent smooth, red cliffs of great height shooting out of dense beech forests. After penetrating three or four miles due west, rising steeply all the time, it abruptly terminates in a basin enclosed by the wildest crags. The two streams which here meet fall from recesses lying north and south, and giving access respectively to the Bocca di Vallazza, a pass leading to the high pasturages at the head of Val Teresenga, and to the more famous Bocca di Brenta. Between the two a third pass, discovered by Mr. Tuckett, leads directly to Campiglio by the Vallesinella.
We left Molveno by starlight, and dawn had but just bared the sky when we turned up the rough hillside leading to the Bocca di Brenta. The track at first climbed so steeply through the dewy forest that we were often glad to catch at a branch or root to ease the strain. The pasturage above is the Malga dei Vitelli, and the calves and the boys who tend them can afford to dispense with zigzags. The mothers of the herd are in more luxurious quarters, chewing the sweet herbage of the Flavona Alp or wandering over the broad ridges of Monte Gazza.
On a sudden the tip of the rock opposite us glowed as if with ruddy flame; for a few seconds every pinnacle was of the same colour, then the whole sun reached them, and over the solemn greens and greys of the lower earth the mountain rampart flashed out gorgeous with light and colour. The red gold assumed at sunrise by rocks of this formation may be better realised by a glance at Turner's 'Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus' (No. 523 in the National Gallery), than by reading pages of description.