THE MIGRATION OF THE HERDS.
Such was the prosperity of all the farmers in the Cantons of Vaud and Valais, that their men used goat cheeses (tommes) instead of quoits for their daily games, and on Sundays played bowls with huge balls of the sweetest, hardest, yellowest butter that has ever been made. The fruit trees were as productive as the pastures; the grapes, for instance, being so large and juicy that faucets had to be inserted in each grape to draw off the juice, while the pears were so fine and heavy that their stems had to be severed by means of a double hand-saw when came time to pick them.
The Golden Age of the Alps did not last long, however, for the unparalleled prosperity the people enjoyed filled their hearts with such inordinate pride that they became very insolent, and thereby called down the wrath of heaven upon their guilty heads. The brutality and avarice which they displayed was punished by earthquakes, storms, and landslides, which ruined their finest pastures, and by sudden and unwelcome changes in the temperature. Dense fogs swept over the mountains, and there were long and heavy snow-falls which swathed the mountains in a permanent casing of ice and snow. The summer season became far briefer than in the past, and fields and pastures much less productive. Cattle and fruit therefore soon dwindled down to their present comparatively small proportions, and unlimited plenty no longer reigned in the land.
In the Golden Age the country boasted of a few very large but quite benevolent giants. They roamed about at will, striding over mountains and forests, which seemed to them no larger than mole hills and tiny shrubs. The best known of these giants was Gargantua, renowned alike for his athletic proportions and for his childlike spirit. He was so huge that when he sat down to rest upon Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, or some other large mountain, his legs hung down on either side until his feet rested comfortably in the valleys. Sometimes, when indulging in a brief noonday nap, he used one of these peaks as pillow for his huge and sleepy head. His thick white beard and hair, falling around him on all sides, then gave these heights somewhat the same aspect they have now, with their fields of snow and rivers of ice. The sunken orbits of the giant’s eyes and his wide-open mouth looked like valleys and crevasses, while his nostrils could be mistaken for deep and dark caves, and his ruddy cheeks for great patches of red rock peeping out among the snows.
When the weather was warm, Gargantua’s breath seemed like the mist hovering on the mountain tops; but when the temperature fell, it rapidly congealed, spreading like a dense fog all over the country. His gentlest snores are said to have sounded like the distant rumble of thunder, or the crash of avalanches; and when he stretched himself after a siesta, the whole country was shaken as by a violent earthquake.
Once, while the giant lay asleep, his head resting against a mountain, a large flock of sheep scrambled up over his prostrate form, and began to thread their way through his tangled hair and beard in quest of pasture. Awakened by a slight tickling sensation, the giant half opened his sleepy eyes. The sight of a host of little white creatures crawling around in his beard so angered him, that he took them up one by one between his thumb and index, and crushed and threw them away, thinking they were vermin.
During another nap a large herd of cows strayed into the giant’s wide-open mouth, which they mistook for a cave. Their presence there, however, occasioned a prodigious coughing-fit, in the course of which the cows were ejected with such force that they flew through miles of space and landed in another country!
As simple and innocent as he was large, Gargantua delighted in playing in the dirt. To amuse himself, he hollowed out the Rhône valley, and scooped out a basin for the Lake of Geneva. There the marks of his fingers can still be seen, for having no other tools he freely used those nature provides, flinging handfuls of earth and stones on either side of him, or into a rude basket made of wattled pine-trees which he carried on his back.
At one time Gargantua elected to build a fine sand-heap, and carried load after load of dirt and stones to a point southeast of the present city of Geneva. There he dumped them one after another, and as the heap increased in size after each basketful, he gleefully cried: “Ça lève, ça lève!” (It is rising, it is rising!) This cry was overheard by the people in the neighbourhood, who ever after used it as a name for that mountain, changing the orthography to Salève.