“I think that Shelley would have done better if he had not tried to rhyme his verses,” said Ruth. “The attempt to find rhymes led him on and on into meanings that he didn’t mean. But there are fine lines in both. By the way,” she added with an abrupt dislocation of our literary talk, and yet it was suggested by it, “Will and I propose to take you to Chamonix. Would you like that?”
“Of course I would.”
“We will get an early start to-morrow—that is, if the weather prove propitious.”
The weather could not have been more kindly disposed. We started early in the morning and reached Villeneuve in less than an hour. Thence we rode up the at first broad and then ever narrowing valley of the mystic Rhône. I wished that I might see some of the strange things that it is said to conceal. Juste Olivier tells of its sandy nonchalant banks, its marshes and creeks of almost stagnant waters, the little bridges carrying fascinating paths, which later, glittering with silvery dust, suddenly plunge under long vaults where the light scarcely penetrates the green cool arches.
“Here and there,” he says, “there are fantastic clearings. Old trunks of ancient willows, oddly wrapt around and still more oddly crowned now with creepers, now with young bushes which have climbed to their tops, and now with their own branches contorted and interlaced. Immense oaks loved by adventurous pairs of the wild pigeons which fill the solitude with their plaintive notes. Young alders countless in number and growing so closely the heifers can with difficulty force a way through between their smooth even trunks. In a word, a forest variegated by marshes, by patches of sand, by yellowish fields where the water contributes its murmur, the desert its solemnity, the infinite its mystery, the unknown its charm.
“This is what you find in these shores of the Rhône called Les Isles. Sometimes strange noises come to the inhabited châlets and the reedy plain and startle the passer-by and are lost in the neighboring fields; it is the voice of la Fennetta-des-Isles who sometimes bellows like the bise in the trees, sometimes like the calves in the pastures, and seems to run over the wrinkled waters of the canal. If the clamor approach the fisherman pulls in his line and turns his head away, for he knows that any person who has caught sight under any form whatever of the fantastic being who thus howls in the gloomy woods has little more to expect from life.”
We heard no bellowing Lady-of-the-Isles nor did we see her under any form. Probably electric trams, and corrective dykes, and the skeptical boldness of modern science has scared the Little Lady away. She will never come back.
We had a glance at the big château of Aigle and looked to see if we could recognize any of the fair black-eyed, plump-figured women for which that place is famous. We saw the waterfalls on the Grande Eau. We passed through “the smiling village of Bex” and Will asked me if I would like to take the time to visit the remarkable salt-works at Bex the Old—Bévieux—but I told him that I preferred Attic salt. Then we discussed the question how salt should have been deposited so high up among the mountains. Was it the relic of the vast ocean that once covered all Europe? This presence of salt-laden anhydrite and the occasional sulphur springs with high temperatures are extremely interesting. There is evidently heat enough under the Alps to start a volcano some day.
The sight of the mountains gathering about us menacingly made me again remember Juste Olivier’s poetic description of the names of these Savoyan Alps. He advised his pupils to climb them, his word, as the word of every true Alpinist, is “conquer”—conquer them:—
“What marvellous treasures! What fragrant valleys! What flower-adorned slopes! What dazzling crystals! What depths of shade! What fountains! Happy son of the Alps who has succeeded in taming the Genius of them. From the highest summits like a cascade in the eternal chant, by a thousand brooks, by a thousand murmurs, over slate and granite down to the depths of staggering abysses, across mist-hung crags, by the side of mournful lakes, amid green and smiling hiding-places, along pasture-grounds spread with a network of light and shade, in fir-forests which roar like the sea, beds of thyme under beach-trees and laburnum, Poesy descends into the valleys and with the sunset turns back in jets of flame toward the skies.