How could I possibly describe the first distant view of the Alps? It is one of those sensations that only music can approximately represent in symbols. Olyenin, the hero of Count Tolstoï’s famous novel, “The Cossacks,” catches his first glimpse of the Caucasus and they occupy his mind, for a time at least, to the exclusion of everything else. “Little by little he began to appreciate the spirit of their beauty and he felt the mountains.”
I have seen, on August days, lofty mountains of cloud piled up on the horizon, vast pearly cliffs, keenly outlined pinnacles, and I have imagined that they were the Himalayas—Kunchinjunga or Everest—or the Caucasus topped by Elbruz—or the Andes lifting on high Huascarán or Coropuna—or more frequently the Alps crowned by Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau. For a moment the illusion is perfect, but alas! they change before your very eyes—perhaps not more rapidly than our earthly ranges in the eyes of the Deity to whom a thousand years is but a day. They, too, are changing, changing. Only a few millions of years ago Mont Blanc was higher than Everest; in the yesterday of the mind the little Welsh hills, or our own Appalachians, were higher than the Alps.
Like summer clouds, then, on the horizon are piled up the mighty wrinkles of our old Mother Earth. We cannot see them change, but they are dissolving, disintegrating. Only a day or two ago I read in the newspaper of a great peak which rolled down into the valley, sweeping away and burying vineyards and orchards and forests and the habitations of men. The term everlasting hills is therefore only relative and their resemblance to clouds is a really poetic symbol.
Oh, but the enchantment of mountains seen across a beautiful sheet of water! It is a curious circumstance that the colour of one lake is an exquisite blue, while another, not so far away, may be as green as an emerald. So it is with the tiny Lake of Nemi, which is like a blue eye, and the Lake of Albano, which is an intense green. Here now before our eyes, as we drove up from Geneva to Lausanne, lay a sheet of the most delicate azure, and we could distinctly see the fringe of grey or greenish grey bottom, the so-called beine or blancfond, which the ancient lake-dwellers utilized as the foundation for their aerial homes. My nephew told me how a scientist, named Forel, took a block of peat and soaked it in filtered water, which soon became yellow. Then he poured some of this solution into Lake Geneva water, and the colour instantly became a beautiful green like that of Lake Lucerne.
I found that Will Allerton is greatly interested in the geology of Switzerland. Indeed, one cannot approach its confines without marvelling at the forces which have here been in conflict—the prodigious energy employed in sweeping up vast masses of granite and protogine and gneiss as if they were paste in the hands of a baby; the explosive powers of the frost, the mighty diligence of the waters. Here has gone on for ages the drama of heat and cold. The snow has fallen in thick blankets, it has changed by pressure into firn, and then becomes a river of ice, flowing down into the valleys, gouging out deep ruts and, when they come into the influence of the summer sun, melting into torrents and rushing down, heaping up against obstacles, forming lakes, and then again finding a passage down, ever down, until they mingle with the sea.
As we mounted up toward Lausanne, the ancient terrace about two hundred and fifty feet above the present level of the lake is very noticeable. In fact the low tract between Lausanne and Yverdun, on the Lake of Neuchâtel, which corresponds to that level, gives colour to the theory that the Lake of Geneva once emptied in that direction and communicated with the North Sea instead of with the Mediterranean as now. How small an obstacle it takes entirely to change the course of a river or of a man’s life!
These practical remarks were only a foil to the exclamations of delight elicited by every vista. I mean to know the lake well, and shall traverse it in every direction. It takes only eight or ten minutes from my niece’s house by the funicular, or, as it is familiarly called, la ficelle, down to Ouchy, the port of Lausanne. I parodied the lines of Emerson—
I love a lake, I love a pond,
I love the mountains piled beyond.