Come here to these scenes and never leave them!”
LA DENT DU MIDI FROM MONTREUX.
I suppose it is really one’s duty to know the names of the mountains, just as one must know the botanical names of flowers. Nevertheless, only within comparatively few years have distinctive names been actually fastened to special mountains. The names, foreign to English, when translated into English are often to the last degree banal. A typical example is the Greek headland with its high-sounding appellation, Kunoskephale, which means merely Dog’s Head; and those that first gave the Alps a generic name could not devise anything better than a word which means “White.” What would not the imaginative American Indians have called Mont Blanc! Very probably the Keltic inhabitants of these regions, with their poetic nature, would have named it something better than just “White Mountain!” The Romans might have the practical ability to build roads over the hills, but they could not name them!
Juste Olivier, however, goes into ecstasies over the names of some of the Swiss mountains. He says:—
“What more charming, more fresh and morning-like than the name of the Blümlisalp? What more gloomy than that of the Wetterhorn, more solid than that of the Stockhorn, more incomparable than that of the Jungfrau, more aerial and whiter than that of the Titlis, more superb and high sounding than that of the Kamor, more sparkling and vivid than that of the Silberhorn, more terrible than that of the Finsteraarhorn which falls and echoes like an avalanche!”
He is still more enthusiastic over the Alps of Vaud:—Moléson with its round and abundant mass so frequently sung by the shepherds of Gruyères, the slender, white, graceful forms of La Dent de Lis and Le Rubli. And he finds in the multitude of names ending in az—Dorannaz, Javernaz, Oeusannaz, Bovannaz—something peculiarly alpestrine and bucolic, as if one heard in them the horn-notes blown by the herdsmen, and their long cadenzas with the echoes from the mountain walls; and the solemn lowing of the cows as they crop the flowery grass and shake the big copper bells fastened to their necks. There is an endless study in names of places as well as in names of people. Often centuries of history may be detected in a single word.
Meantime we have been speeding along, cutting through the fabric of the lake as if we were a knife. Behind us radiated two long, dark blue lines tipped with bubbles and mixing the reflections of the gracious shores. Oh, this wonderful lake! Vast tomes have been devoted to its poetic, picturesque, scientific characteristics. Almost every inch of its vast depths has been explored. No longer has the wily boatman, as he steers his lateen-sailed lochère, any excuse for telling his occasional passenger (as he used to tell James Fenimore Cooper) that the water is bottomless. Every fish that swims in it is known and every bird that floats on its broad bosom.