THE weather showed unusual good humour by clearing in the night. Geneva woke up to bright sparkling sunshine. I went out before breakfast, indeed before sunrise, on the bridge, and had a most glorious view up the lake and up to the very summit of Mont Blanc. White as sugar, it lifted its aerial head into the azure—a solid cloud which looked as if it might at any moment take wings and fly away. A well-informed policeman told me the names of the other peaks: L’Aiguille du Midi, nearly a thousand meters lower than the crowning height: La Dent du Géant; Les Grandes Jorasses (from that same word, joux, meaning rock); Les Aiguilles Rouges; La Mole, contrasting with the sharp peak of the Aiguille d’Argentière, rightly suggesting silver. If any one is satisfied with a distant prospect of mountains, his eye would never weary of that glorious sight; but there is an attractive power in the great mountain-masses. They beckon, they say:—“Come to us; we want you; you are ours.”
LES GRANDES JORASSES.
That is, however, a wholly modern conception. If in the old days human consciousness felt the call, heard the summons, it was with the horror with which a bird feels the impulse to fly into the serpent’s jaws. Not so many years ago the popular imagination filled the ravines of the higher mountains with other terrors besides the frost. Dragons haunted caverns; with bated breath men told of having seen the dance of Wotan on the Diablerets, or of having heard fiends playing nine-pins with great stones which, when they missed their mark, went dashing and crashing down into the valleys. What herdsman would dare approach the Grotte de Balme, that cavern, hollowed out in the limestone rock, where dark-skinned fairies, with no heels to their feet, but with long, rippling hair, lured young men to their destruction! There was the spectral ram of Monthey; there was the three-legged horse of Sion; there was the giant ox of Zauchet, with glowing horns and flaming torch of a tail; there was the blue-haired donkey of Zermatt. Down from the mountains to Neuchâtel there used to come a ghost, wearing a cloth dripping with blood, and vanishing toward the lake. It was that of the widow of Walther, Comte de Rochefort, publicly accused of forgery and beheaded in 1412. The sight of her presaged a conflagration.
The Lord of Grimmelstein killed a doe and her fawns and was condemned to hunt through the mountains—one of those famous Wild Hunts which are accompanied by terrible tempests, and overwhelming snows.
There was a herd of chamois tended by dwarfs. Woe to those hunters who killed too many!
As in Schiller’s poem, the gazelle climbs to the ruggedest top of the naked precipice with the huntsman close behind and, just as he is about to fit the arrow to the string, the ancient Spirit of the Mountain, the good Genius of the trembling creature, appears to him:—“Earth has room for all to dwell—Why chase my belov’d gazelle?”
At the entrance of the Rhône into the lake there used to be low banks and wandering islands. Here dwelt the nixies and their queen, Finetta of the White Hand. She wore lilies in her golden hair. Any one who saw her was sure to die within a year.