Here we diverged a little from the old road of his youth, by going east a few miles to St. Cergues instead of making for the Col de la Faucille at once. The clean inn delighted him; pine boards on the floor, scrubbed white, and no needless furniture. Here he said we should stay a week and rest; he had much to write—first ideas for "Præterita," you understand. But the next days were wet, and he sat in his bedroom writing diligently at first, while I caught some bright intervals for a sketch, though we never saw the line of the Alps quite clear.
In the lecture on "the Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century," one of his least convincing though most sincerely meant utterances, there are references to the strange weather of those days. All the way up from Morez he wanted me to come into the carriage and shut the window because of a treacherous east wind, and in my sketch you can see a certain smoky, not only thundery, look in the clouds. At St. Cergues this east wind haze was still more pronounced, the Lake of Geneva ruffled and white, with patches of shadow from small "sailor-boy" clouds, while the whole range opposite was not exactly shrouded but veiled in a persistent thickness of air. Above, the sky was bright, with blue and streaky cirrus, and between the showers the sun glittered on the trees. That fitful wind with the brownish-grey haze he called the plague-wind, and in all his lecture there is no very definite explanation of it, but much declamation against it as the ruin of landscape, and some vague hints of portent, almost as if he had been a prophet of old seeing the burden of modern Babylon in the darkened sun.
It is smoke. Any one who haunts our Lake district hills knows it well. On coronation night I saw it trailing from Barrow and Carnforth up the Lune valley as far as Tebay, always low and level, leaving the upper hills clear, perfectly continuous and distinct from the mist of water. This winter, from the top of Wetherlam on a brilliant frosty day, I saw it gradually invade the Lake district from the south-east; the horizontal, clean-cut, upper surface at about 2000 feet; the body of it dun and semi-transparent; its thick veil fouling the little cotton-woolly clouds that nestled in the coves of the Kirkstone group, quite separate from the smoke-pall; and by sunset it had reached to Dungeon Gill, leaving the Bow Fell valleys clear. Coming down by moonlight I found the dales in a dry, cold fog, and heard that there had been no sunshine at Coniston that afternoon. This is Ruskin's plague-cloud, and the real enemy of the weather not only in England but in the Alps. You will see it, according to the wind, on either side of Zurich most notably, and the distance this blight will travel is more than the casual reader might believe. A strong wind carries it away, but only to deposit it somewhere else, cutting off the sun's rays, and breeding rain and storm. This was not understood twenty years ago, but Ruskin's observations of the weather were perfectly accurate and his regrets at the changed aspect of Alpine landscape were only too justifiable.
LAKE OF GENEVA AND DENT D'OCHES UNDER THE SMOKE-CLOUD, FROM ST. CERGUES
September 1882
On Thursday, September 7, he had tired of dull weather at St. Cergues, and written up his notes for "Præterita"; he proposed to climb the Dôle and get onward to Geneva. It is a very easy walk of about a couple of hours up the gently sloping backs of the Helvellyn-like Jura range; and from its top one should get a grand view of the lake and the Alps to Mont Blanc. He walked up as briskly as ever; there was a cold wind but sun overhead, though the mountains to the south and east were still in the "plague-cloud." There was no sketching to be done, and we followed the ridge down to the Col de la Faucille. If you look at his map of the Jura, facsimiled at [page 109] of this volume, the Col is where the road suddenly turns round into zigzags after going straight south-west behind the Dôle; and you remember how he names the whole chapter from this one spot, as a chief landmark in his memories, for there he always used to get his first full view of the "Mount Beloved." Few travellers know it, he says; but it is far from unknown to all who have lived in la Suisse Romande. There, they take school-children up mountains. Far better than Helvellyn is known to the English school child, the "dear Dôle" is known to every youngster who has learnt to sing (to the tune of "Life let us cherish") the song of
La Suisse est belle,
Oh qu'il la faut chérir!