Rupt, which means 'the cleft'
(for there is here a great cleft in the hillside), I went up to it and
had my coffee. Then I discovered a singular thing, that the people of
the place are tired of making up names and give nothing its peculiar
baptism. This I thought really very wonderful indeed, for I have
noticed wherever I have been that in proportion as men are remote and
have little to distract them, in that proportion they produce a great
crop of peculiar local names for every stream, reach, tuft, hummock,
glen, copse, and gully for miles around; and often when I have lost my
way and asked it of a peasant in some lonely part I have grown
impatient as he wandered on about 'leaving on your left the stone we
call the Nuggin, and bearing round what some call Holy Dyke till you
come to what they call Mary's Ferry'... and so forth. Long-shoremen
and the riparian inhabitants of dreadful and lonely rivers near the
sea have just such a habit, and I have in my mind's eye now a short
stretch of tidal water in which there are but five shoals, yet they
all have names, and are called 'The House, the Knowle, Goodman's Plot,
Mall, and the Patch.'

But here in Rupt, to my extreme astonishment, there was no such
universal and human instinct. For I said to the old man who poured me
out my coffee under the trellis (it was full morning, the sun was well
up, and the clouds were all dappled high above the tops of the
mountains): 'Father, what do you call this hill?' And with that I
pointed to a very remarkable hill and summit that lie sheer above the
village.

'That,' he said, 'is called the hill over above Rupt.'

'Yes, of course,' I said, 'but what is its name?'

'That is its name,' he answered.

And he was quite right, for when I looked at my map, there it was
printed, 'Hill above Rupt'. I thought how wearisome it would be if
this became a common way of doing things, and if one should call the
Thames 'the River of London', and Essex 'the North side', and Kent
'the South side'; but considering that this fantastic method was only
indulged in by one wretched village, I released myself from fear,
relegated such horrors to the colonies, and took the road again.

All this upper corner of the valley is a garden. It is bound in on
every side from the winds, it is closed at the end by the great mass
of the Ballon d'Alsace, its floor is smooth and level, its richness is
used to feed grass and pasturage, and knots of trees grow about it as