the branches of the trees in front of me a sight in the
sky that made me stop breathing, just as great danger at sea, or great
surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make a man stop
breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as a boy, something
I had never seen so grandly discovered as was this. In between the
branches of the trees was a great promise of unexpected lights beyond.

I pushed left and right along that edge of the forest and along the
fence that bound it, until I found a place where the pine-trees
stopped, leaving a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap, was a
tree whose leaves had failed; there the ground broke away steeply
below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast
cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further,
beyond my sight. I looked through this framing hollow and praised God.
For there below me, thousands of feet below me, was what seemed an
illimitable plain; at the end of that world was an horizon, and the
dim bluish sky that overhangs an horizon.

There was brume in it and thickness. One saw the sky beyond the edge
of the world getting purer as the vault rose. But right up--a belt in
that empyrean--ran peak and field and needle of intense ice, remote,
remote from the world. Sky beneath them and sky above them, a
steadfast legion, they glittered as though with the armour of the
immovable armies of Heaven. Two days' march, three days' march away,
they stood up like the walls of Eden. I say it again, they stopped my
breath. I had seen them.

So little are we, we men: so much are we immersed in our muddy and
immediate interests that we think, by numbers and recitals, to
comprehend distance or time, or any of our limiting infinities. Here
were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps, which now
for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura; and because they
were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they were a mile or two
high, they were become something different from us others, and could
strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural things. Up there in
the sky, to which only clouds belong and birds and the last trembling
colours of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the
things of the sky. They were as distant as the little upper clouds of
summer, as fine and tenuous; but in their reflection and in their
quality as it were of weapons (like spears and shields of an unknown
array) they occu