Its tall, cold, stone buildings are half-buried in ice in the
winter, while even in summer the winds, dense with snow, shriek and
howl as they make their way through the notch in the mountain. Its
little lake, cold and dark, frozen solid in winter, is covered with
cakes of floating ice under the sky of July. The scanty grass around
it forms a thick, low turf, which is studded with bodiless blue
gentians, primroses, and other Alpine flowers. Overhanging the lake
are the frost-bitten crags of the Mountain of Death; and the other
mountains about, though less dismally named, are not more cheerful to
the traveler. Along the lake margin winds the narrow bridle-path,
which follows rushing rivulets in zigzags down steep flower-carpeted
slopes to the pine woods of Saint Remy, far below. Among the pines the
path widens to a wagon-road, whence it descends through green pastures,
purple with autumnal crocus, past beggarly villages, whose houses crowd
together, like frightened cattle in a herd, through beech woods,
vineyards, and grain-fields, till at last it comes to its rest amid the
high stone walls of the old city of Aosta, named for Augustus Caesar.
Above Aosta are the sources of the river Po, one of the chief of these
being the Dora Baltea, in a deep gorge half-hid by chestnut-trees. It
is twenty miles from the lake to the river--twenty miles of wild
mountain incline--twenty miles from Switzerland to Italy, from the
eternal snows and faint-colored flowers of the frigid zone, to the
dust, and glare of the torrid.

The Hospice of the Great Saint Bernard stands thus in a narrow mountain
notch, with only room for itself and its lake, while above it, on
either side, are jagged heights dashed with snow-banks, their summits
frosted with eternal ice.

[Illustration: The Great Saint Bernard.]

It is a large stone building, three stories high, beside the two attic
floors of the steep, sloping roof. A great square house of cold, gray
stone, as unattractive as a barn or a woolen-mill, plain, cold, and
solid. At one end of the main building is a stone addition precisely
like the building itself. On the other side of the bridle-path is an
outbuilding--a tall stone shed, "the Hotel of Saint Louis," three
stories high, as plain and uncompromising as the Hospice is. The front
door of the main building is on the side away from the lake. From this
door down the north side of the mountain the path descends steeply from
the crest o