To this spot we returned again and again, fascinated as much, perhaps, by the mystery in which it was enveloped, as by the majestic outline of this unknown mountain, to which, for want of a better, we gave the name of Notre Dame.  For the old bellringer was not alone in his ignorance.  Ask whom we would, we invariably received the same vague reply—­it was a mountain “on the Italian side.”  They knew no more; and some, like our friend of the Campanile, had evidently “not noticed it before.”

IX

ALPINE RESORTS

The call of the mountains[29]

BY FREDERIC HARRISON

Once more—­perhaps for the last time—­I listen to the unnumbered tinkling of the cow-bells on the slopes—­“the sweet bells of the sauntering herd”—­to the music of the cicadas in the sunshine, and the shouts of the neat herdlads, echoing back from Alp to Alp.  I hear the bubbling of the mountain rill, I watch the emerald moss of the pastures gleaming in the light, and now and then the soft white mist creeping along the glen, as our poet says, “puts forth an arm and creeps from pine to pine.”  And see, the wild flowers, even in this waning season of the year, the delicate lilac of the dear autumn crocus, which seems to start up elf-like out of the lush grass, the coral beads of the rowan, and the beech-trees just begun to wear their autumn jewelry of old gold.

As I stroll about these hills, more leisurely, more thoughtfully than I used to do of old in my hot mountaineering days, I have tried to think out what it is that makes the Alpine landscape so marvelous a tonic to the spirit—­what is the special charm of it to those who have once felt all its inexhaustible magic.  Other lands have rare beauties, wonders of their own, sights to live in the memory for ever.

In France, in Italy, in Spain, in Greece and in Turkey, I hold in memory many a superb landscape.  From boyhood upward I thirsted for all kinds of Nature’s gifts, whether by sea, or by river, lake, mountain, or forest.  For sixty years at least I have roved about the white cliffs, the moors, the riversides, lakes, and pastures of our own islands from Penzance to Cape Wrath, from Beachy Head to the Shetlands.  I love them all.  But they can not touch me, as do the Alps, with the sense at once of inexhaustible loveliness and of a sort of conscious sympathy with every fiber of man’s heart and brain.  Why then is this so?

I find it in the immense range of the moods in which Nature is seen in the Alps, as least by those who have fully absorbed all the forms, sights, sounds, wonders, and adventures they offer.  An hour’s walk will show them all in profound contrast and yet in exquisite harmony.  The Alps form a book of Nature as wide and as mysterious as Life.