For Some Miles Past The Hills Had Grown Higher And Higher Upon Either Side, The Valley Floor Narrower, The Torrent Less Abundant; There Now Stood Up Before Me The Marshy Slopes And The Enormous Forests Of Pine That Forbid A Passage South.

Up through these the main road has been pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to

The very top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a mountain with spurs like a star, and where mountains of this kind block the end of main valleys it becomes necessary for the road leading up and out of the valley to go over their highest point, since any other road over the passes or shoulders would involve a second climb to reach the country beyond. The reason of this, my little map here, where the dark stands for the valley and the light for the high places, will show better than a long description. Not that this map is of the Ballon d'Alsace in particular, but only of the type of hill I mean.

Since, in crossing a range, it is usually possible to find a low point suitable for surmounting it, such summit roads are rare, but when one does get them they are the finest travel in the world, for they furnish at one point (that is, at the summit) what ordinary roads going through passes can never give you: a moment of domination. From their climax you look over the whole world, and you feel your journey to be adventurous and your advance to have taken some great definite step from one province and people to another.

I would not be bound by the exaggerated zig-zags of the road, which had been built for artillery, and rose at an easy slope. I went along the bed of the dell before me and took the forest by a little path that led straight upward, and when the path failed, my way was marked by the wire of the telegraph that crosses to Belfort. As I rose I saw the forest before me grow grander. The pine branches came down from the trunks with a greater burden and majesty in their sway, the trees took on an appearance of solemnity, and the whole rank that faced me - for here the woods come to an even line and stand like an army arrested upon a downward march - seemed something unusual and gigantic. Nothing more helped this impression of awe than the extreme darkness beneath those aged growths, and the change in the sky that introduced my entry into the silence and perfume of so vast a temple. Great clouds, so charged with rain that you would have thought them lower than the hills (and yet just missing their tops), came covering me like a tumbled roof and gathered all around; the heat of the day waned suddenly in their shade:

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