The path
was lost upon a fine open sward which was the very top of the Jura and
the coping of that multiple wall which defends the Swiss Plain. I had
crossed it straight from edge to edge, never turning out of my way.
It was too marshy to lie down on it, so I stood a moment to breathe
and look about me.
It was evident that nothing higher remained, for though a new line of
wood - firs and beeches - stood before me, yet nothing appeared above
them, and I knew that they must be the fringe of the descent. I
approached this edge of wood, and saw that it had a rough fence of
post and rails bounding it, and as I was looking for the entry of a
path (for my original path was lost, as such tracks are, in the damp
grass of the little down) there came to me one of those great
revelations which betray to us suddenly the higher things and stand
afterwards firm in our minds.
There, on this upper meadow, where so far I had felt nothing but the
ordinary gladness of The Summit, I had a vision.
What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or that, and if you think I
am inventing the words, you know nothing of men.
I saw between 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.
