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 occupied the sky with a sublime invasion: and the things
proper to the sky were forgotten by me in their presence as I gazed.
To what emotion shall I compare this astonishment? So, in first love
one finds that _this_ can belong to _me._
Their sharp steadfastness and their clean uplifted lines compelled my
adoration. Up there, the sky above and below them, part of the sky,
but part of us, the great peaks made communion between that homing
creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a slow
movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly at
home in Heaven. I say that this kind of description is useless, and
that it is better to address prayers to such things than to attempt to
interpret them for others.
These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one's
immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to suggest, those
few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is something more.
Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it
were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of
height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of
reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration
also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I
know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and
it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of
merriment in the soul of a sane man.
Since I could now see such a wonder and it could work such things in
my mind, therefore, some day I should be part of it.
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