This it is also which leads some men to climb mountain-tops, but not
me, for I am afraid of slipping down.
Then you will say, if I felt all this, why do I draw it, and put it in
my book, seeing that my drawings are only for fun? My jest drags down
such a memory and makes it ludicrous. Well, I said in my beginning
that I would note down whatever most impressed me, except figures,
which I cannot draw (I mean figures of human beings, for mathematical
figures I can draw well enough), and I have never failed in this
promise, except where, as in the case of Porrentruy, my drawing was
blown away by the wind and lost - - if anything ever is lost. So I put
down here this extraordinary drawing of what I saw, which is about as
much like it as a printed song full of misprints is to that same song
sung by an army on the march. And I am consoled by remembering that if
I could draw infinitely well, then it would become sacrilege to
attempt to draw that sight. Moreover, I am not going to waste any more
time discussing why I put in this little drawing. If it disturbs your
conception of what it was I saw, paste over it a little bit of paper.
I have made it small for the purpose; but remember that the paper
should be thin and opaque, for thick paper will interfere with the
shape of this book, and transparent paper will disturb you with a
memory of the picture.
It was all full of this, as a man is full of music just after hearing
it, that I plunged down into the steep forest that led towards the
great plain; then, having found a path, I worked zig-zag down it by a
kind of gully that led through to a place where the limestone cliffs
were broken, and (so my map told me) to the town of Soleure, which
stands at the edge of the plain upon the river Aar.
I was an hour or more going down the enormous face of the Jura, which
is here an escarpment, a cliff of great height, and contains but few
such breaks by which men can pick their way. It was when I was about
half-way down the mountain side that its vastness most impressed me.
And yet it had been but a platform as it were, from which to view the
Alps and their much greater sublimity.
This vastness, even of these limestone mountains, took me especially
at a place where the path bordered a steep, or rather precipitous,
lift of white rock to which only here and there a tree could cling.
I was still very high up, but looking somewhat more eastward than
before, and the plain went on inimitably towards some low vague hills;
nor in that direction could any snow be seen in the sky.
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