On Such Days The Mountains
Are Very Dark Till Close Up To The Level Of The Clouds; Here, If
There
Is dewy or rain-besprinkled pasture, it tells of a luminous
silvery colour by reason of the light which the
Clouds reflect upon
it; the bottom edges of the clouds are also light through the
reflection upward from the grass, but I do not know which begins
this battledore and shuttlecock arrangement. These things are like
quarrels between two old and intimate friends; one can never say
who begins them. Sometimes on a dull gray day like this, I have
seen the shadow parts of clouds take a greenish-ashen-coloured
tinge from the grass below them.
On one of these most enjoyable days we left Bellinzona for Mesocco
on the S. Bernardino road. The air was warm, there was not so much
as a breath of wind, but it was not sultry: there had been rain,
and the grass, though no longer decked with the glory of its spring
flowers, was of the most brilliant emerald, save where flecked with
delicate purple by myriads of autumnal crocuses. The level ground
at the bottom of the valley where the Moesa runs is cultivated with
great care. Here the people have gathered the stones in heaps
round any great rock which is too difficult to move, and the whole
mass has in time taken a mulberry hue, varied with gray and russet
lichens, or blobs of velvety green moss. These heaps of stone crop
up from the smooth shaven grass, and are overhung with barberries,
mountain ash, and mountain elder with their brilliant scarlet
berries - sometimes, again, with dwarf oaks, or alder, or nut, whose
leaves have just so far begun to be tinged as to increase the
variety of the colouring.
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