Book The Second- Riches

BOOK THE SECOND- RICHES

CHAPTER 1

Fellow Travellers

In the autumn of the year, Darkness and Night were creeping up to
the highest ridges of the Alps.

It was vintage time in the valleys on the Swiss side of the Pass of
the Great Saint Bernard, and along the banks of the Lake of Geneva.

The air there was charged with the scent of gathered grapes.
Baskets, troughs, and tubs of grapes stood in the dim village
doorways, stopped the steep and narrow village streets, and had
been carrying all day along the roads and lanes. Grapes, split and
crushed under foot, lay about everywhere. The child carried in a
sling by the laden peasant woman toiling home, was quieted with
picked-up grapes; the idiot sunning his big goitre under the leaves
of the wooden chalet by the way to the Waterfall, sat Munching
grapes; the breath of the cows and goats was redolent of leaves and
stalks of grapes; the company in every little cabaret were eating,
drinking, talking grapes. A pity that no ripe touch of this
generous abundance could be given to the thin, hard, stony wine,
which after all was made from the grapes!

The air had been warm and transparent through the whole of the
bright day. Shining metal spires and church-roofs, distant and
rarely seen, had sparkled in the view; and the snowy mountain-tops
had been so clear that unaccustomed eyes, cancelling the
intervening country, and slighting their rugged heights for
something fabulous, would have measured them as within a few hours
easy reach. Mountain-peaks of great celebrity in the valleys,
whence no trace of their existence was visible sometimes for months
together, had been since morning plain and near in the blue sky.
And now, when it was dark below, though they seemed solemnly to
recede, like spectres who were going to vanish, as the red dye of
the sunset faded out of them and left them coldly white, they were
yet distinctly defined in their loneliness above the mists and
shadows.
Seen from these solitudes, and from the Pass of the Great Saint
Bernard, which was one of them, the ascending Night came up the
mountain like a rising water. When it at last rose to the walls of
the convent of the Great Saint Bernard, it was as if that weather-
beaten structure were another Ark, and floated on the shadowy
waves.

Darkness, outstripping some visitors on mules, had risen thus to
the rough convent walls, when those travellers were yet climbing
the mountain. As the heat of the glowing day when they had stopped
to drink at the streams of melted ice and snow, was changed to the
searching cold of the frosty rarefied night air at a great height,
so the fresh beauty of the lower journey had yielded to barrenness
and desolation.