Only twenty-five miles farther lies Avignon, on the Rhône, once the abiding-place of seven Popes, and from there a run of one hundred and eighty-five miles takes one to Grenoble, whence, by way of Aix-les-Bains, it is an easy and delightful way to reach Geneva. Then Lausanne – home, so to speak! – a lakeside drive of a couple of hours!
The other choice led from Tours, through Bourges, Nevers, Lyons, tapping the longer route at Chambéry.
“We will leave it to you to decide,” said my niece. “It makes not the slightest difference to us. We have plenty of time. Emile says the roads are equally good in either itinerary. I myself think the route skirting the Pyrenees would be much more interesting.”
“So do I! I vote for the longer route.”
Now there is nothing that I should better like than to write a rhapsody about that marvellous journey – not a mere prose “log,” giving statistics and occasionally kindling into enthusiasm over historic château or medieval cathedral or glimpse of enchanting scenery; but the “journal” of a new Childe Harold borne along through delectable regions and meeting with poetic adventures, having at his beck and call a winged steed tamer than Pegasus and more reliable. But I conscientiously refrain. My eyes are fixed on an ultimate goal, and what comes between, though never forgotten, is only, as it were, the vestibule. So I pass it lightly over, only exclaiming: “Blessed be the man who first invented the motor-car and thrice blessed he who put its crowning perfections at the service of mankind!” In the old days the diligence lumbered with slow solemnity and exasperating tranquillity through landscapes, even though they were devoid of special interest. The automobile darts, almost with the speed of thought, over the long, uninteresting stretches of white road. There is no need to expend pity on panting steeds dragging their heavy load up endless slopes. And when one wants to go deliberately, or stop for half an hour and drink in some glorious view, the pause is money saved and joy intensified. There is no sense of weariness such as results from a long drive behind even the best of horses. Not that I love horses less but motos more!
Twenty days we were on the road and favoured most of the time with ideal weather. It was one long dream of delight. We had so much to talk about; so much we learned! So many wonderful sights we saw!
How could I possibly describe the first distant view of the Alps? It is one of those sensations that only music can approximately represent in symbols. Olyenin, the hero of Count Tolstoï’s famous novel, “The Cossacks,” catches his first glimpse of the Caucasus and they occupy his mind, for a time at least, to the exclusion of everything else. “Little by little he began to appreciate the spirit of their beauty and he felt the mountains.”
I have seen, on August days, lofty mountains of cloud piled up on the horizon, vast pearly cliffs, keenly outlined pinnacles, and I have imagined that they were the Himalayas – Kunchinjunga or Everest – or the Caucasus topped by Elbruz – or the Andes lifting on high Huascarán or Coropuna – or more frequently the Alps crowned by Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau. For a moment the illusion is perfect, but alas! they change before your very eyes – perhaps not more rapidly than our earthly ranges in the eyes of the Deity to whom a thousand years is but a day. They, too, are changing, changing. Only a few millions of years ago Mont Blanc was higher than Everest; in the yesterday of the mind the little Welsh hills, or our own Appalachians, were higher than the Alps.
Like summer clouds, then, on the horizon are piled up the mighty wrinkles of our old Mother Earth. We cannot see them change, but they are dissolving, disintegrating. Only a day or two ago I read in the newspaper of a great peak which rolled down into the valley, sweeping away and burying vineyards and orchards and forests and the habitations of men. The term everlasting hills is therefore only relative and their resemblance to clouds is a really poetic symbol.
Oh, but the enchantment of mountains seen across a beautiful sheet of water! It is a curious circumstance that the colour of one lake is an exquisite blue, while another, not so far away, may be as green as an emerald. So it is with the tiny Lake of Nemi, which is like a blue eye, and the Lake of Albano, which is an intense green. Here now before our eyes, as we drove up from Geneva to Lausanne, lay a sheet of the most delicate azure, and we could distinctly see the fringe of grey or greenish grey bottom, the so-called beine or blancfond, which the ancient lake-dwellers utilized as the foundation for their aerial homes. My nephew told me how a scientist, named Forel, took a block of peat and soaked it in filtered water, which soon became yellow. Then he poured some of this solution into Lake Geneva water, and the colour instantly became a beautiful green like that of Lake Lucerne.
I found that Will Allerton is greatly interested in the geology of Switzerland. Indeed, one cannot approach its confines without marvelling at the forces which have here been in conflict – the prodigious energy employed in sweeping up vast masses of granite and protogine and gneiss as if they were paste in the hands of a baby; the explosive powers of the frost, the mighty diligence of the waters. Here has gone on for ages the drama of heat and cold. The snow has fallen in thick blankets, it has changed by pressure into firn, and then becomes a river of ice, flowing down into the valleys, gouging out deep ruts and, when they come into the influence of the summer sun, melting into torrents and rushing down, heaping up against obstacles, forming lakes, and then again finding a passage down, ever down, until they mingle with the sea.
As we mounted up toward Lausanne, the ancient terrace about two hundred and fifty feet above the present level of the lake is very noticeable. In fact the low tract between Lausanne and Yverdun, on the Lake of Neuchâtel, which corresponds to that level, gives colour to the theory that the Lake of Geneva once emptied in that direction and communicated with the North Sea instead of with the Mediterranean as now. How small an obstacle it takes entirely to change the course of a river or of a man’s life!
These practical remarks were only a foil to the exclamations of delight elicited by every vista. I mean to know the lake well, and shall traverse it in every direction. It takes only eight or ten minutes from my niece’s house by the funicular, or, as it is familiarly called, la ficelle, down to Ouchy, the port of Lausanne. I parodied the lines of Emerson —
I love a lake, I love a pond,
I love the mountains piled beyond.
But I must confess I was not sorry to dismount from the motor-car in front of the charming house that was destined to be my abode for so many months.
CHAPTER IV
HOME AT LAUSANNE
THE house stands by itself in a commanding situation on the Avenue de Collanges. It is of dark stone, with bay windows. The front door seemed to me, architecturally, unusually well-proportioned. It was reached by a long flight of steps. It belonged to an old Lausanne family who were good enough to rent it completely furnished. I noticed, in the library, shelves full of interesting books bound in vellum. Interesting? Well, I doubt if I should care to read many of them – they are in Latin for the most part. How in the world could men in those old days induce printers to manufacture such stately tomes filled with so much wasted learning, on hand-made paper?
I suppose it was characteristic of me to be attracted first of all by the library, but, as soon as I got to my own room, I went to the window – I confess it, the tears came to my eyes! It must be a dream. I recognize the cathedral with its massive Gothic tower and its slender spire and over the house-tops, far below, four hundred feet below, gleams the azure lake, and beyond rise the mountains. A steamboat cuts a silvery furrow through the blue, and a pearly cloud clings to the side of – yes, it must be La Dent du Midi! Below me, for the most part, lies Lausanne. I shall have plenty of time to know it thoroughly, and never, never shall I tire of that view from my chamber-window, looking off across the azure lake.
So absorbed was I in my contemplation that I had not realized how near luncheon-time it was. My trunk was at hand, unstrapped, and I quickly changed from ship and automobile costume into somewhat more formal dress. I was still looking out of the window with my collar in my hand when a miniature cyclone burst open the door. Yes, it was my nephew and namesake with the twin girls, blue-eyed Ethel and blue-eyed Barbara, who came to sweep me down