The mail sleigh takes you up and carries you on,
and you reach the top of the ascent in the first hour of the day.
To trace the fires of the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak,
to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted
sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading
shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half
glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the
greyness of the western heaven--these will seem to repay you for
the discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and
these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther
side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with
such another long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another
senseless watercourse bickering along the foot. You have had your
moment; but you have not changed the scene. The mountains are
about you like a trap; you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold
the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can
change only one for another.
CHAPTER X--HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has
followed in the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the
wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some
basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting
in dusty olive-yards within earshot of the interminable and
unchanging surf--idle among spiritless idlers; not perhaps dying,
yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after
livelier weather and some vivifying change.
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