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He went out on to the balcony and looked at the Alps through his Zeiss field-glasses. The brilliant snow upon the Diablerets danced and sang into his blood; across the broken teeth of the Dent du Midi trailed thin strips of early cloud. Behind him rose great Boudry's massive shoulders, a pyramid of incredible deep blue.
The mill lay where the highway slopes under the snow covered rocky heights which are called here, in the language of the country "Diablerets" close to a rapid mountain stream, which was of a greyish white, like bubbling soap suds.
The wind produced by this vast rush of falling rock was so great that people were blown away by it; some, indeed, were killed in this singular manner. The most interesting field of these Swiss mountain falls is a high mountain valley of amphitheatrical form, known as the Diablerets, or the devil's own district.
The Clariden, the Spannoerter, the Titlis, then the Bernese colossi from the Wetterhorn to the Diablerets, then the peaks of Vaud, Valais, and Fribourg, and beyond these high chains the two kings of the Alps, Mont Blanc, of a pale pink, and the bluish point of Monte Rosa, peering out through a cleft in the Doldenhorn such is the composition of the great snowy amphitheatre.
Take the Diablerets on the west, and the Wetterhorn on the east, and they are the flanking bastions of another great wall, the Bernese Oberland. And these two walls are parallel, with the Rhone in between. Now these two walls converge at a point where there is a sort of knot of mountain ridges, and this point may be taken as being on the boundary between Eastern and Western Switzerland.
His quiet stay here was interrupted only by a visit of a few days to his sister at Lausanne, and a trip to the Diablerets, where his brother, then a great invalid, was staying.
The Ski-ing is said to be good but not extensive. There is no railway. DIABLERETS, 3,849 feet above the sea, in a valley going from Aigle among the mountains to the East, might be a good centre for Ski-ing, but I only know it in Summer. So far as I have heard it offers the usual attractions in Winter, but there is no railway to help much.
But after visiting with him the glaciers of the Diablerets, those of the valley of Chamounix, and the moraines of the great valley of the Rhone and its principal lateral valleys, he came away satisfied that a too narrow interpretation of the phenomena was Charpentier's only mistake.
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