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Updated: June 14, 2025
Our art and our literature are reserved for the privileged few of education and fortune. But do not misunderstand me. I do not ask poets, novelists, and painters to descend from the heights and walk along the mountain-sides, finding their satisfaction in mediocrity; but, on the contrary, to mount higher.
We had promised Rhoda to assault her winter fastness whenever she should summon us; and now, in obedience to her message, a gay party of us had left the railway, and had driven, sometimes in slushy snow and sometimes on bare ground, up the old mountain-road, laughing and singing and jangling our bells, till at length the great bare woods, lifting their line forever before us and above us, gave place to bald black mountain-sides, whose oppressive gloom and silence stifled everything but a longing to escape from between them, and from the possible dangers in crossing bridges, and fording streams swollen by the fortnight's thaws and rains.
This region of Imerethia, bordering on Mingrelia, is smothered beneath an exuberance of vegetation almost tropical, blue and golden with enormous flowers, tangled with wild vines, rich with towering soft beech woods, and finally, in the upper sections, ablaze with leagues of huge rhododendron trees in blossom that give whole mountain-sides the aspect of a giant garden, flowering amid peaks that even dwarf the Alps.
Very often this Vesuvio gives itself up to hideous Bellowing, causing the Windows, nay the very Houses, in Naples to Shake, and then it vomits forth vast Quantities of melted Stuff, which streams down the Mountain-sides like a pot boiling over.
More waterfalls the Sau de la Pucelle, which falls from a height of some two hundred and fifty feet, resembling the Staubbach besides rivulets without number, running down the mountain-sides like silver threads; until we arrive at La Grave, a village about five thousand feet above the sea-level, directly opposite the grand glaciers of Tabuchet, Pacave, and Vallon, which almost overhang the Romanche, descending from the steep slopes of the gigantic Aiguille du Midi, the highest mountain in the French Alps, being over 13,200 feet above the level of the sea.
That Oriental song she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare, brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native pride beneath its burdening pannier or its jar of water from the well.
Count Roland looked round on the mountain-sides and on the plains. Alas! how many noble sons of France he saw lying dead upon them! "Dear friends," he said, weeping as he spoke, "may God have mercy on you and receive you into His Paradise! More loyal followers have I never seen. How is the fair land of France widowed of her bravest, and I can give you no help.
The pale yellow of the starlight becomes merged in the gold of dawn. White billowy mists of most delicate softness imperceptibly form themselves in the valley depths and float up the mountain-sides. The deep hum of insect life, the chirping of the birds, the sounds of men, begin to break the hush of night.
We had had food and sleep, but during the entire night the poor animals had been searching those rocky mountain-sides for food and failing to find it. They stood in a dejected group, heads down, feet well braced to support their weary bodies. But last summer was not a normal one. Unusually heavy snowfalls the winter before had been followed by a late, cold spring.
The harbour is picturesque, with mountains rising abruptly from the water to the height of 1800 feet, clothed with dense verdure from water's edge to top, many of the trees being of large size. The soil is very rich, but there is little cultivated land, the mountain-sides being too steep.
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