XI. L’HOTEL DU MONT BLANC 447

Blanc de St. Gervais.¹ The Aiguille de Bionnassay, the most graceful buttress ridge in all the Alps, and Mont Blanc himself, above the full fronts of the Aiguille and Dôme du Goûter, followed further to the left. So much came into the field of that little four-feet-square casement.

If one had a mind for a stroll, in half a minute’s turn to the left from the yard gate, one came to the aforesaid village church, the size of a couple of cottages, and one could lean, stooping, to look at it, on the deeply lichened stones of its low churchyard wall, which enclosed the cluster of iron crosses,-floretted with everlastings, or garlands of fresh flowers if it was just after Sunday,-on two sides; the cart-path to the upper village branching off round it from the road to Chamouni. Fifty yards further, one came to the single-arched bridge by which the road to Sallenches, again dividing from that of Chamouni, crosses the Arve, clearing some sixty feet of strongly-rushing water with a leap of lovely elliptic curve; lovely, because here traced with the lightest possible substance of masonry, rising to its ridge without a pebble’s weight to spare,* and then signed for sacred pontifical work by a cross high above the parapet, seen from as far as one can see the bridge itself.²

218. Neither line, nor word, nor colour, has ever yet given rendering of the rich confusions of garden and cottage through which the winding paths ascend above the church; walled, not with any notion of guarding the ground, except from passing herds of cattle and goats, but chiefly to get the stones off the surface into narrowest compass, and, with the easy principle of horticulture,-plant everything, and let what can, grow;-the under-crops of unkempt pease, potatoes, cabbage, hemp, and maize, content with what sun can get down to them through luxuriantly-branched apple

* Of course, in modern levelled bridges, with any quantity of overcharged masonry, the opening for the stream is not essentially an arch, but a tunnel, and might for that matter be blown through the solid wall, instead of built to bear it.

¹ [Plate XXXIV.]

² [Plate XXXIII.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]