At last little Aix unveiled her face to us, as we looked down upon it
from airy altitudes. We had space to see how pretty she was, how
charmingly she was dressed, and how gracefully she sat in her
mountain-backed chair, with her dainty white feet in the lake, which,
as Joseph said, we could now follow with our eyes _dans toute son
etendue_. A beautiful _etendue_ it was, the water keeping its
extraordinary brilliance of colour, even in the far distance; vivid in
changing blue-greens, flecked with gold, like the spread tail of a
peacock burnished by the sun.
Mont Revard is chiselled on the same pattern as all the other
mountains, big and little, of this part of Savoie; first, the long,
steep slope decently covered with a belt of wood, oak below, and pine
above; then a grey, precipitous wall, scarred and furrowed by the
frost and storm of a million years or more. This block-and-socket
arrangement of Nature is, generally speaking, one of the least
interesting of mountain forms, and its crudity was the more noticeable
as we were fresh from the soaring pinnacles and stupendous pyramids of
Switzerland. But Mont Revard is the perfection of its type; and as we
plodded in single file up the threadlike path wound round the
mountain (Joseph and Innocentina in front, driving the animals), my
respect for Revard increased with each steeply ascending step.
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