The great lines of the Alps, and their sweet perfumes and haunting voices, reach the mind through the senses, and the mind in its impotence deals with them in a succession of images. Mont Blanc is a tidal wave that never falls, the crash for ever imminent above the valley; you watch it and feel that the very next moment it will surge forward and curl over in a dreadful arc and drop down upon the villages beneath in a glory and confusion of snow-white foam shot with innumerable rainbows. The Dents de Midi rears his great heads against the sky, a diabolic Trinity with his three dreadful faces staring over into Savoy. But he is a giant who has his mood of repentance for whatever stony sins have so scarred his forehead. From the top of the Col de Chesèrie in July, as you come up the final slope, there he is, quite suddenly, almost leaning over you, iron-grey and terrible, his granite faces streaked with tears of melting snow. From down on the shore of the lake of Geneva the Spring climbs the slope with difficulty : first the cherry-blossom : then the sharp green of the lower beechwoods, and higher up browny-green beech-woods half in bud, and, above them, brown woods where the winter still holds its own. The blending bands of colour mount upwards to the old dark green of the pines, to the stony crags, to the snow. It looks as if the light-foot Spring will never conquer up there.