IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE 167

two o’clock, if there are clouds above Jura, there will be assuredly clouds on the Alps.

It is worth notice, Saussure himself not having noticed it, that this main pass of Jura, unlike the great passes of the Alps, reaches its traverse-point very nearly under the highest summit of that part of the chain. The col, separating the source of the Bienne, which runs down to Morez and St. Claude, from that of the Valserine, which winds through the midst of Jura to the Rhone at Bellegarde, is a spur of the Dôle itself, under whose prolonged masses the road is then carried six miles farther, ascending very slightly to the Col de la Faucille, where the chain opens suddenly, and a sweep of the road, traversed in five minutes at a trot, opens the whole Lake of Geneva, and the chain of the Alps along a hundred miles of horizon.

194. I have never seen that view perfectly but once- in this year 1835; when I drew it carefully in my then fashion, and have been content to look back to it as the confirming sequel of the first view of the Alps from Schaffhausen. Very few travellers, even in old times, saw it at all; tired of the long posting journey from Paris, by the time they got to the col they were mostly thinking only of their dinners and rest at Geneva; the guide books said nothing about it; and though, for everybody, it was an inevitable task to ascend the Righi, nobody ever thought there was anything to be seen from the Dôle.

Both mountains have had enormous influence on my whole life;-the Dôle continually and calmly; the Righi at sorrowful intervals, as will be seen.¹ But the Col de la Faucille, on that day of 1835, opened to me in distinct vision the Holy Land of my future work and true home in this world.² My eyes had been opened, and my heart with them, to see and to possess royally such a kingdom! Far as the eye could reach-that land and its moving or

¹ [There is, however, no other reference to the Righi in Prćterita; but it was to have formed the subject of one of the unwritten chapters: see below, p. 634.]

² [Compare what Ruskin says to like effect in the Preface to Queen of the Air, Vol. XIX. p. 293.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]