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XIX The Saleve from Geneva. [f.p.324,r]

324 PRÆTERITA-II

waistcoat-pocketful of the loveliest little clean-struck centimes; and then one might stand on the bridge any time, in perfect quiet. (The Genevese didn’t like paying the centime, and went round by the gate.) Two swans, drifting about underneath, over a couple of fathoms of purest green water, and the lake really opening from the moat, exactly where the Chamouni range of aiguilles rose beyond it far away. In our town walks we used always to time getting back to the little bridge at sunset, there to wait and watch.

87. That was the way of things on the north side; on the south, the town is still, in the main buildings of it, as then; the group of officially aristocratic houses round the cathedral and college presenting the same inaccessible sort of family dignity that they do to-day; only, since then, the Geneva Liberals--Well, I will not say what they have done; the main town stands still on its height of pebble-gravel, knit almost into rock; and still the upper terraces look across the variously mischievous Liberal works to the open southern country, rising in steady slope of garden, orchard, and vineyard-sprinkled with pretty farm-houses and bits of chateau, like a sea-shore with shells; rising always steeper and steeper, till the air gets rosy in the distance, then blue, and the great walnut-trees have become dots, and the farmsteads, minikin as if they were the fairy-finest of models made to be packed in a box; and then, instant-above vineyard, above farmstead, above field and wood, leaps up the Salève cliff, two thousand feet into the air.

88. I don’t think anybody who goes to Geneva ever sees the Salève.1 For the most part, no English creature ever does see farther than over the way; and the Salève, unless you carefully peer into it, and make out what it is, pretends to be nothing,-a long, low swell like the South Downs, I fancy most people take it for, and look no more.

1 [For a note on the drawing here reproduced (Plate XIX.), see above, p. lxxix. Ruskin knew the mountain well: see Vol. XVII. p. liv., Vol. XXVI. p. 6.]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]