THE DOLOMITES.* Mrss EDWARDS exhibits many qualities essential to the
writing of a pleasant book of travel. She is interested to the point of enthusiasm in the places which she visits, and well informed about them to the point which stops short of pedantry ; she has a lively imagination, more humour than most women who travel, or who stay at home ; much consideration, and only moderate contempt for the presumable ignorance of her readers ; and a picturesque and pleasant style. Her task is not faultless ; she is capable of disregard of the feelings, ideas, and prejudices of " foreigners," as English people are apt to call the natives of those countries which they honour with their presence ; and her preface is provoking. The book is dedicated to her American friends in Rome, which is very proper, but her readers do not care to be told about the wonderful things she could have written, if only she bad had in the first place, " Mr. Ruskin's power to create landscapes with words," and then, could she have seized the " weirdness and poetry " of the scenes she describes, "as you, Vedder, would have seized them ;" could she have " watched the relative tones of trees, and skies, and mountain summits, Charles Caryll Coleman, with your wonderful fidelity" ; could she have dipped her brush, "Tilton, like you, in the rose and gold of Southern sunsets." This is so silly, that it pre- disposes one against the book, quite unjustly, as very soon appears, for there is no silliness, affectation, or tall-talking in Miss Edwards's account of her exploration of the comparatively un- known part of the south-eastern Tyrol, which lies between Botzen, Innichen, and Belluno.
• Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys: a Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites. By Amelia B. Edwards. London: Longman, Green, and Co.
It was an adventurous undertaking for two ladies to explore the Dolomite district, where there are no roads to speak of, and they must either go on foot or on mule-back ; and so distinctly averse to the proceeding was the imposing courier who personally con- ducted Miss Edwards and her friend L--, so long as they chose to confine themselves within the limits of conventional lady-like travel, that he relinquished his post at Cortina, to their secret delight, though the desertion caused them some embarrassment.- They started from Venice, took leave of railroads at Conegliano, and after a drive of two days in a very decent carriage reached-
Longarone, where they found a most melancholy inn. " We dine," records the author, " in a desert of sitting-room„ at an oasis of table, lighted up a single tallow candle.
The food is indifferent, and is indifferently cooked. The wine is the worst we have had in Italy." A stern and ominous look of satisfaction settles on the countenance of the courier. " We shall not meet with many inns so good as this where we are going !" he says triumphantly. " Good night, ladies!" One does not feel that the travellers are fairly off until they cross the Austrian frontier. It is very charm- ing up to that period, but we have read a good deal about
it before ; the novelty begins at Cortina, which curious,. beautiful little place Miss Edwards describes pleasantly, but with an occasional touch of hardness and want of sym- pathy with the people. They had to wait some time at. Cortina, because the only guide who could be recommended as. "used to travelling with ladies" was away, and because two side- saddles were indispensable, and there was only one in the place.. A second was coining, however, and at last it came, and thence-
forth that saddle forms an amusing feature in the story of the journey. Their first sight of the Afarmolata was an event to be remembered, though the clear vision of it lasted only a few seconds, the envious mist then hiding it. Miss Edwards has a happy way of interesting one in the small as well as the great incidents of the journey, and she makes the guide, Giovanni,—a delightful being, equal to any emergency, and the most simpatico of companions,— and the mules, Dark Nessol and Fair Nessol, very vivid and amusing. Of course they thoroughly explored " Titian's Country" from Cortina, which they recommend as the best " Dolomite centre."
"Looking back in memory," says the author, "across that interven- ing sea of peaks and passes which lies between Botzen and Cortina, I am inclined to place the Ampezzo Dolomites in the very first rank, both as regards position and structure. The mountains of Primiero are more extravagantly wild in outline ; the Marmo]ata carries more ice' and snow ; the Civita is more beautiful ; the solitary giants of the Seisser Alp are more imposing ; but taken as a group, I know nothing, whether for size, variety, or picturesqueness, to equal that great circle which, within a radius of less than twelve miles from the doors of the Aquila Nero. (the inn at Cortina), includes the Palino, Antelao, Marmarole, Credo 3lalcora, Cristallo, and Tofana."
Her descriptions of the mountains, illustrated by several beautiful drawings, make a much more vivid impression than. descriptions ordinarily make, because they are very free from technicalities. She is not a climber, she says, though she did achieve the distinction of a first ascent—that of the Sasso Bianco —and she has no pet theories. They found themselves in Italy again, having ridden over the pass of the Tre Sassi, to Caprile, a beautiful village, which lies at the foot. of four mountains and the junction of four valleys. The first great sight to be seen at Caprile is the Civith :-
" A sheer, magnificent wall of upright precipice, seamed from crown. to foot with thousands of vertical fissures, and rising in a mighty arch towards the centre. It fills in the end of the valley as a great organ- front fills in the end of a cathedral aisle. Towards evening it takes all the glow of the sunset. In the morning, while the sun is yet low in the east, it shows through a veil of soft blue shade, vague and unreal as a dream. It was thus I first saw it ; it suddenly rose up before me like a beautiful ghost, draped in haze against a background of light. I thought it then, for simple breadth and height, for symmetry of out- line, for unity of effect, the most ideal and majestic-looking mountain. I had ever seen, and I think so still."
The awful story of the berg-fall from Monte Pezza, which buried the villages, and created the lake of Alleghe, is most effectively, told. The travellers went out upon the lake in a boat one beautiful day, to test the accuracy of the general notion that the walls and roofs of one of the submerged villages might be seen far down. below the surface of the water. They distinctly traced a long reach of wall and three or four square enclosures, evidently the superstructures of several houses. But the old woman who, with the aid of a little girl, pulled their boat, told them " there are those living who have seen the old parish church, with its belfry, all perfect, out yonder in the middle of the lake, where it is deep water. There are those living who have heard the bells tolling under the water at midnight for the unburied dead !" To the Civith, Miss Edwards gives the title of Queen of the Dolomites, the Palino she calls the King ; but the most curious and romantic of them all is the Sasso di Ranch, of which she says :—" Some one has compared the Matterhorn to the head and neck of a war-horse rearing up behind the valley of Zermatt ; so might the Sasso di Ronch be compared to the head and neck of a giraffe. Standing upon its knife-edge of ridge,—all precipice below, all sky above, the horizon one long sweep of jagged peaks." Many legends, all of course familiar to Giovanni, cluster round this fantastic mountain. There is a charming ruin at Caprile, kept by the Pezze, a name as familiar in the south-eastern Tyrol as that of Bianconi used to be in Ireland. The Pezze take care of everybody and everything in those parts, and are the most delightful people we have met with in a book for many a day. The travellers found a second centre at Caprile, whence they made several excursions to the surrounding mountains, which, especially the Sasso Bianco, the author describes with much picturesque detail. The wild- flower zone on the slope of the great mountain must be a most beautiful spectacle. As they were descending from this won- derful scene, which far overtops the Sasso di Ronch, the mules escaped, and the sublime was turned into the ridiculous. The guide ran and shouted after them in vain. They trotted on till, reaching a little hollow among the bushes and deep grass, they buried their noses in a cool rill which they had scented from afar off. " The guide coming up, red and breathless, wrenches their heads out of the water, and overwhelms them with reproaches.
Holy Mother ! what do they mean by not minding when they are spoken to ? Holy Mother ! what do they mean by drinking cold water when they are as hot as two hot cakes in an oven ? Sacra- mento ! Do they want to fall ill and die, out of mere spite towards a master who loves them? Eh, Long-ears! are they deaf ? Eh, monsters of mules ! do they not understand Italian ?'" The grandeur, the dignity, the stupendous height of the Dolo- mites, plainly as Miss Edwards puts them before us, do not impress us so much as the extraordinary variety of their outlines, the great number of aspects under which each of the giants pre- sents itself. The Civith might be six mountains, instead of only one, by her descriptions. One in particular, that of the back, as seen from a gorge leading to Val di Zoldo, is exceedingly grand and picturesque. The travellers emerged into ordinary tracks again at Botzeu, having realised their dream of the Dolomites with a fullness and perfection rarely awarded to human aspirations.
It would be difficult to imagine a more tempting programme of autumn travel than this which Miss Edwards has sketched ; one with fewer drawbacks and more numerous sources of enjoyment. The author puts her own convictions on these points pithily:— "When one has said that there are few roads ; that letters, having sometimes to be carried by walking postmen over a succession of passes. travel slowly, and are delivered irregularly ; that the inns are not only few and far between, but often of the humblest kind ; and that except at Cortina, there is not a telegraph station in the whole country, one has said all there is to say in disparagement of the dis- trict. For the rest, it is difficult to speak of the people, of the climate, of the scenery, without risk of being thought too partial or too en- thusiastic. To say that the arts of extortion are here un- known, that the old patriarchal notion of hospitality still survives, miraculously, in the minds of the inn-keepers ; that it is as natural to the natives of these hills and valleys to be kind and helpful and disin- terested as it is natural to the Swiss to he rapacious ; that here one escapes from hackneyed sights, from overcrowded hotels, is, after all, but to say that life in the South-Eastern Tyrol is yet free from all the discomforts that have of late years made Switzerland unendurable, and that for those who love sketching and botany, mountain climbing and mountain air, the Dolomites offer a 'playground' far more attractive than the Alps."
We do not believe Switzerland to be " unendurable," and we do not know what Miss Edwards means by "hackneyed sights,"—the eternal hills are not " played out" surely,—but we feel certain the Dolomites are delightful.
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