AMONG THE DOLOMITES.—I.
TT is an old remark that men are, like sheep, ready to follow where 1. they are led, but very slow to start in a new line of their own accord ; but I begin to think the saying a calumny against the sheep. Else how comes it to pass that although years ago Messrs. Gilbert and Churchill published their book about the Dolomite Mountains, and here and there a mountaineer has visited them in search of fresh peaks to conquer, the mass of travelling English- men persist in ignoring the most singular mountain scenery in Europe ? Is there a law which makes the tide of fashion as to plaCes of travellers' resort flow slowly eastward, a sort of reflex current to the tide of historical movement ? Ten years ago Chamouni was in the height of English fashion, it is now, com- paratively speaking, abandoned to the Americans, always intensely conservative in their sight-seeing ; and the centre of English resort is the Engadin, where the country inns of six years ago, with their everlasting Kalbsyleisch and Veltliner wine, have been transformed into huge hotels, viith table d'h6te twice a day, and a wino list of two pages. Perhaps in ten years more Cortina and Caprile will have superseded St. Moritz and Pontresina in general estimation, and the Dolomites will be as familiar as the Oberland. Locomo- tion is, I presume, the solid substance, the one necessary part of travel, and the objects of interest on the journey, be they moun- tains or churches, lakes or pictures, are but as the sauce with which the food is flavoured. We English are not anxious for variety in our cookery, and, in spite of numerous exceptions, we are not, in general, much more so in our travel. There is a great pleasure in revisiting familiar scenes, in feeling that one is going to a place where one will feel at home ; and the new travellers of each year are naturally guided by the experience of older stagers, to go and see what has delighted their friends, and will give them common topics of interest in future. But still, why have not the Dolomites long ago become popular? Why have not the bell- wethers long ago led the flock into this marvellous region? It is cheap, and the travelling Briton likes to make his money go a long way, though he is a bad hand at screwing and bargaining. It is bilingual, and most of us can manage to procure what we want by means of either German or Italian. The inns are clean and comfortable, quite up to the average of Swim mountain inns. It is easily accessible ; the Ampezzo pass, the northern gate of the Dolomites, is within thirty- five miles, over an admirable high-road, of the Brenner Railway, and Botzen, at the southern foot of the Brenner, is itself the western entrance. And yet the Englishmen who come here in a season may almost be counted on the fingers. Homo sum : I am but one of the flock. Though an Alpine traveller of pretty long stand- ing, I never made my way into this region until last week. But having strayed here, I feel a benevolent desire that others may enjoy the same pleasure ; perhaps also a less disinterested wish that on my next visit I may not be a week without hearing a word of English, and that with a greater number of guests the innkeepers may be able to afford to vary their not unsatisfactory but some- what monotonous cuisine.
One's general impression of a mountain is that it should have something of a pyramidal form. The differentia of a mountain is, I suppose, that the curves of its outline should be concave up- wards, whereas those of a hill are convex. But both alike ordinarily have an unmistakable top somewhere, whether it be a sharp point or a rounded dome. But when you have passed through the portal of the Ampezzo, you find these conditions changed. The marked and imposing character of the great natural gateway, with its side-posts some 4,000 feet high, suggests an entrance into a new world, and you are not disappointed. The Dolomite Mountains are anything and everything but pyramidal in form, with one single exception. If they have a common type, it is a battlamented wall of which the upper part has been well knocked about by cannon. Such a process may, and probably will, leave one turret, or jagged stone, standing above the rest; and this is the general aspect of the Dolomite Mountains, both as seen from below, and as seen from the top of one of themselves. And then there are deep rifts in the mountain sides, running sometimes from the crest of the wall to its very base, and so narrow that one hardly sees them, except when exactly opposite, and it almost seems as if a chimneysweep could climb them with back and knees. In many places the cliffs rise stark and sheer out of the grass, without the usual wilderness of broken rocks to cover their base. But where dolomite does break to pieces, it does it in earnest, so that the slopes of smooth green turfs alternate with piles of debris, broken at least as small as stones for mending an English high-road. I do not say that all these peculiarities of shape in the Dolomite Mountains delight me. I am not sure that love for such forms as the Weisshorn or the Wetterhorn does not run in the Teutonic blood, akin to the spirit that invented the pointed arch and the cathedral spire. And I am quite certain that to the mountaineer it is a satisfaction, when he reaches his mountain top, to be distracted by no doubts as to exactly where it is, and to have no break in his horizon. I know that the jagged cliffs make minute local knowledge almost necessary to climbing, and that the slopes of debris are a weariness and vexation of spirit, whether to ascent early in the morning or to come plunging down in the afternoon. But there the forms are, none the less wonder- ful, none the less unlike those of every other mountain district, and with sufficient savage grandeur to atone for the absence of other perfections. Colour, however, is an element in a picture scarcely less im- portant than form, and here, again, the Dolomites are utterly exceptional. The characteristic colour of a view in the High Alps is white,—the brilliant glittering white of the snow, the dingier white of the glaciers ; but among the Dolomite Mountains there are but few and very small glaciers, and hardly any snow. Dolomite rock is itself white, in general, before it has been coloured by weather, quite white enough to make one's eyes ache with walking over a long slope of debris ; but it is a different white, more nearly approaching to pearl grey, and it never appears in masses on the mountain. The whitest things in a landscape are the heaps of rubbish at the base of the cliffs. Again, in the granite and limestone ranges the prevailing colour of the rocks, as seen from a distance, so as to contribute an element of colour to the picture, is blackish brown, varying more or less in shade, but hardly ever in hue. On the dolomite rocks this is almost the only colour absent, except blue. I do not feel suffi- cient confidence in my knowledge of the composition of colours to be quite certain ; but the impression conveyed to me by the dolomite rocks is as if a painter had tried to distribute over them every colour which he could compound without the use of blue. Not only are there the simple colours of the spectrum, red, yellow, with every intermediate shade of orange, but also nearly every hue which results from combining neutral browns and greys with red and yellow. And the cliffs almost look as if they had been painted, so fantastic are the mixtures and juxtapositions of colours—as if no natural causes could have produced such strange results. Nor is such an hypothesis altogether wild ; for in sober truth it is the weather which gives the dolomite its marvellous variety of colouring. The rock itself is white, with sometimes a tinge of pale grey or faint pink, and how and why its exposed surfaces turn to all the colours of the rainbow is a problem I leave the mineralogists to solve if they can, contenting myself with the fact that there are the colours to be accounted for. And when to all this diversity of rock-colouring is added the rich green of the fertile and well-wooded valley, the number and variety of pic- tures presented to the eye may well be conceived to defy the power of the pen or of the pencil. Before I came here, I imagined that the absence of snow would be a great defect, as depriving the landscape of the most brilliant of all of its hues, but nature is right. The snow does not harmonize with all this profusion of light colours, what little there is looks out of keeping with the rocks. Thus the shape of the Dolomite Mountains in general, which forbids any great accumulation of snow, rather tends to heighten the effect of the rock-tints ; and form and colour com- bine to produce here what I have already called the most singular, perhaps also, on the whole, the most beautiful mountain scenery in Europe.
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