Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876 by Various
page 100 of 282 (35%)
page 100 of 282 (35%)
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incessant strain to which it was subjected. Early in the spring of 1829
he was forced to go to Geneva with the hope of recruiting. There, after two years of suffering, the details of which are painful beyond expression, he died at the age of thirty-one. With our minds full of these memories we set out on the morning after our arrival at Pallons, with Pastor Charpiot as guide, to explore the valley of Fressinière and ascend to Dourmillouse. The immediate vicinity of Pallons is fair and fertile, but a short walk up the course of an impetuous torrent brought us to a narrow gorge, beyond which we found a totally different region. Bare slopes of rock that looked grim even in the sunny morning, and a waste valley-bottom, here of considerable width, but sterile and bleak, made up the landscape. Its dreariness was only increased by an occasional chalet standing beside a patch of limp and discolored potato-vines. As we went on the scene grew more and more gloomy. The tillage is in cleared spots not so large as the heaps of stones that surround them, or on bits of practicable soil left by land-slides in the midst of their hideous débris. The only trees are dwarfish pollards, reduced to bare trunks with thin tufts of green atop by the practice of stripping off the sprouts every two or three years to make fodder for the goats. Midway up the valley we passed the village of Violins. It seemed mournfully empty, and many of the houses were in reality deserted. A shy, bright-faced fellow opened the little _temple_ for our inspection, and Pastor Charpiot reminded us how its interior was not only planned by Neff, but in large measure his actual handiwork. Half an hour further on our path led us through the hamlet of Minsas, now entirely abandoned and in ruins. The desolation of the valley here becomes appalling. On either hand sheer precipices of crumbling rock rise above steep slopes of gravel and loose stones. The ground is strewn thick with great boulders, many of which had left traces of their |
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