they stand as giants, parting two kingdoms. Austere and still, they face
us, as they have faced this spot since that stormy Eocene morning when
they sprang like the dragon's white teeth from the earth.

The view is a far-reaching one. The eye sweeps the broadside of the
entire west-central chain,--a full seventy miles from right to left. The
view might recall, as the greater recalls the less, the winter summits
of the Adirondacks, seen from the St. Regis mountain. It has been more
equally paired with the line of the distant Alps seen from the platform
at Berne. I may parallel it, too, again in Switzerland, with the view of
the Valais peaks which bursts on one when, winding upward past the
Daubensee and its desolation, he comes out suddenly upon the brink of
the great wall of the Gemmi. But here there is a warmth in the view
beyond that of Switzerland. Some one has said that "snow is regarded as
the type of purity not because it is cold but because it is spotless."
This distant snow-line is spotless, but to the eye at least it is not
cold.

Here as there, the separate peaks have their separate personality. It is
not a blur of nameless tips. Two especially arrest attention, south and
southeast, for they rise head and shoulders above their neighbors. Each
bears the name of the _Pic du Midi_. That opposite us, dominating the
valley of Ossau, is the _Pic du Midi d'Ossau_. It is ice-capped and
jagged,--

"A rocky pyramid,
Shooting abruptly from the dell
Its thunder-splintered pinnacle,"--

the Matterhorn of the Pyrenees. That on the left is the noted _Pic du