heaven in an iron peace. Day at last brings vigorous fire; arrows of
light pierce the mist-wreaths, the dancing draperies, the floors of
vapour; and the mountain of piled pasturages is seen with its foot on the
shore of Lago Maggiore. Down an extreme gulf the full sunlight, as if
darting on a jewel in the deeps, seizes the blue-green lake with its
isles. The villages along the darkly-wooded borders of the lake show
white as clustered swans; here and there a tented boat is visible,
shooting from terraces of vines, or hanging on its shadow. Monte Boscero
is unveiled; the semicircle of the Piedmontese and the Swiss peaks,
covering Lake Orta, behind, on along the Ticinese and the Grisons,
leftward toward and beyond the Lugano hills, stand bare in black and grey
and rust-red and purple. You behold a burnished realm of mountain and
plain beneath the royal sun of Italy. In the foreground it shines hard
as the lines of an irradiated Cellini shield. Farther away, over middle
ranges that are soft and clear, it melts, confusing the waters with hot
rays, and the forests with darkness, to where, wavering in and out of
view like flying wings, and shadowed like wings of archangels with rose
and with orange and with violet, silverwhite Alps are seen. You might
take them for mystical streaming torches on the border-ground between
vision and fancy. They lean as in a great flight forward upon Lombardy.

The curtain of an early autumnal morning was everywhere lifted around the
Motterone, save for one milky strip of cloud that lay lizard-like across
the throat of Monte Boscero facing it, when a party of five footfarers,
who had met from different points of ascent some way below, and were
climbing the mountain together, stood upon the cropped herbage of the
second plateau, and stopped to eye the landscape; possibly also to get
their breath. They were Italians. Two were fair-haired muscular men,
bronzed by the sun and roughly bearded, bearing the stamp of breed of one
or other of the hill-cities under the Alps. A third looked a sturdy