impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of
Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a mountain
with spurs like a star, and where mountains of this kind block the end
of main valleys it becomes necessary for the road leading up and out
of the valley to go over their highest point, since any other road
over the passes or shoulders would involve a second climb to reach the
country beyond. The reason of this, my little map here, where the dark
stands for the valley and the light for the high places, will show
better than a long description. Not that this map is of the Ballon
d'Alsace in particular, but only of the type of hill I mean.

Since, in crossing a range, it is usually possible to find a low point
suitable for surmounting it, such summit roads are rare, but when one
does get them they are the finest travel in the world, for they
furnish at one point (that is, at the summit) what ordinary roads
going through passes can never give you: a moment of domination. From
their climax you look over the whole world, and you feel your journey
to be adventurous and your advance to have taken some great definite
step from one province and people to another.

I would not be bound by the exaggerated zig-zags of the road, which
had been built for artillery, and rose at an easy slope. I went along
the bed of the dell before me and took the forest by a little path
that led straight upward, and when the path failed, my way was marked
by the wire of the telegraph that crosses to Belfort. As I rose I saw
the forest before me grow grander. The pine branches came down from
the trunks with a greater burden and majesty in their sway, the trees
took on an appearance of solemnity, and the whole rank that faced
me--for here the woods come to an even line and stand like an army
arrested upon a downward march--seemed something unusual and