he great valleys and the
ranges of mountain land lie in such a direction that they must be
_crossed_ in order to pass from one country to the other. These ranges
are, however, not regular. They are traversed by innumerable chasms,
fissures, and ravines; in some places they rise in vast rounded
summits and swells, covered with fields of spotless snow; in others
they tower in lofty, needle-like peaks, which even the chamois can
not scale, and where scarcely a flake of snow can find a place of
rest. Around and among these peaks and summits, and through these
frightful defiles and chasms, the roads twist and turn, in a zigzag
and constantly ascending course, creeping along the most frightful
precipices, sometimes beneath them and sometimes on the brink,
penetrating the darkest and gloomiest defiles, skirting the most
impetuous and foaming torrents, and at last, perhaps, emerging upon
the surface of a glacier, to be lost in interminable fields of ice and
snow, where countless brooks run in glassy channels, and crevasses
yawn, ready to take advantage of any slip which may enable them to
take down the traveler into their bottomless abysses.

And yet, notwithstanding the awful desolation which reigns in the
upper regions of the Alps, the lower valleys, through which the
streams finally meander out into the open plains, and by which the
traveler gains access to the sublimer scenes of the upper mountains,
are inexpressibly verdant and beautiful. They are fertilized by the
deposits of continual inundations in the early spring, and the sun
beats down into them with a genial warmth in summer, which brings out
millions of flowers, of the most beautiful forms and colors, and
ripens rapidly the broadest and richest fields of grain. Cottages, of
every picturesque and beautiful form, tenanted by the cultivators, the
shepherds and the herdsmen, crown every little swell in the bottom of
the valley, and cling to the declivities of the mountains which rise
on either hand. Above them eternal forests of firs and pines wave,
feathering over the steepest and most rocky slopes with their somber
foliage. Still higher, gray precipices rise and spires and pinnacles,
far grander and more picturesque, if not so symmetrically formed, than
those constructed by man. Between these there is seen, here and there,
in the background, vast towering masses of white and dazzling snow,
which crown the summits of the loftier mountains beyond.

Hannibal's determi