From the Swiss Lakes

by Algernon Blackwood

The suggestiveness of sudden contrast must always be a quickener to the inner life⁠—that sharp little spur forward it gives to the imagination⁠—and to descend from a sojourn of months among the frozen immobilities of the high Alps, and catch a great bit of the world’s surface in dancing motion, gave me a sensation the other day that was keen enough to be properly described as a “shock.” For it seemed lke passing from death into life to drop from the terrors of the silent heights and come abruptly upon the blue waters of Lake Geneva, rippling for miles in sunshine, plashing along the shores as with a sound of children playing, and carrying to and fro the white lateen sails in foretaste already of the summer. And the contrast⁠—the transition, at least⁠—seemed all the more sudden and effective because deep in the bosom of the lake, like giant thoughts maturing in some steady mind, lay the reflections of those very mountains left two short hours before. For the Valais Alps that tower beyond the southern shores, facing the strip from Lausanne to Villeneuve, drop into the lake dark images of themselves that stretch halfway across and readily conjure to an imaginative mind the picture of death waiting inevitably in the depths of all things.

Of all the big puddles that indent the surface of the map of Europe, Lac Leman has been my favourite⁠—and for a somewhat bizarre reason connected with the fancies of childhood. I always thought of its crescent shape as formed by some Blue Moon in her first quarter that had tumbled from the sky and embedded herself here between the Jura and the Alps. What she loses in picturesque variety of shore and bay, she gains in the perfect symmetry of her delicately-curved lips, this crescent-shaped depression brimming with blue water. Just now, of course, she is peculiarly “brimming,” for, in common with the other lakes of Switzerland, after the downpours of the winter months she has about as much water as she can comfortably hold; and the poplars that sentinel the shores here and there like campanile seem from a distance to be standing well over their ankles among the waves. On all sides the slopes discharge their melting snows, and the Rhone, swollen and turbulent, comes tearing in with an almost unprecedented volume of mountain waters. Everywhere along the northern and western shores, as the lake curves from Chillon round to Morges (where Paderewski leads his farmer life), and along la cote past Nyon to Geneva, the vineyard slopes are all running and a-drip, while on the opposite side the streams from Faucigny and Chablais come foaming down, only yielding in torrential value to the flood rushing further east from the Valais snow-fields behind St. Gingolphe and Bouveret. At night, leaning out of my hotel window, I heard this sound of many waters faintly in the air, and irresistibly came the picture of the lake as a great receiving station⁠—some patient mother of the fairy tales taking into her untroubled heart all the passion and complaint of these troubled and troublesome children, listening to their babbling, confused tales of journeys and adventures, neither believing nor disbelieving, but accepting it all without interruption or contradiction, and finally smoothing them all down into silence and sleep, their voices hushed behind her own quiet breathing. All night long the murmur of these water-voices went on, rising and falling, telling their endless tales as they have told them since the beginning of the world⁠—the tales of winter’s cruelties and their own release and escape on the wings of the first south wind. And the old lake, it seemed to me, was well content to listen, letting their wild stories murmur through her dreams; for they brought to her another and far more pregnant message that just now is beginning to run secretly all over the world⁠—the message of spring. For spring touches the surface of water by ways incredibly delicate and almost indecipherable; those faint reflections of a sky that knows it first and instantly passes it on.

The life of this lake, I always think, increases as it leaves Geneva and sweeps round towards the mountains and the entrance to the Rhone Valiey. The town itself, scorched in summer, and desolated in winter by the icy bise noire that sucks down through the trough of the long curve from Lausanne, cutting like broken glass, presents itself to my imagination as the point where the Rhone escapes only too gladly. Even the seabirds prefer the Chillon end. The trees themselves grow more vital and independent towards the eastern tip; near the town they are too saturated with the heavy affairs of men to be more than half alive, and the shores where they stand in rather sorry patches to drink seem formal, killed by concrete and stone walls. One of these Geneva trees, however, has tried to escape! Everyone, as the train leaves Villeneuve coming west, must have seen that single unhappy little tree, wasted and alone, that stands upon its island of concrete walls a little east of Chillon, out some distance in the lake. Wizened and half terrified, bereft of all shelter or companionship of its kind, it grows there pluckily among the stress of wind and water, as though one night it had tried to escape, had flown down the whole length of the lake towards the mountain forests, been suddenly discovered and⁠—fixed there for the term of its natural life at hard labour. I should like to raise a fund to transplant that plucky little tree into some big mountain wood where it would be looked after by its kind, and know its last days spent in comfort and companionship.