What changes, one wonders, are still to come? How long will the solid peak beneath us withstand the continual flux? As one gazes on the 'sea of mountains' stretching on every side, a new aptness is given to the hackneyed figure. For seeing everywhere below the flash of cataracts and the riot of descending streams, with the murmur in the air of innumerable waters all incessantly engaged in the work of transformation, the everlasting hills seem mutable as the waves of ocean: The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands: They melt like mists the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. II VAL BERNINA Val Bernina, the most notable of the side-valleys of the Engadine, is traversed by the railway that runs from St. Moritz to Tirano in the Valtelline. This is {28} joined by the Rhaetian Railway from Samaden at Pontresina, the pleasant collective name of the three villages--Laret, Spiert, and Giarsun--that stretch in a long street at the entrance to the valley, happier than most resorts in the Engadine in enjoying magnificent views of the great snow mountains. Of course, like all popular resorts, Pontresina pays the penalty of being appreciated. Those who gibe at the Upper Engadine as a transcendent tea-garden have a special gibe for Pontresina. But the garden is so very transcendent, so lovely, so extended, so varied, so full of retreats of wild, sweet beauty, so continually rising into points of view whence one looks illimitably across the high places of the earth, that the term is freed from all opprobrium. Seldom do crowded places have within a few minutes of them such attractive haunts as the Schlucht promenade along the left bank of the deep ravine of the Bernina. The many-hued cliffs grasped by the snaky roots of straight-stemmed firs are writ with records of the stream's former course: the curve of waterfalls; the winding, widening, and narrowing of its channel; the swirl and sweep of its current; the deep holes ground by stones revolving in its eddies, as it gradually wore down its bed to that along which it now frets and fumes, incessantly bearing away the substance of staid and sober Switzerland to make land for the restless peoples of the Danube and the Black Sea. {29}