Then, again, we passed through a region of pines, grim, time-stained—scarred and bereft of limbs in many a battle with the elements—with bare long arms and patriarchal beards of hoary lichen; an older generation of trees, waiting in vain for kindly axe or levelling blast; and awakening, in their Arctic desolation, memories of a Lapland forest-scene. And now once more a charming transformation takes place. Cheerful beech avenues again overarch us, or open out in sunny glades, where butterflies—commas, whites, clouded yellows—are fluttering and settling about yellow salvias and a flower which looked like a rosy phlox with a single blossom. Now we found, to our great relief, an icy-cold stream, and prepared our noon-day repast in a beechwood glen that carried us back to the chalk hills of old England. Here we recognized around us those old familiar ferns, the prickly and the maiden-hair[184]—polypody, flouncing the old stumps with charitable raiment—rarer tufts of blechnum; and, prying curiously among the beech-roots for another of our chalk-hill favourites, we found—sure enough!—that spiky shell[185] which seems to imitate the form and colour of the sheathed buds of the beech-leaves. The track we now followed began to descend rapidly, and we discovered, after climbing down a considerable way, that we were on the wrong side of the watershed, so that there was nothing for it but to reascend as nearly as possible two thousand feet towards the main ridge of Troghìr which we had left.