The Four Alpine Trees

THE mountain tops of the Alps present to the clear planetary atmosphere bare granite rocks that saw at the sky with jagged teeth. In the winter these inaccessible heights are paralyzed into a cold that can transform springs into perpetual glaciers and waterfalls into suspended canopies of ice. Only such humble forms of vegetation as lichen, moss, and the creeping willow can possibly prosper in these airy acres of frost and sunshine.

At a lower altitude, however, the principal trees are four in number. On the sides of the rocky gullies falling away towards the valleys the mountain ash is common. When all is snow-covered the scarlet berries of these beautiful rowan trees provide food for the deer, and also for the birds. In the spring, wherever the dark fir forests open out to yellow patches of sunshine, the mountain ash is sure to be seen, shading with its slim delicate leaves happy couching places by noisy torrents. To watch a summer sunrise from one of these wild retreats is an experience not easily to be forgotten. At such an hour every flower and grass blade is bright with dew, and the finest spider thread and lightest insect wing gleam and glitter. Over this ethereal ground the few detached trees edging the forest cast long shadows, sable and exact.

It was surely on such high lawns that Chiron held his Academy, wise in a curriculum that included instruction as to the medicinal properties of the pink flower we call centaury, so tart to the taste, as was remarked by Sir Thomas Browne. To such liberal schoolrooms it was that the centaur led his troop of heroical children, nursing them to wisdom with hairy equine limbs recumbent and at ease upon the gay soil of the Greek peninsula. In such primitive paddocks the mountain wagtails have their nests, birds which, with feathers green as sorrel leaves, employ their time in dancing with short jerky flights from mossy watersplashed rocks to topmost larch-tree twig: —

The trees that people the vast forests covering the sides of the mountains from the white streams of the valleys to the white snow fields higher up are spruce firs. These red firs tower one above the other. In precipitous places the topmost branches of the lower ones touch the exposed and dangling roots of those aloft. Where the declension is less sharp they grow side by side, heroical perpendicular pillars of smoothbarked Christmas trees, hundreds and thousands of them, along the branches of which the chattering squirrels scramble their warm bodies, with tufted ears and curling tails, emitting a strong rodent-like odor. Where the trees are growing close and the sun can but with difficulty penetrate to the lower branches, it is a common thing to see the firs festooned with streamers of gray-green lichen; especially is this the case with the older timber, which often presents to a fanciful eye the appearance of bands of bearded giants standing together in motionless dejection.

In the summer all is different. As soon as ever the melting begins, the forest floor is quick everywhere with the tribes of ants — ‘a People not strong,’ but whose tiny heads are intent upon constructing with Dædalus craft their summer palaces. These towers of warm dust are placed as a rule at a fir-tree bole. They are built out of fir needles and dry crumbs of earth, their subtle galleries being supported for the most part by brown fircone scales that have been everywhere scattered about by the squirrels in their eager search for the light dietary of the conifer’s marrow. Then it is that the crows, jays, woodpeckers, missel thrushes, blackbirds, and chaffinches make their nests in boughs that tingle with life to the very tip of each sprouting tender green twig.

Below and above this ordinary mountain timber grow the larch trees (Larix europœa), always slender, always aristocratical, offering substance and shelter to the great tits, blue tits, coal tits, and crested tits — trees of grace, etching in the moonlight nights of midwinter a filigree pattern upon the shining snow slopes, each motionless knotted spray in shadow form sharply visible to the eye; while on a summer morning their drooping feathery boughs remain forever responsive to the gentle winds that aimlessly wander across green hills ringing with the sound of cattle bells and running water.

And higher still above the graceful larch, the homely fir, and the lovely ash is to be seen the wildest and the proudest tree of all the forest — the Pinus cembra. This remarkable pine of central Europe finds its precarious and solitary stations on the bleakest heights, never far from the irregular margins of the perpetual snow line. When felled by the woodsmen it is often shown that these ancient trees have reared their contorted shapes against the stars for no less than a thousand winters. Season after season blind November blizzards have driven past them, giving them gnarled stooping postures which suggest a rout of refugees in perpetual flight from some unprecedented disaster.

The houses of the peasants are for the most part built of fir and larch logs, the more valuable wood of the pine being reserved for interior paneling, and for the making of household furniture and objects of pastoral economy, as yokes, corn bins, and the huge wooden watertight tubs necessary for holding the winter meat supply, which must be left soused for several weeks in salt, onions, and wine. These stone pines can draw the sap of life out of the very rocks, their roots, often enormous in proportion to the size of the stunted trunk, gripping at precipice boulders with the resolute muscular coil of serpent constrictors. It is in the sheltered elbows of such ground timber that the Alpine foxes have their holes, and the hardy chamois hinds find sheltering places to bring forth their young; and it is also upon the leafless elbow branches of this tragic lumber of the ultimate wilderness that the Steinadler return to their familiar stools — stools from which these eagles can scan the horizons before rising in slow wide-winged flights to the colder regions of their empyrean circuits.

LLEWELYN POWYS