The Land in the Sky

THE lowest country in Europe is Holland.

The highest country in Europe is the land of the Swiss people, called Switzerland.

There is hardly a hill in the whole of Holland. The country is as flat as a ball-field.

There is hardly a hill in the whole of Switzerland. The hills are all mountains—the highest mountains in western Europe—mountains so high that there is snow on their tops all the year round, in summer as well as winter. They are called the Alps.

But you can’t have a hole in a doughnut without the doughnut, and so you can’t have a mountain without a valley. The mountain tops in Switzerland are white, but the valleys are green, and cows with tinkling bells graze over the fields. The melting snow from the mountain tops makes beautiful waterfalls and babbling, tinkling brooks in the valleys.

Have you ever seen the snow on the roof of a house suddenly slide off and fall to the ground? That is called an avalanche. But suppose the roof of the house were a mile long like the side of a mountain, and suddenly the snow covering it slipped and fell into the valley beneath. That is an avalanche such as they have in Switzerland; and sometimes avalanches bury people and houses and even whole villages beneath.

Some long and wide valleys are filled with snow that has turned to ice. The ice filling these long valleys, like a river frozen to the bottom, is called a glacier, and the biggest of these glaciers have names just as rivers have.

Most rivers start from springs, but in Switzerland they usually start from the melting ice under a glacier. One of these big glaciers in Switzerland is called the Rhône Glacier. From under the end of the Rhône Glacier, as from an ice cave, flows a cold stream of melting ice. This stream grows larger and larger as it flows on down the valley and is joined by other streams of melted snow and ice. It is then called the Rhône River. It runs on until it reaches a big, broad valley, which it fills and forms a lake—the largest lake in Switzerland—called Lake Geneva.

The Rhône flows out again on the other side of Lake Geneva, down through France past Lyons and the mulberry-trees and silkworm farms and silk manufactories I told you about, and at last empties into the Mediterranean Sea.